CHARLEBOIS: On food security, Liberals have the better Temporary Foreign Worker plan, Ivison: Poilievre takes a risk on scrapping TFWs

2025/09/06 Leave a comment

Of note:

…The Liberal plan — led by Mark Carney — opts for reform rather than elimination. It introduces a cap to reduce temporary residents (including workers and students) to under 5% of the population by 2027 and tightens eligibility, permit lengths, and program oversight. Crucially, agriculture and food processing are explicitly exempted, ensuring that farms and processors maintain access to the labour they need. This more measured approach reins in misuse of the program while protecting supply, helping to moderate food price pressures.

The implications for prices are stark. If Poilievre’s model is adopted, Canadians can expect sharper and faster increases in both food-service and retail. Restaurants will need to hike wages to compete for domestic workers, leading to menu prices that rise faster than inflation. Grocers will see wholesale costs climb as farm and processing labour tightens. By contrast, the Liberal plan allows for a gradual adjustment while safeguarding agricultural labour, which should help contain inflationary shocks.

So which policy best serves a country grappling with high youth unemployment and a food system dependent on reliable labour? Poilievre’s proposal appeals to those eager to prioritize Canadian youth, but it risks jolting the food sector and undermining affordability. The Liberal reform plan, though far from perfect, offers a more pragmatic balance: Reducing excesses, protecting supply chains, and keeping food as affordable as possible in an already volatile global environment.

In the end, the question is not whether Canadians will pay more for food — it’s how much more. One plan wagers on sweeping labour substitution to revive youth job prospects. The other emphasizes stability and gradual reform to steady the system.

For households already under financial strain, the choice policymakers make could be the difference between manageable increases and another round of sticker shock at the till.

— Sylvain Charlebois is director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University.

Source: CHARLEBOIS: On food security, Liberals have the better Temporary Foreign Worker plan

And from John Ivison:

…But while he has correctly identified the disease, it is less clear he has found the cure.

The Conservative plan would create a standalone program for seasonal agricultural workers and the food processing industry.

But ending the issuance of new permits cold turkey is likely to result in a completely different set of unintended consequences than the ill-advised policy that caused the problem in the first place.

The program should return to its original intent of allowing firms to hire foreign workers when qualified Canadians are not available, gradually reducing the number of temporary foreign workers as a share of the low-skill workforce.

That is what the Liberal reforms are trying to do, although as Poilievre pointed out, it looks like the government won’t hit its target in 2025.

However, a hard stop to the program is likely to give labour markets whiplash.

From a political perspective, it’s not an obvious win for Poilievre, even if the public is sympathetic to the intent.

His critics cite this as another example of him fighting the culture wars. That’s unfair: he was clear he was not demonizing foreign workers or regular immigrants.

But it is undoubtedly a hardening of the party’s position from the 2025 platform, which talked about dramatically reducing the number of temporary foreign workers and international students.

Poilievre seems to be more concerned about his leadership review in January than winning votes from people who didn’t vote for him last time.

This — and other immigration-reform positions to come — are Rempel Garner’s work and it should have been her show. There are many able Conservative MPs who have been reduced to bobbleheads by the leader and that must change.

Scrapping the temporary foreign worker program is a valid, if misguided, response to the crisis in youth unemployment.

But the risk for Poilievre is that he’s shrinking, not expanding, his pool of available voters.

Source: John Ivison: Poilievre takes a risk on scrapping temporary foreign workers

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Poilievre calls for federal government to end temporary foreign worker program 

2025/09/05 Leave a comment

Some initial comments on the CPC proposal:

…The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), a small-business lobby group, condemned Mr. Poilievre’s proposal to scrap the program, saying that there were “zero” employers of entry-level workers who use the program for cheap labour. 

“We have many parts of Canada – particularly in rural and remote communities – with very few available entry-level workers for jobs on which local people depend,” said Dan Kelly, president of the CFIB, in a post on X.

Mr. Poilievre’s criticism of the program as exploitative has been voiced for years by international human-rights organizations and migrants’ rights groups. 

