Khan: The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed

There will always be some need for temporary workers, particularly seasonal work and some of the groups under IMP. But the design for lower skilled temporary workers invites abuse and scams:

THE TEMPORARY FOREIGN WORKER PROGRAM has, for a litany of reasons, cemented its place as the poster child for all things wrong with Canada’s immigration system. Corruption? Check. Exploitation? Check. Profiteering? Check. A growing majority of Canadians now blame the program for bringing in too many immigrants and contributing to the housing shortage, a crumbling health care system, and for some on the far right, a perceived crisis of too many Brown people. 

The critiques are mostly political and occasionally racist. But a recent British Columbia Supreme Court decision in a class action suit tells a more sobering story: the TFWP is merely a tool bad actors can weaponize against the vulnerable in a broader immigration system that places a person’s productive value above their human value. 

What makes this case extraordinary is its scale: between 2011 and 2016, a Surrey-based immigration consultant named Kuldeep Bansal ran a glitzy foreign worker recruitment operation out of a luxury hotel in Dubai, disguised as a series of job fairs, that defrauded hundreds, potentially thousands, of vulnerable workers with offers of jobs in Canada that, in many instances, didn’t exist. 

The suit accused Bansal of charging vulnerable workers in Dubai between $2,000 and $8,000 for “services” related to obtaining these “guaranteed” jobs for Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. (The company, which has been rebranded as Circle K, is owned by Quebec-based Alimentation Couche Tard, which is not named in the ruling.) The hiring representative for Mac’s, a man named Geoff Higuchi, was accused of knowing about the scam but still helping Bansal secure work permits through the TFWP, then breaching contracts with the around 125 workers who actually arrived in Canada and were told the jobs they had applied for were no longer available….

Canada is no stranger to the exploitation of temporary workers. It’s been a feature of the Canadian labour market practically since Confederation, from the contract labour schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the seedy “labour brokers” they spawned, to the introduction of the TFWP in 1973, the birth shortly thereafter of the immigration consultant industry, the abuse of agricultural and domestic workers that followed, and the expansion of the program during the low-wage labour shortages of the early 2000s and during the pandemic. By 2023, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery declared the low-wage stream of the TFWP a “breeding ground” of modern enslavement.

Over the decades, successive governments have used a largely economic argument to justify temporary labour: businesses need flexibility in hiring to help them navigate the ups and downs of the labour market. The logic of that argument, experts say, places short-term economic needs above humanitarian obligations. And the results have been predictable: flexibility has turned into dependency, dependency into abuse. 

Today, with Canada facing an uncertain economic future, the demand for temporary foreign workers is on the decline. But when that changes, the machinery of exploitation will lurch back into motion. We will see more businesses lobbying the government for more access to cheap foreign labour and more immigration consultants leveraging that demand to enrich themselves, leaving in their wake a trail of broken lives. 

That cycle will endlessly repeat, as it has for more than a century, until Canadian politicians finally admit what the real problem is: temporariness itself. 

Adnan R. Khan is a freelance writer and editor based in the Netherlands and the author of the Canada in the World newsletter.

Source: The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed