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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‘State of shock’: As Canada ramps up immigration, unsuspecting …

2023/03/20 Leave a comment

Of note, the reality vs the promise:

A year after hearing “welcome home” for the first time at the Canadian border, Shahzad Gidwani found himself questioning whether he and his wife made the right decision to start a new life here.

The timing wasn’t ideal, arriving in Toronto from India with their son just as the pandemic began sweeping the globe. Yet the 53-year-old held high hopes for his family’s future. He was bringing with him decades of international work experience in sales and marketing, and a master’s degree in business from the U.S.

But as inflation crept toward a 40-year high, eating away at the family’s savings, panic began to set in. Gidwani struggled to secure a permanent job with a living wage because employers didn’t want to hire someone without Canadian experience.

“We hadn’t prepared for inflation,” Gidwani said. He estimated they were spending nearly $6,000 a month on rent, furniture, food and basic necessities when they were first settling in. “We were in a state of shock.”

“We thought about whether we’d made the right decision because we were burning through money. What you spend here in one month would last you nine months back in India,” Gidwani said.

Many newcomers like Gidwani come to Canada dreaming of a better life, but lately they have found themselves pummelled by the highest inflation rate in four decades, unable to afford adequate housing, food and basic necessities. And as the federal government responds to historic labour shortages by ramping up immigration — targeting an unprecedented 1.5 million immigrants over the next three years and issuing work permits to non-Canadians at record highs — newcomers are arriving only to find mostly low-skill, low-paying jobs available to them.

Many Canadians are feeling the strain of exorbitant living costs, but those struggles can be more acute for recent immigrants and those trying to secure permanent residence. Newcomers can face discrimination and precarious work conditions while scrambling to fulfil convoluted immigration requirements. According to a recent RBC report, they earn less than the general population and are more likely to reside in inadequate housing.

“Because of competition and favouritism and racism, the Canadian dream of working your way up after you get here often doesn’t happen,” said Jim Stanford, economist and director of think tank Centre for Future Work.

The situation for newcomers is unlikely to get better, economists warn, as the government’s gambit to help fill nearly one million job vacancies with an aggressive immigration strategy risks creating an underclass of newcomers trapped in low-paying jobs with little hope of advancement or improvement, while often lacking the same basic rights and protections granted to Canadian workers.

Inflation shock

Like Gidwani, Sara, a former chief financial officer, moved to Canada a few years ago hoping her extensive work experience would help her secure employment while she and her family pursued permanent residence.

But hope turned to fear as Sara found her savings evaporating. Rent was “excessive,” Sara said, and for the first year she and her husband shared housing with another family to cut costs.

(Sara’s name has been changed and the Star has granted her anonymity as her immigration status could be compromised by speaking publicly.)

Immigrants are more than twice as likely to live in inadequate housing, with 16 per cent of immigrants living in homes not suitable for the size of their household, compared with seven per cent of non-immigrants, according to a recent RBC report. A full 21 per cent of immigrants spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing, compared with 13 per cent of non-immigrants.

As she desperately looked for work, Sara found her job applications routinely rejected because she lacked Canadian experience, so she took up work as an Uber driver to stay afloat until she finally landed a job as a personal support worker.

“It was scary,” Sara said. “We needed income. We had savings, but based on how expensive everything was, that was used up quickly.”

Sara made it through COVID-19 lockdowns, job losses and discrimination before eventually getting a job in the financial sector, albeit in a position much lower than expected, given her skill set and experience.

It has also taken Gidwani two years to secure a job with adequate pay, but he remains on contract and feels like he’s constantly “on edge.”

Immigrants in 2021 accounted for more than half of the working-age population who hold a doctorate and master’s degree, or a degree in medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or optometry, as well as 39.1 per cent of those with a bachelor’s degree.

But only one in four immigrants with a university degree worked at a job that typically requires less than a high school education, or 2.5 times more than the “overqualification rate” of Canadian-born degree holders

“You can see the difference is in how you’re treated as an immigrant,” Sara said. “It has brought me to tears to see how I have been treated and how other individuals have been treated, not because of our competency and our experience, but merely because … we weren’t born here.”

Now she and her family have come out the other side, having secured permanent residence, only to find themselves in a city of soaring costs.

“The grocery bill is almost double or triple the amount when we first came here. Not to mention the cost of gas and housing on top of that,” Sara said. “It’s beyond my expectation or understanding. And we’re seeing those costs go up, but we’re not seeing our wages go up.”

The median wage of immigrants admitted to Canada in 2018 was $31,900 one year after arriving, according to Statistics Canada. Despite being the highest wage since 1981, this was still 18 per cent lower than the 2019 median wage of the total Canadian population ($38,000).

Because of the high cost of living, Laura Sanchez, 42, and her husband,Daniel Faura, 42, are considering leaving Toronto after moving here with their children in 2021. Despite sending out hundreds of resumes and getting a Canadian education, Faura said he isn’t hearing back from employers. To be eligible for permanent residence, Faura needs 12 months of Canadian work experience in one of the government’s listed occupations before his work permit expires in a couple of years.

For the time being, Sanchez and Faura, who were journalists in Colombia, have picked up cleaning jobs with long night shifts at a warehouse, making $14 an hour, which barely covers the cost of their $2,100 monthly rent. The low wages mean they frequently have to resort to food and clothing banks to cover basic necessities.

According to Statistics Canada, an estimated 12 per cent of immigrants get trapped in chronic poverty and nearly one-third experience shelter poverty. Because of these conditions, 30 per cent of young new Canadians aged 18-34 and nearly a quarter of university-educated newcomers say they are likely to leave Canada in the next two years, according to a 2022 survey conducted by Leger in partnership with the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

“That’s why we are thinking about moving to another province, because it’s too difficult to make it work here in Toronto,” Faura said.

Unprecedented expansion

Newcomers like Faura often have the promise of permanent residence — and eventually, citizenship — dangled before them, but the journey to both is becoming increasingly difficult as Canada expands its immigration programs and admits more and more people.

Both of Canada’s two main programs through which work permits are issued — the International Mobility Program and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program — have ballooned in recent years to fill labour gaps in the aftermath of the pandemic.

But the biggest surge in temporary foreign labour has been largely driven by the massive expansion of open work permits under the International Mobility Program. This program allows employers to hire a foreign worker without a labour market assessment, which demonstrates that there is a need for a foreign worker to fill the job and that no Canadian worker or permanent resident is available to do it. Those in Canada on open-work permits include hundreds of thousands of international students.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada processed more than half a million more work permits in 2022 than it did the previous year. An estimated 756,000 work permits were processed in 2022, compared with approximately 215,000 in 2021, according to IRCC data. More than 470,000 of these work permit holders were under the International Mobility Program in 2022, up from 253,365 work permit holders in 2018 — a whopping 85 per cent increase.

One of the main reasons for the growth of the International Mobility Program is the “explosion of the international student program,” said Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

Post-secondary institutions in Canada have ratcheted up their intake of international students, who can work without permits while they study. In 2021 there were 845,930 valid study permit holders in Canada, which increased to 917,445 as of Sept. 30 last year. At the same time, the amount of international students with T4 earnings skyrocketed to 354,000 in 2019, up from 22,000 in 2000, according to Statistics Canada.

The 20-hour weekly work cap on international students was also lifted last year, which experts have cautioned could create yet another tier of temporary foreign workers stuck in low-wage jobs.

While the move was seen as a positive step for students hoping to get work experience in their field, “it could set them up for becoming another form of low-skill, low-wage worker and an underclass that employers can then exploit,” said Toronto Metropolitan University professor Rupa Banerjee, Canada research chair of economic inclusion, employment and entrepreneurship of Canada’s immigrants.

Harshill Dhingra, 23, who is in Canada on a three-year, post-graduate work permit, is feeling the anxiety of having to complete 12 months of work before his visa expires to be eligible for permanent residence.