…In a recent interview with The Globe, Mikal Skuterud, a labour economist at the University of Waterloo, said that immigration is not the main driver of higher youth unemployment. Instead, he pointed to weak economic conditions and a sharp reduction in job vacancies that are making it tougher for people to secure employment.

Source: Poilievre calls for federal government to end temporary foreign worker program

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

2025/09/05 Leave a comment

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

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Pierre Poilievre’s call to scrap the temporary foreign worker program marks new, tougher stance for Conservatives

2025/09/04 Leave a comment

Safer area for Conservatives to attack and immigration critic Rempel Garner is having fun tweeting examples of TFWs in low-skilled service jobs. The excesses need to be trimmed and Canadian employers should not rely on TFWs to the same extent as cheaper labour or avoiding more investment in technology. Expect the provinces will also push back given the views of their business communities.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on Mark Carney’s Liberals to ditch the federal government’s decades-old temporary foreign worker program, taking a harder stance against a program he’s previously said should be reduced, not axed outright.

The reason why, Poilievre said Wednesday, is because of worsening youth unemployment, rather than a Liberal-induced “immigration crisis” he has claimed has weakened both the economy and security of the country.

“The individual temporary foreign workers, the workers themselves, they are not bad people. They are not the problem. They are being taken advantage of by Liberal corporate leaders who want to use them to drive down wages,” Poilievre said at a news conference in Mississauga.

“We continue to support the dream of all immigrants to Canada, the immigrants who come here to be Canadian to get a job, work hard, contribute and live a good life that is part of the Canadian promise, and that is not what we’re addressing here today.”

Experts, however, warn that the Conservative leader’s framing is misleading, and promotes beliefs that foreign workers are a prominent threat to Canadian jobs.

The long-standing temporary foreign worker program allows Canadian companies to hire foreign nationals for temporary positions, as long as employers complete a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to demonstrate the need for a temporary worker and that no local Canadians or permanent residents can fill the role. Through its various streams, the program has been lauded as a way to address labour shortages, but has also become a magnet for criticisms that it exposes workers to exploitation and abuse.

During this year’s spring campaign, Poilievre pledged in his platform to “restore order to immigration” in part by “dramatically reducing the number of temporary workers.”

On Wednesday, his party called on Ottawa to permanently end the program, cease issuing visas for new workers, create a separate program for “legitimately difficult-to-fill agricultural labour,” and to wind down the program more slowly in “ultra-low-unemployment regions.”

Tim Powers, chair of public affairs firm Summa Strategies, said Poilievre’s tougher position and shift in tone suggests he is seizing on Canadians’ economic fears while also avoiding turning away more immigrant communities who could join his coalition of Conservatives.

“It isn’t so much about what the program actually does. It’s what he thinks it represents to Canadians, this narrative that their jobs are being taken from them, and young people don’t get the opportunity to do work because temporary foreign workers are replacing them,” Powers said.

“I think if you talk to a lot of employers who use the program, they would tell you that trying to find local workers, particularly in service-based jobs … is hard to do because not everyone views the opportunities to work in a fish plant or a Tim Hortons as a job they want.”

At a cabinet retreat in Toronto, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he believed the program still had a place in his policy book and said he would assess how well the program was working.

“When I talk to businesses around the country … their number 1 issue is tariffs, and their number 2 issue is access to temporary foreign workers,” Carney told reporters.

But the Conservative leader, citing a youth unemployment rate that has climbed to 14.6 per cent, rolled out a series of claims about the program to justify his ask.

“The Liberals promised they would cap the temporary foreign worker program at 82,000, but in the first six months, they’ve already handed out 105,000 permits,” Poilievre said.

….According to federal data, Canada set a target to admit 82,000 new arrivals through the program this year.

But Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said Poilievre’s 105,000 figure does not “represent new arrivals to the country” and includes permit extensions for people already in Canada.

“Between January and June 2025, 33,722 new workers entered Canada through this program, which is roughly 40 per cent of the total volume expected this year,” a spokesperson for the department said in an email.

