Bonner & Brown: Poilievre’s call to scrap the temporary foreign worker program is a good first step

Part of the ecosystem likely behind the CPC push to eliminate temporary foreign workers apart from agriculture.

Need for major trimming, undoubtedly, eliminating not realistic given pushback from business community and likely provinces.

While much of the pushback is self-serving, as businesses were far too eager to use temporary workers rather than improving compensation, training and investing more in technology, there will always be needs for some temporary workers irrespective of pathways or not for permanent residency:

…Canada’s foreign labour crisis can be seen as perpetuating intergenerational injustice by sidelining Canadian youth. The result is a sense of alienation and despair that makes people call into question the very legitimacy of Canada’s social contract. Many Canadian youth, especially those burdened by student debt and high living costs, view government and business as having abdicated their role in the natural order of a high-trust society: to contribute to public cohesion and nurture a skilled workforce. Instead, they’ve opted for importing an easily exploitable foreign population in order to suppress innovation and wage growth.

Herein lies the case for the Conservatives’ announcement as a key starting point. The government should actually abolish all temporary labour schemes in all sectors of the economy—with the exception of certain areas, such as seasonal agriculture, where the TFWP has never been controversial.

Ottawa and the provinces must use every means at their disposal (from tax incentives to public praise) to reward businesses for hiring and training actual Canadians.

This is the least Canadians should be able to expect from business and government alike. The sooner things change, the better.

Source: Poilievre’s call to scrap the temporary foreign worker program is a good first step

And a separate more alarmist piece by Brown,

Canada’s youth unemployment has surged to record highs, with 22 percent without jobs. This crisis stems from systemic failures in immigration policy enacted during the pandemic, particularly the abuse-ridden Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), foreign-student streams, and asylum and in-land asylum systems.

They have flooded the labour market with cheap, temporary workers, suppressing wages, and blocking entry-level opportunities for Canadian graduates. AI advancements exacerbate this, rerouting career paths young people trained for.

The fallout is profound: delayed adulthood milestones like independence, homeownership, and family formation. Skyrocketing housing costs force many into unaffordable dog-crate apartments or prolonged parental dependence. In an increasingly digital isolated world, this breeds alienation, eroding both confidence and social bonds.

Young men, hit hardest, are turning to radical fringes. Groups like the Dominion Society of Canada push for “remigration” well beyond deporting TFWP abusers or fraudulent claimants, with its supporters veering into blanket calls to expel immigrants. Such rhetoric risks serving as a kind of honeypot for the vulnerable, while potentially derailing legitimate reform.

One can certainly make the case that mass immigration has been the most destructive policy blunder in this country’s history. Historically poor trend lines in jobs, housing affordability, health-care wait-times, and a rise in violent crime all sit downstream from the decision to abandon the sensible. Couple this with spiking the GDP coming out of Canada’s pandemic response, suppressing wages, and experimenting with a country run as a post-national economic zone first, and a distinct society with standards and guard-rails second.

But calls for “remigration,” and saying you are inspired by “The Great Replacement,” is less a dog-whistle than a foghorn; and this group’s brazen call to revoke permanent residency status and naturalized citizenship is worse. We know what they mean when they say “heritage Canadian.” Canada may have been built by European settlers, Anglo and French, but not by them and them alone. Our demographic destiny changed long ago.

History warns us: idle hands, suppressed opportunities, and angry young men do not mix. Yet blame lies squarely with government and exploitative businesses, not with immigrants as a whole. Liberal policies have ballooned temporary residents to an estimated 3 million, prioritizing volume over integration. To stem this, Canada must enforce “temporary” status, deport those excesses, and restore a points-based system emphasizing skills and values.

This is the moment to cut the TFWP down to size, to continue to reform the International Mobility Program, and to return to the prioritization of Canadian workers, particularly those yet to get off the launch pad, to rebuild opportunity and restore the promise of tomorrow. Failure will only invite ugliness: potentially radical coalitions could fracture consensus on sensible changes. Success means launching youth into productive lives, fostering upward mobility for the first time in years.

By Alexander Brown, a director with the National Citizens Coalition

Source: Canada can fix its xenophobia by fixing its immigration system