Scrapping the Temporary Foreign Worker Program Is Common Sense

A fast food restaurant in Montreal in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Christinne Muschi

Commentary

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre held a press conference on Sept. 3 where he called on the federal government to abolish Canada’s temporary foreign worker (TFW) program.

Putting politics aside, this demand is in accordance with plain common sense.

Since the pandemic, the TFW program has been the subject of intense criticism from members of the public and media commentators alike. It was inevitable that a politician would eventually echo this wave of discontent.

From exploitation of foreign workers, to allegations of financial fraud, to businesses prioritizing foreign workers over Canadian youth, the TFW program has been a trainwreck of scandals.

In September 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur on modern slavery Tomoya Obokata released disturbing findings from a two-week trip to Canada. He took the view that our TFW program had become a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Obokata found troubling evidence of “a dependency relationship between employers and employees, making the latter vulnerable to exploitation and abuse” which is “compounded by the fact that many workers reside in employer-provided accommodation.”

In January of this year, Amnesty International published a report finding “shocking abuse and discrimination” in Canada’s TFW program, including “physical, sexual and psychological abuse.” The report found that TFWs had “worked in unsafe conditions, lacked access to adequate housing and healthcare, and faced discrimination in the workplace.”

Then, there was the alleged fraud. In December 2024, the federal government announced that it was acting to combat a scandalous practice in which unscrupulous actors would “illegally buy or sell labour market impact assessments to improve a candidate’s chances of being selected to come to Canada as a permanent resident.”

Labour Market Impact Assessments theoretically demonstrate that an employer has made sufficient effort to hire a Canadian before using the TFW program. The assessments, a good-faith attempt to protect Canada’s job market, had instead become a vehicle for fraud.

As if the allegations of exploitation and financial fraud within the TFW program were not bad enough, this summer made abundantly clear what many Canadians had long suspected: Foreign workers are not exclusively being hired for jobs that our citizens cannot or will not undertake—they are displacing Canadians from low-skill, entry-level jobs.

Throughout the summer, viral videos circulated across social media in which high schoolers and university students revealed that they were sending in dozens of jobs applications to no avail.

These young people were applying to coffee shops, fast food joints, fairs, big box stores, and restaurants to get the kind of summer jobs that were easy to find when their parents and older siblings were their age.

Their resolve to work was by no means lacking, but the jobs they were seeking were in many cases being filled by foreign nationals.

A BMO report titled “The Kids Aren’t Alright—Job Market Concerns“ shed further light on the situation. Robert Kavcic, Senior Economist at BMO Capital Markets, argued that poor employment outcomes for Canadian youth over the summer months “mainly reflects labour force saturation from historic immigration —namely lower-skilled temporary foreign workers and international students.”

The data confirms that this has been a brutal summer for young Canadian job seekers.

According to Statistics Canada, youth employment fell to just 53.6 percent in July – excluding the pandemic years, this is the lowest rate since 1998. Conversely, the unemployment rate for returning students aged 15 to 24 rose to 17.5 percent, which is “the highest for the month of July since 2009 (excluding July 2020).”

Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared to reject Poilievre’s call to abolish the TFW program, saying on Sept. 3 that some businesses rely on foreign workers. “When I talk to businesses around the country ... their number one issue is tariffs, and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers,” he said.

While Carney did not endorse scrapping the TFW program, he emphasized his government’s aim to reform immigration more broadly: “As a whole, it’s clear that we can improve our overall immigration policies. We’re working on that, and we’re setting clear goals to adjust.”

There is now a broad recognition across the political aisle that Canada’s immigration policy is in dire need of reform. The question is whether we make minor adjustments, or major changes—do we need a surgeon’s scalpel, or a knife?

When it comes to the temporary foreign worker program, minor adjustments fall short.

It should be abolished, not only because it is plagued by scandals, but because it is founded on the weak premise that employers should be entitled to dip into a reservoir of foreign labour instead of raising wages or benefits to entice Canadians.

We are not discussing back-breaking agricultural jobs that many people argue Canadians are unwilling to do. There are few calls to scrap the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, which was introduced by the Pearson government in 1966.

The current debate mainly centres on two streams unrelated to agriculture: the high-skill stream launched in 1973, and the low-skill stream launched in 2002.

Employers in Canada got along fine without access to high-skill foreign workers before 1973, and they were certainly able to manage without low-skill foreign workers before 2002.

It is high time that we broke our economy’s addiction to foreign labour for good, and started hiring and training up our Canadian workforce.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.