Despite Poilievre’s focus on the economic impacts of the program, some economists and immigration experts expressed concern about that the Conservative leader’s comments could still feed into the belief that migrant workers steal jobs. 

“It is wrong to suggest that migrant labour is a major source of the problems Canadian workers are experiencing today — which are the result, first and foremost, of (U.S. President) Donald Trump’s tariff attacks, lingering high interest rates, the decline of high-wage industrial jobs, and government austerity in some provinces,” said Jim Stanford, economist and director of the think tank Centre for Future Work.

Stanford also emphasized that the program Poilievre is targeting only makes up a small share of the workforce and should not be confused with foreign workers under the substantially larger International Mobility Program, which includes international students.

Stanford said Poilievre’s claim that temporary foreign workers now make up two per cent of Canada’s workforce is inaccurate.

According to government data on the program, there were approximately 191,000 work permit holders in total in 2024, “less than one per cent of the workforce,” Stanford said. …

Source: Pierre Poilievre’s call to scrap the temporary foreign worker program marks new, tougher stance for Conservatives

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Dozens fined for breaking rules of Ontario immigrant program that has come under scrutiny

2025/09/04 Leave a comment

Of note. Good that some have been caught:

Ontario has issued $509,100 in penalties against 77 legal representatives and employers for breaking the rules of a program that gives the province the power to pick immigrants who best suit its labour needs.

That’s the total amount of fines levied since the introduction of a provincial law in 2018 that established an administrative and enforcement regime to ensure the integrity of the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program (OINP). 

The fast-growing program — which has seen a tripling of allocated spots from 6,000 in 2018 to 21,500 in 2024 — was the focus of a critical report by the Auditor General last year that revealed “weaknesses” in its ability to prevent and detect misrepresentation. 

Under the program, a foreign national needs a certificate of nomination from Ontario before applying for permanent residence through the federal Immigration Department. There are nine OINP streams, including three that require a job offer by an employer in the province. 

Those fined include a lawyer, 21 immigration consultants and 55 employers, according to a freedom-of-information request made to the Ontario Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development.

The violations include failing to provide information that is accurate, correct and not misleading, or failing to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure that in applications, the ministry said on its website.

Between 2018 and 2024, program staff issued 6,506 notices of intent to refuse an applicant’s nomination application, said the ministry. Out of those, 2,703 ended up being rejected after further inquiries. Notices of intent are issued when an individual’s qualifications and information are in question….

Source: Dozens fined for breaking rules of Ontario immigrant program that has come under scrutiny

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Chinese students take Ottawa to court over study permit delays

2025/09/04 Leave a comment

Security clearances take time, particularly for citizens of countries with a history of foreign interference and opaque organizations, making some being caught up in the vetting process:

Dozens of Chinese graduate students are accusing Ottawa of discrimination because their study permit applications have been left in limbo for months, preventing them from beginning their advanced degrees at Canadian universities.

“It’s already [done] very serious damage to my life,” Yixin Cheng, a 27-year-old would-be PhD student in computer science at UBC, told CBC News from Hangzhao, China.

Cheng is one of a group of 25 students who have filed a case in Federal Court against Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), alleging their files have been unfairly stalled in the security screening phase. All of them have been accepted into graduate-level programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at universities including UBC, McGill and the University of Waterloo.

All 25 were still in China as the new school year began this week.

“Basically, the IRCC pressed the pause button for my life for over one year,” said Cheng.

Cheng applied for a study permit back in May 2024, and quit a high-paying job because he expected to be at UBC last fall.  The IRCC website says the standard processing time for students from China is four weeks. …

Their lawyer, Toronto-based Vakkas Bilsin, says their similarities  — all Chinese citizens, all seeking graduate programs in STEM — made him think “there is something serious going on.”

He says the lack of transparency is particularly frustrating, saying that four or five weeks after some students had submitted their applications, IRCC’s application tracker said the agency had only just started the background check process.