Dhingra came to Canada from India four years ago and completed his bachelor’s degree in commerce and accounting. He is currently working at a job that pays him $44,000 annually before tax, which makes it extremely difficult for him to keep up with increasing rent and costs of living.

“The job definitely underpays, but since the experience is counting toward my permanent residence I’m too scared to leave it or get fired,” Dhingra said.

While 60 per cent of international students plan to apply for permanent residence, only three in 10 international students who entered the country in 2000 or later ended up getting it within 10 years, according to Statistics Canada.

Amid growing concerns about the treatment of international students, publicly funded colleges in Ontario recently announced they are bringing in a new set of rules to protect those coming from abroad to study, including post-graduation services to assist international students’ settlement.

“I can’t stress the importance of giving newcomers status. It gives us rights and the ability to speak up and make choices,” Dhingra said.

A permanent feature

The federal government’s various policy changes normalize temporary work and make it harder for many newcomers to make a decent living, forcing them into low-skilled jobs while now also facing a housing and affordability crisis, according to economists.

It’s a problem that won’t get better any time soon because the growth in foreign labour is driven by employers’ desire to keep wages low, Banerjee said.

“The desire for cheaper, more flexible wages is really what’s driving the growth in temporary resident permits,” said Banerjee. “It transforms the role of the immigrant from a person who is there to be a future citizen to someone who’s there as an economic unit or a worker.”

Stanford argues that the labour shortage narrative coming from companies and the government is misleading and an excuse for the government to bend to corporate pressure instead of forcing companies to improve working conditions and raise wages.

“It helps employers lock in the situation where those low-wage jobs are a permanent feature of the labour market,” Stanford said. It allows companies to say the solution is to “quickly find desperate workers so that way they don’t have to change the job, which could be insecure with irregular hours and pays minimum wage with no benefits,” he added.

Because of this, many newcomers may arrive in Canada unprepared for the reality, he said.

“They’ll find themselves segmented into insecure, low-wage work and, as we know, with the cost of living crisis for everyone in Canada, it’s particularly acute for people in insecure, low-wage jobs, including most migrant workers,” Stanford said.

And even when newcomers get permanent residence, many have to restart their careers and upward mobility seems impossible.

“Immigrants always have to start at the bottom of the labour market and work their way up. There’s no surprise that new Canadians are disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs. They don’t have the network, the connections or the Canadian experience to have equal access to better jobs, even if they’re skilled,” Stanford said.

Sheila Block, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, emphasized that foreign labour is not taking jobs away from Canadians. The solution is for employers to increase pay and improve working conditions while also protecting newcomers who bring much-needed skills to Canada and help the country’s economy.

“What we need is a just immigration policy that gives workers rights upon entry, and along with that we need a public sector and collective services, which includes transit, housing and health care that will be adequate for all of us, including newcomers,” Block said.

Gidwani and his family love their new home in Canada, but the road to security was long, expensive and harder than it needed to be.

“I tell people who want to come to Canada that the cost of living is so much higher here than where they’re coming from,” said Gidwani, who along with his wife has found work and now dedicates much of his time to helping newcomers like himself plan for the realities of moving to Canada so they are set up for success.

“They can get a job — but it might not be the job they want for a while and it’ll be minimum wage,” Gidwani said.

“I tell them that it’s not impossible, but it’s not easy.”

Source: ‘State of shock’: As Canada ramps up immigration, unsuspecting …

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Stanford: Humans aren’t widgets, and Canadian workers are not in ‘short supply’

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Needed reminder and useful counterpart to the self-serving nature of many of those complaining about labour shortages:

Busy people often lament, “I wish there were more hours in the day!” They struggle to get all their tasks completed. An extra hour or two each day would surely ease the pressure.

While this frustration is understandable, no-one seriously believes our days are too short — nor that time pressures would be solved by stretching the day to 25 hours. Almost certainly, our to-do lists would just get longer, and we’d quickly face the same time crunch again.

This same flawed logic infects the chorus of complaints these days about a so-called ‘labour shortage.’ Employers moan they can’t find enough workers. They preferred it when unemployed workers abounded, and simple job ads could elicit dozens of applications.

Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada, also cites employers’ complaints as justification for painful interest rate hikes. He aims to ‘solve’ the labour shortage by deliberately raising unemployment.

The federal government, too, is catering to employers by increasing immigration targets to all-time highs. Properly planned and supported immigration is good for the economy and for society. But importing masses of workers just to make life easier for employers is the wrong way to do it (especially using exploitative temporary migrant programs).

At any rate, just increasing the number of people in the country doesn’t magically fix the labour market. Yes, there are more people to work, but now there is more work to do (since the population requiring housing and subsistence also grows). It’s like lengthening the day to 25 hours, while adding more tasks to your list.

Labour shortage narratives are also heard loudly in the social policy arena. For example, employers want Employment Insurance benefits cut, to compel unemployed workers to accept lower-paying jobs.https://d-14355908711088163416.ampproject.net/2301261900000/frame.html

Others want to postpone the retirement age, to pressure Canadians to work longer. This, too, is a false solution. Yes, Canada’s population is aging. But it’s wrong to assume this will translate into a crisis in labour supply. Strong labour force participation (including many over 65 who voluntarily keep working) is offsetting demographic trends, and keeping the labour force growing.https://amp.thestar.com/amp-ymbii.html?pos=1&path=/business/opinion/2023/02/11/humans-arent-widgets-and-canadian-workers-are-not-in-short-supply.html&sitename=thestar#amp=1

All these policies would make it harder for Canadians to find and keep good work — which should be our central economic goal. Pushing more workers into the labour market, while reducing job opportunities, will certainly make like easier for HR managers. But it will undermine life chances for most Canadians.

Statistics prove that Canada is not anywhere near ‘running out’ of workers. There are more than a million officially unemployed. Another million or more are underemployed, working short hours or in menial jobs that don’t fully utilize their abilities. And at least a million more potential workers (including hundreds of thousands of female parents, and hundreds of thousands of nonemployed who aren’t counted as officially ‘unemployed’) sit on the sidelines of the labour force.

Fully employing these Canadians would expand national output by 15 per cent. It would reduce poverty and exclusion. And it would allow us to undertake vital priorities: like strengthening health care, expanding green energy, and building affordable housing. Instead, the economy is being deliberately held back to maintain an ample buffer of idle workers, ready anytime employers need them.

To be sure, employing every available worker (and achieving genuine full employment) would require careful planning and supports. We’d need stronger vocational training pipelines to train and retrain workers, and connect them with relevant jobs. We’d need better child care, flexible hours, and public transit to support healthier work-life balance. And we’d need different ways of setting wages: through industry-wide negotiations that lift real wages steadily and sustainably (alongside productivity), rather than using unemployment as a weapon to keep wages in line.

Ultimately, the terminology of ‘labour shortage’ propagates an employer-centric vision. It portrays the economy as a machine — and human beings as just another input to that machine (like energy, raw materials, or widgets).

In fact, the economy is there to serve us, not the other way around. The economy is the place where we use our energy and skills to produce the goods and services we need for a good life. If workers are fully occupied, that means we’re doing a good job supporting ourselves.

We shouldn’t complain about that, or try to prevent it. We should celebrate it.

Source: Humans aren’t widgets, and Canadian workers are not in ‘short supply’

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Canada wants to welcome 500,000 more immigrants in 2025. Can our country keep up?

2022/11/28 Leave a comment

The Globe’s Matt Lundy is doing some of the best reporting and analysis of immigration these days, with this article raising one of the elephants in the room, housing availability and affordabilty, healthcare, infrastructure:

Every year, Canada adds a big city – in a sense. The mass of individuals are spread around, mostly to urban centres, but increasingly to suburbs and far-flung communities. They are here to work, to study, to build a better life.

The expansion is historic. From July to September, Canada’s population grew by around 285,000, a 0.7-per-cent gain that was the largest since Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949. More than 700,000 people have been added over the past year, roughly the same as the population of Mississauga, the seventh-largest municipality in the country.

