Some employers using foreign worker program facing bigger fines for violations

Encouraging:

Amid increasing scrutiny on the use of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, the total dollar amount of fines imposed on employers who are found to violate the terms of the program has risen dramatically.

However, some observers think changes to monitoring and enforcement of the program are still required.

Catherine Connelly is a professor of human resources and management at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., who has studied the temporary foreign worker program.

She says the federal government historically seemed to take an “educational approach,” with fines that were usually in the hundreds rather than the thousands of dollars.

“There just didn’t seem to be too much of a deterrence in terms of how they were approaching the enforcement of the rules of the program,” she said.

But Connelly says as public perception of the program soured, she noticed a gradual change that built into a “dramatic shift” over the last year.

“Now the approach seems to be more of a deterrence approach and we see fines easily into the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said.

In the 2018-19 fiscal year, 74 companies faced a total of $102,250 in fines.

By comparison, during the last fiscal year, 147 companies faced $4,882,500 in fines.

Connelly believes the number of companies caught and fined is likely a “fraction” of those who are actually breaking the rules. But she says large fines may catch the attention of companies that are using the program.

“They are risk-averse and they are strategic in their planning. And so a well-run company will see that non-compliance with this complicated program is a serious issue that needs to be avoided,” she said.

Meanwhile, the number of employers applying to use the temporary foreign worker program has dropped in the last two years, according to recent numbers released by the federal government.

After hitting roughly 150,000 applications in the 2023-24 fiscal year, the number fell to roughly 63,000 so far in the current fiscal year. …

Source: Some employers using foreign worker program facing bigger fines for violations