“We still don’t understand why a detailed, extensive security check is necessary in this specific circumstance of these students,” he said.

IRCC said in an emailed statement it is “committed to a fair and non-discriminatory application of immigration procedures. All applicants seeking to come to Canada — regardless of their country of origin or the program under which they apply — are subject to the same screening processes.”

It says the website only offers a general idea of how long the process may take and that, under the law, all people looking to enter the country must meet admissibility requirements, including a security screening.

Source: Chinese students take Ottawa to court over study permit delays

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Clark: There is no flood of newcomers anymore, Mr. Poilievre

2025/09/03 Leave a comment

Would be helpful if the data on opendata was disaggregated between new permits and extensions for temporary residents but good to have this analysis. And as I indicated in my regular tracking deck, there has been a significant decline:

…Now Ottawa has embarked on a process of reducing the numbers of temporary residents. One part is reducing new arrivals. The IRCC reports there were 214,000 fewer new arrivals of temporary workers and international students in the first half of 2025 than in the same period the year before.

But another part is an effort to turn temporary residents into permanent residents. Many of the 395,000 people to get permanent resident status in 2025 were already here.

In total, the immigration plan calls for slightly more people to leave in 2025 than arrive. Already, population growth in the first quarter of 2025, according to Statistics Canada, was 0.0 per cent.

The Liberals certainly deserve mountains of blame for the failures of 2021 to 2024, but Mr. Poilievre has no business pretending the number of immigrants is still going up.

That’s especially true when there are so many other big problems in the immigration system to fix – the things that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has so far failed to correct.

The labour market impact assessment system used to determine whether a company can hire temporary foreign workers is an utter failure. The low-wage stream of the temporary foreign workers program, which brings in occupations such as fry cooks, should be completely scrapped. The selection of economic immigrants, turned into a hodgepodge by the Liberals, should be returned to a predictable, points-based system. Those are real immigration issues. 

But there is no flood of newcomers. Rapid population growth has stopped. There are other things to fix.

Source: There is no flood of newcomers anymore, Mr. Poilievre

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Danella Aichele: Canada’s immigration policy must address the growing number of students who don’t speak English or French

2025/09/03 Leave a comment

Surely the provinces should ensure this input as part of the annual levels plan consultations. In general, Canada scores highly on PISA for immigrant integration and outcomes:

…A better approach would involve genuine intergovernmental coordination. If Ottawa intends to maintain high levels of immigration, it should consult with provinces and large urban school boards before announcing new targets. Federal funding should be aligned with provincial education budgets so that school systems can hire more ESL teachers, develop tailored curricula, and ease the transition for newcomers.

This wouldn’t be administratively burdensome. Immigration is heavily concentrated in a relatively small number of urban centres. The challenge isn’t complexity, it’s negligence.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has framed immigration as central to Canada’s growth strategy. He is right. But growth cannot come at the expense of cohesion. If immigration is to succeed, it must be matched by the resources and the planning required to make integration work.

That means Ottawa can’t simply drop new arrival numbers into the system and hope for the best. It needs to start in the classrooms where integration is lived and learned every day. Immigration targets should reflect not just national ambitions but the realities in Brampton, Calgary, and Montreal schools.

Canada’s future prosperity and social cohesion depend on getting this balance right. Immigration works best when it is ambitious and realistic—when it opens doors but also equips schools, teachers, and communities with the tools they need. Anything less risks undermining public confidence and shortchanging the very students who will shape the country’s future.

Danella Aichele is a former teacher with the Calgary Board of Education with a Master’s of Public Policy from the University of Calgary.

Source: Danella Aichele: Canada’s immigration policy must address the growing number of students who don’t speak English or French

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Thousands in Australia march against immigration, government condemns rally

2025/09/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Hopefully will not be replicated in Canada:

Thousands of Australians joined anti-immigration rallies across the country on Sunday that the centre-left government condemned, saying they sought to spread hate and were linked to neo-Nazis.

March for Australia rallies against immigration were held in Sydney and other state capitals and regional centres, according to the group’s website.

“Mass migration has torn at the bonds that held our communities together,” the website says. The group posted on X on Saturday that the rallies aimed to do “what the mainstream politicians never have the courage to do: demand an end to mass immigration”.

The group also says it is concerned about culture, wages, traffic, housing and water supply, environmental destruction, infrastructure, hospitals, crime and loss of community.

Australia – where one in two people is either born overseas or has a parent born overseas – has been grappling with a rise in right-wing extremism, including protests by neo-Nazis.

“We absolutely condemn the March for Australia rally that’s going on today. It is not about increasing social harmony,” Murray Watt, a senior minister in the Labor government, told Sky News television, when asked about the rally in Sydney, the country’s most-populous city.

“We don’t support rallies like this that are about spreading hate and that are about dividing our community,” Watt said, asserting they were “organised and promoted” by neo-Nazi groups.

March for Australia organisers did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the neo-Nazi claims.

Laws banning the Nazi salute and the display or sale of symbols associated with terror groups came into effect in Australia this year in response to a string of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.

COUNTER-PROTESTERS EXPRESS ‘DISGUST, ANGER’

Some 5,000 to 8,000 people, many draped in Australian flags, had assembled for the Sydney rally, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported. It was held near the course of the Sydney Marathon, where 35,000 runners pounded the streets on Sunday, finishing at the city’s Opera House.

Also nearby, a counter-rally by the Refugee Action Coalition, a community activist organisation, took place.

“Our event shows the depth of disgust and anger about the far-right agenda of March For Australia,” a coalition spokesperson said in a statement. Organisers said hundreds attended that event.

Police said hundreds of officers were deployed across Sydney in an operation that ended “with no significant incidents”.

A large March for Australia rally was held in central Melbourne, the capital of Victoria state, according to aerial footage from the ABC, which reported that riot officers used pepper spray on demonstrators. Victoria Police did not confirm the report but said it would provide details on the protest later on Sunday.

Bob Katter, the leader of a small populist party, attended a March for Australia rally in Queensland, a party spokesperson said, three days after the veteran lawmaker threatened a reporter for mentioning Katter’s Lebanese heritage at a press conference when the topic of his attendance at a March for Australia event was being discussed.

Source: Thousands in Australia march against immigration, government condemns rally

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Canadian Immigration Tracker First Quarter 2025

2025/09/02 Leave a comment

My regular update on key immigration programs. Given the various articles on whether or not the government is meeting the reductions announced earlier, here is where we stand for January to June for the current and previous two years:

Permanent residents admissions: From 255,015 in 2024 to 207,510 in 2025, decline 18.6 percent, (from 2023, decline 21 percent), about 50 percent of 2025 target  

TR2PR (Those already in Canada): From 148,020 in 2024 to 126,365 in 2025, decline of 14.6 percent (from 2023, decline 13 percent). 

TRs-IMP: From 420,070 in 2024 to 295,505 in 2025, decline of 29.7 percent (from 2023, decline 23.4 percent), already exceeds 2025 target

TRs-TFWP: From 110,910 in 2024 to 106,105 in 2025, decline of 4.3 percent (from 2023, decline 7.2 percent), already exceeds 2025 target for both agriculture and non-agriculture workers

Students: From 248,820 in 2024 to 152,775 in 2025, decline of 38.6 percent (from 2023, increase 26.1 percent), about 50 percent of 2025 target (likely to overshoot given third quarter has highest number of admissions (between 40-45 percent for post-secondary albeit only 34 percent in 2024)

Asylum Claimants: From 93,315 in 2024 to 57,810 in 2025, decline of 38 percent (from 2023, decline 3.7 percent)

Citizenship: From 205,363 in 2024 to 151,804 in 2025, decline of 26.1 percent (from 2023, decline 14.2 percent)

Visitor Visas: From 868,234 in 2024 to 568,195, decline of 34.6 percent (from 2023, decline 40.5 percent)

Covid-19 Immigration Effects – Key Slides – June 2025Download

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