The trend picked up when the federal Liberal Party came to power. Since 2016, the country has grown at nearly double the rate of its Group of Seven peers. For the most part, that growth is driven by immigration.

The push is deliberate. Policy makers say higher immigration is necessary to fuel Canada’s economic growth, and in particular, to ease labour shortages that have frustrated the corporate sector.

It is, however, a population boom with its share of growing pains

Consider that over the past year, fewer than 200,000 housing units were completed. There were 3.6 new residents for every home added, the highest ratio since at least 1991. Affordability is deteriorating in most places. There is a fundamental mismatch between home supply and demand – and the population boom is contributing to the divide.

At the same time, Canadian governments are struggling to deliver basic services. Surgeries are getting cancelled in crammed hospitals. Canadians can’t find family doctors, let alone newcomers trying to navigate an ailing health care system. Cash-strapped cities can’t refurbish their infrastructure as fast as it’s falling into disrepair.

To cope with the affordability crisis, a growing number of people are fleeing our cities. They include teachers, nurses and construction workers – the very people who keep those cities running.

In this fraught environment, Ottawa has its foot on the accelerator. After admitting about 405,000 permanent residents last year, the federal government is aiming for 500,000 in 2025. And that’s just a portion of the migration wave: At last count, there were 1.4 million residents with temporary work or study permits.

Canada is facing a complicated adjustment. Notably, developers are scrapping or delaying housing projects, owing to rising interest rates and waning profitability. Just when more homes are needed, fewer are being built.

Several economists question why the federal government would create more demand for services, when so many pillars of social infrastructure are in distress. They wonder if Ottawa is singularly focused on hitting its immigration targets, with insufficient planning for how to successfully absorb those newcomers.

For its part, the federal government says the solution to so many of these problems is simple: more immigration. They’re planning to bring in more doctors and nurses from abroad, along with people to build homes.

Many recent immigrants have waited years for admission. Now they’re arriving at a time of decades-high inflation and slowing economic growth. Highly-skilled newcomers will likely manage the transition just fine. But others are discovering the Canadian dream is a pricey proposition – and perhaps not what they bargained for.

Ash Gopalani knew Toronto would be expensive. Just not this expensive.

He and his wife, Sneha, arrived in September, after a stressful three-year process to get their permanent resident cards. Finding an apartment was the next hurdle. Too often, the listings were in cramped basements, with little natural light, or far removed from the city’s core or public transit.

Mr. Gopalani eventually signed a lease for a one-bedroom unit in the city’s west end for $1,800 a month, the top end of his expected range. What he didn’t anticipate was paying six months of rent – $10,800 – up front, because the couple from Mumbai has no credit history here. Now, they have less of a financial buffer as they search for jobs.

Mr. Gopalani was hoping to follow a familiar playbook for newcomers. Establish a career. Save up money. Then buy a house – preferably big enough that their family from India could stay a while.

But the experience of moving here has been a reality check.

“We don’t know if we can afford building a life in Canada,” he said.

The rental market is ground zero for where immigrants get a taste of the cost-of-living crisis, in which fierce competition and bidding wars for relatively few units have led to jacked-up prices.

For Alexiane Sauvaire, it was a rude awakening. She thought finding an apartment in Toronto would be easier than in her native Paris. After eight frustrating days of looking, following her arrival, she moved to Montreal.

“Maybe for rich people, it’s easy. But when you’re not rich, it’s impossible to live right now in Toronto,” she said.

Increasingly, recent immigrants are bypassing the largest metro areas – Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal – to settle elsewhere, although a slim majority still favour those regions, according to the latest census results. However, costs are rising quickly in other cities, too, as they experience fervent demand from migrating people.

Over the past year, the average rent in Calgary has jumped 18 per cent to around $1,720 a month, according to data for new listings on Rentals.ca. London, Ont., is up 26 per cent. Halifax: 21 per cent.

From a labour standpoint, the affordability crisis is making it difficult to recruit – and retain – important workers.

