Ottawa to rectify issue with massively revised temporary foreign workers data

2023/06/26 Leave a comment

Good quick response. And kudos to the Globe for uncovering the change. Hopefully the lesson learned is that any significant change must be openly and transparently communicated, preferably with advance consultations:

The federal government says it will publish a full accounting of temporary foreign work permit holders in Canada after The Globe and Mail discovered that more than two decades of data had been altered without explanation.

More than one million people held work permits through the International Mobility Program at the end of last year, according to figures that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada published in February.

However, the federal immigration department recently made significant downward revisions to those numbers, indicating there are now around 675,000 permit holders. The figures for all previous years, dating back to 2000, had also been reduced.

Several immigration researchers told The Globe that IRCC removed work permit holders whose primary reason for being in Canada may not be related to the labour market, such as students and refugee claimants.

The department said the revised numbers were not properly labelled. “When this new data set was published, the incorrect title/description was mistakenly published to accompany it,” spokesperson Matthew Krupovich said in a statement.

IRCC said it intends to publish figures on both the narrower and broader groups of work permit holders, but did not indicate when that will happen.

Some economists were frustrated with how IRCC handled the data revision and expressed concern that lowering the numbers would obscure how many temporary foreign workers are in the country.

“The data is just a mess,” said Mikal Skuterud, a professor of labour economics at the University of Waterloo.

By not counting international students with work permits, for example, “one would understate the growth of the IMP,” Feng Hou, principal researcher at Statistics Canada, said by e-mail.

The International Mobility Program accounts for a large share of temporary foreign workers in the country. Within the program are several categories of permit holders, including postgraduate workers and spouses of skilled workers.

Canada’s population is growing rapidly, in large part because of the influx of temporary residents, including workers and students. Many of those people are accruing postsecondary degrees and Canadian work experience in hopes of getting permanent residency.

The use of temporary foreign labour by Canadian employers has soared in recent years. The trend has been criticized by many economists for helping companies minimize their labour costs, among other reasons.

Source: Ottawa to rectify issue with massively revised temporary foreign workers data

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Ottawa makes massive data change on temporary foreign worker numbers 

2023/06/23 2 Comments

Hopefully the government will be fully transparent on how this happened and what changes are being made. This can further undermine general confidence in government management and administration given how fundamental accurate data to government programs:

The federal government has revised more than two decades of immigration data, saying that “technical difficulties” led to bloated figures for a subset of temporary foreign workers.

Slightly more than one million people held work permits through the International Mobility Program at the end of last year, an increase of 48 per cent from 2021, according to figures that were published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in February.

But recently, IRCC updated those numbers – and they are significantly different. Now, the federal government says that roughly 675,000 people held IMP work permits at the end of 2022, a decline of about 340,000 from the earlier dataset. The figures for all previous years, dating back to 2000, were also reduced.

Globe and Mail journalists recently discovered the revisions. The federal immigration department did not publish the new figures with an explanation for why they had changed so much.

IRCC spokesperson Matthew Krupovich said in a statement that the department experienced “technical difficulties” when producing the figures. The current numbers, he said, are “accurate.”

The Globe and Mail asked IRCC for a deeper explanation of these issues, but has yet to receive a response.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” said Mikal Skuterud, a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, who uses these numbers in his research. “At a minimum, when you’re working with government data, you want to trust that they’re accurate.”

Canada’s population is growing at the fastest rate in decades, in large part because of temporary migration, including students and workers. The country grew by more than one million people in 2022, and just last week, the population surpassed 40 million.

The International Mobility Program plays a large role in population growth, accounting for the majority of temporary work permit holders. Within IMP, there are several streams of migration, including post-graduate workers and spouses of skilled workers.

The presence of temporary foreign workers has grown dramatically over the past two decades. Based on the updated numbers, the volume of IMP permits has grown by 1,434 per cent since 2000.

Canada’s growing reliance on temporary foreign labour has drawn criticism on several grounds, including that it shields employers from making more competitive wage offers to domestic workers or investing in new technologies.

Canada is increasingly moving to a two-step immigration process that sees people come here first as students or workers, who vie for the opportunity of securing permanent residency.

The federal government is ramping up targets for the admission of permanent residents to 500,000 annually by 2025.

Source: Ottawa makes massive data change on temporary foreign worker numbers

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