While I was away: Temporary Residents

Some articles of interest:

Rempel Garner: Liberals spent $1.6B on Temporary Foreign Worker program, new data shows

Virtue signalling. A CPC government would face the same pressures from the business community and provincial governments:

….Therefore, particularly in light of the recession, the TFW program should be immediately abolished and replaced with a standalone program solely dedicated to fill legitimately hard-to-fill seasonal agricultural positions. In no universe should its administration in its present iteration be funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by Canadian taxpayers who themselves are struggling to find and keep work….

Tim Hortons commits to hiring 10,000 local employees, scaling back on temporary foreign workers

Hopefully, they will publish the numbers for accountability:

Tim Hortons is pledging to hire some 10,000 local employees, rolling back its reliance on the temporary foreign worker program.

The coffee chain says 400 hiring events have already taken place throughout March and April, and that the hiring blitz of local team members will continue throughout the year.

It’s a bit of a change for the company, which has in the past relied on the temporary foreign worker program to pull in new employees. Tim Hortons says it turned to the foreign worker program following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when the country experienced a shortage of workers….

ApplyBoard faces a reckoning as Canada’s immigration boom turns into a bust

Had it coming it appears:

….Behind the scenes, however, things were messier. The Logic spoke to 17 former ApplyBoard employees who worked at a variety of levels and in a wide range of roles—from the company’s launch to recent months—to tell the inside story of a startup that played a key role during a pivotal time in Canada’s history. The sources requested anonymity out of fear of professional and legal repercussions. 

The former workers talked of pervasive culture problems amid immense pressure to expand as ApplyBoard’s leaders lionized the work-hard, play-hard ethos of Silicon Valley at the expense of workplace boundaries and norms. The results, say the departed staffers, were incidents of recklessness and questionable judgment by senior managers, including sexual harassment and discrimination. They also said managers brushed off well-known problems with document fraud and unscrupulous recruiting agents, prioritizing growth over academic integrity and student well-being….

Usher, the college and university consultant who has worked with ApplyBoard, likewise doesn’t pin the consequences of high foreign-student numbers on the company that helped match students to schools that wanted them.

“Business conditions are a function of government regulation,” says Usher. “Did they strike it rich in Canada because of the policy environment? Yeah, they did. Good for them. They didn’t create that policy environment. They took advantage of it. That’s what businesses do.”…

ApplyBoard’s services especially appealed to colleges that don’t have the reputations of major universities or the resources to run wide recruitment operations overseas, and they offered too little in return, Skuterud says.

“If you look at the programs these students were in, overwhelmingly the growth was in these business programs with low cost for the college,” Skuterud says. “You just need one more seat in the classroom.”

That’s not arranging a beautiful intellectual marriage, he says—it’s much grubbier….

End the sleight of hand of immigration consultants 

Ongoing debate between lawyers and consultants. Certainly the latter are more prone to fraud:

The new rules give the immigration ministry more power to take action if the college doesn’t fulfill its mandate: the immigration minister can appoint someone to take over the board’s duties if it doesn’t meet its responsibilities. But instead of doubling down on a failed model, it’s well past time that Ottawa moved on to a new solution. 

Given attempts for separate regulation haven’t worked, immigration consultants should be required to work under the supervision of lawyers. There should still be requirements for training, like paralegals, but they would operate under the rules of provincial and territorial law societies, which closely monitor lawyers. For example, lawyers are subject to spot audits to examine their financial records. This more proactive approach would help root out problems. 

Law societies could create public blacklists of consultants, lawyers, employers and recruiters found guilty of fraud. They could also crack down aggressively on ghost consultants. While it might seem that putting lawyers in charge will drive up costs for clients, in reality, many of the independent consultants – in particular the shady ones – already charge their clients very high fees. 

Instead of more half-measures, Ottawa needs to implement real reform. The immigration consultant sector is a stain on Canada’s reputation, and it needs to be cleaned up now.