“There are very significant economic risks to large cities if they do not get housing costs under control,” Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., said on a conference call this summer. “It’s getting increasingly difficult to attract skilled workers and even highly-skilled workers to these cities because they’re just becoming simply unaffordable.”

The task ahead is nothing short of gargantuan. CMHC says that, in order to restore affordability back to levels in 2003 and 2004, Canada would need to build 3.5 million morehomes than projected by 2030.

Earlier this year, the federal government unveiled billions in new spending for housing, with a goal of doubling construction over the next decade. That plan looks dead on arrival amid higher borrowing rates.

There is, of course, another problem: labour. In a recent report, CMHC said there were not enough skilled workers to build the homes so desperately needed.

“Even under more ideal conditions, I don’t think we have the capacity to build at a pace that matches the demand through population growth that we’re seeing,” said Shaun Hildebrand, president at real estate firm Urbanation.

Immigration lawyers have a blunt message: The application system is a mess.

And it’s a mess that was largely created in Ottawa.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (the federal immigration department) had around 2.2 million applications in its inventories as of Oct. 31. About 1.2 million of them were in backlog, meaning they’ve been in the system for longer than service standards for processing. That’s far higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The system is falling apart. I’ve never seen it like this, in the 20 years that I’ve been practising,” said Kerry Molitor, an immigration consultant in Toronto.

After failing to hit immigration targets in 2020, owing to pandemic challenges, the federal government wanted a rebound. Through various decisions, it invited thousands of people already in Canada to apply for permanent residency. The surge in applications overwhelmed a civil service that struggled to process files efficiently amid office closings and the shift to remote work.

In some cases, applicants are waiting years for a decision. Mr. Gopalani and his wife applied for permanent residency in the fall of 2019. They expected an approval within months, a typical outcome in their stream of immigration. They weren’t approved until July, 2022.

“The immigration system could have been more sensitive, empathetic, towards the kind of transition that people go through, which didn’t happen,” he said.

Because of the backlog, applicants such as Mr. Gopalani have put their lives on hold for years. Others are working in Canada, but their permits are nearing expiry, putting their future plans in doubt. These are individuals who, in Canada’s points-based system for economic immigrants, would often be shoo-ins for approval, but now are caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare.

There are “really good, quality people in the pool, and they’re not getting invitations,” said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo. “What happens now when these folks leave? They say, ‘The hell with this, I’m going back to my country or the U.S. or wherever.’ Now you’re losing all that talent. That’s completely not what this process is supposed to be.”

Despite the administrative headaches, Canada is on pace to welcome 431,000 permanent residents this year, right on target. The trouble is that talented people are slipping through the cracks – and the immigration system is taking a beating in public opinion.

“There’s this massive psychological toll that the backlogs, the delays and the lack of transparency have on people,” said Lev Abramovich, an immigration lawyer in Toronto. “I don’t think IRCC bureaucrats and politicians understand how much suffering this has caused.”

For all of Ottawa’s talk of targeting the best and brightest, the federal government is also allowing more cheap foreign labour into the country. Earlier this year, it overhauled the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program, largely so employers could access more low-wage labour.

Colleges and universities, meanwhile, are ramping up their intake of foreign students, who mostly don’t need work permits. Increasingly, those students are taking jobs to rack up points for their permanent residency applications.

Around 1.4 million people had temporary work or study permits at the end of 2021, an increase of 85 per cent since 2015. That’s 640,000 people – about equal to the city of Vancouver – who have been added in just six years. Their ranks are set to accelerate this year, after policy changes.

While Ottawa has targets for admissions of permanent residents, there are no such guidelines for other migrants. With students, the federal government has essentially ceded that responsibility to postsecondary institutions, which are inclined to boost their revenues through higher intake of foreign students, who pay lofty tuition fees.

“The number of foreign nationals who receive study permits in any given year is based on demand, not predetermined targets,” Rémi Larivière, a spokesperson for IRCC, said in a statement.

An extreme example: Cape Breton University. Nearly 4,000 of its full-time students this fall had study visas, up a whopping 68 per cent from last year, according to preliminary survey data from the Association of Atlantic Universities. About three-quarters of CBU’s full-time students are from abroad. That’s injecting a surge of new demand for services in sleepy Sydney, N.S. (population: 31,000).

Gurmeet Singh, a second-year student, is trying to help people with their transition. He’s part of a volunteer group that verifies rental listings for incoming students. On average, the group gets three requests daily to check out potential residences. Mr. Singh visits those listings to see if they’re suitable for living – and if they exist.

Fraudulent listings are fairly common, Mr. Singh said; the group finds a scam every couple of days. “We felt it was our moral duty to help our fellow international students,” he said.

That’s not the only source of frustration. In local media this week, CBU students complained that a majority of classes in the two-year postbaccalaureate business program – a popular choice among foreign students – were being held in an unexpected venue: a Cineplex Inc. movie theatre off campus

Higher immigration is a guiding principle for this iteration of the federal Liberal Party.

Time and again, the party frames immigration as the antidote to an aging population, helping to grow the pool of labour market participants – and thus, too, the economy.

“Immigration is not just good for our economy, it’s essential. We can’t get by without it,” Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told reporters at a recent news conference.

The truth is more complicated. A vast body of economic literature shows that immigration has little effect on gross domestic product per capita, a popular measure of living standards. Furthermore, while new immigrants are younger than existing residents, the intake is too meagre to offset a demographic wave of aging citizens.

This doesn’t mean immigration is bad for the economy. But it’s not an accelerant, either.

“Often, the argument is made as if it’s obvious that immigration generates economic growth,” said David Green, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia. “Not if you look at the numbers.”

Of late, Ottawa has said various policy changes – including the expansion of the TFW program and allowing foreign postsecondary students to work longer hours – are aimed at easing labour shortages. This has led several economists to accuse the federal government of kowtowing to corporate pressure, flooding the job market with low-wage foreign labour, rather than forcing companies to hike wages or make investments.

“There’s lots of evidence that holding employers’ feet to the fire in times of tight labour markets is the best way to spur innovation, automation and productivity. Those are the things you want in an economy,” said Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work, a think tank.

“And if you say to employers, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll let you bring in some low-priced temporary migrants to solve your problem,’ you’re just dissipating the pressure that’s required to achieve a more productive economy.”

Prof. Green questioned the need to admit half a million permanent residents in 2025, given the fragile state of Canada’s social infrastructure and the questionable economic rationale for that target.

“I don’t see the planning here,” he said. “Do you really want to ramp up to 500,000 a year, at a time when we seem to be heading into recession and our housing markets and our health care system are straining at the seams? That’s a discussion that should be had.”

By and large, surveys suggest Canadians welcome immigrants. A recent poll, conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, found nearly seven in 10 respondents support current levels of immigration, about double the share in late 1970s. The vast majority of respondents – 85 per cent – agreed that immigration is positive for the economy, a view that has held strong for decades.

But Prof. Green suggests we shouldn’t take that for granted. If the country struggles to integrate newcomers, then perhaps Canadians will start to eye them suspiciously. “It’s politically dangerous, to my mind,” he said.

For now, that’s a worry. But it’s not the experience of Tanushree Holker and Nishant Kalia, who moved to Toronto from New Delhi in the summer of 2019. Their expectation of Canada as a welcoming country has checked out.

“That perception about Canada being a country which accepts immigrants with open arms, it is true when you come here,” Ms. Holker said.

The couple has shared their journey in Canada on YouTube; their channel, In The North, has nearly 100,000 subscribers, to whom they dispense their acquired wisdom on everything from buying a car to navigating a complex immigration system. Mr. Kalia started the channel after getting laid off early in the pandemic. He’s since built a career in human resources, while his wife works for a Big Six bank.

In recent videos, they’ve documented a major life change: They moved to Calgary. By doing so, they’re saving $350 a month on a similar-sized rental unit, and they expect to buy a home within six to nine months. Despite any number of financial complications, their version of the Canadian dream is going to plan.

“After we made our trip to Alberta, we realized that there is actually a life in Canada beyond Toronto and Vancouver,” Mr. Kalia said in a video. “To our surprise, [Calgary] was much better than we expected.”

Source: Canada wants to welcome 500,000 more immigrants in 2025. Can our country keep up?

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Restaurants and stores say government aid is to blame for a labour shortage — but the hard data tells a different story

2021/08/09 Leave a comment

Of note, given current discussions on whether our immigration system needs to be rebalanced towards the lower skilled and paid:

Relaxed health rules are allowing thousands of restaurants and stores to reopen. But employers are already complaining they can’t find enough workers, especially in hospitality and retail. Some are offering signing bonuses, redistributing tips and making other special efforts to attract staff.

Employers like to point the finger at government income supports that helped people through the pandemic, like emergency recovery benefits (now extended to October) and expanded eligibility for EI payments. Employers complain these programs reduce the incentive to accept low-wage, irregular work in restaurants and shops. Many also want Ottawa to expand the Temporary Foreign Worker program, so they can access low-cost labour from other countries.

To be sure, it is an operational headache for restaurants and stores to reconnect with former employees after months of closure, and they’re all trying to do this at the same time. But the hard data does not support the claim of a generalized labour shortage.

After all, unemployment remains elevated: the latest Statistics Canada reportpegged the official rate at 7.5 per cent. And other pools of hidden unemployment (including people working very short hours, and people who left the labour force during the pandemic) push the true unemployment rate towards 15 per cent.

Wages in stores and restaurants remain very low, and are not rising, which should happen if labour was genuinely scarce. In hospitality, for example, the median wage is $15 per hour (barely matching the legal minimum in many provinces), and average weekly earnings are just $500 per week (reflecting inadequate hours of work as well as low wages).

There is no sign wages are improving, despite anecdotes in the media. To the contrary, wages have grown more slowly in retail and hospitality than the overall economy since the pandemic. Thus the wage penalty for workers in these sectors is getting worse, not better.

When your industry offers less than half the going wage, you shouldn’t be surprised you have trouble attracting workers. That’s like me offering $100,000 for a Lamborghini (less than half the list price), and then crying shortage when no-one will sell me one.

It’s no mystery how to recruit and retain a more stable workforce: offer better pay, stable shifts, decent benefits, and improved training and safety. Inadequate and irregular hours are actually a bigger disincentive than low hourly wages (almost half of hospitality staff work part time). Reorganizing schedules to allow predictable shifts and more full-time roles would support genuine career opportunities in these industries, rather than a culture of lousy precarious work.

Other countries have shown that service sector work can offer stable middle-class career paths. Canada could do the same, but only if we prevent employers from taking the easy out — namely, providing them with still more desperate workers willing to work for any wage. If governments respond to complaints about a labour shortage by cutting income supports or importing migrant labour, that will only short-circuit the improvements in job quality these sectors ultimately need.

Only once did Canada’s economy truly run out of workers. That was during the Second World War, when a massive, government-funded war effort ended the Depression and put every able worker into a productive job. We aren’t anywhere near that situation today, but we could be, if we wanted to. We could launch an ambitious post-COVID national reconstruction plan, featuring massive and ongoing investments in green energy, affordable housing, and human and caring services. That would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, end mass unemployment and improve living standards in the process.

But creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs is actually the last thing low-wage employers want. That would only make it all the harder for them to recruit cheap, desperate labour.

In sum, there’s no “labour shortage” in Canada today, nor is one on the horizon. Governments should ignore these phoney complaints, and instead encourage employers to respond to staffing problems like any other hard-to-find commodity. When something is truly scarce, smart businesses find ways to use less of it (in this case through automation and efficiency measures). They emphasize quality over quantity. And, at the end of the day, they pay more.

In the long run, this will drive productivity growth, innovation and better jobs. And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver, is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @jimbostanford

Source: Restaurants and stores say government aid is to blame for a labour shortage — but the hard data tells a different story

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