Kenney to consider exemptions to temporary foreign worker plan – Macleans.ca

2014/07/14 Leave a comment

Kenney’s consistent messaging while suggesting some flexibility on the margins:

While Kenney attempted to strike a conciliatory note toward the provinces, he took a hard-line toward employers, whom he has criticized in the past as relying on relatively cheaper foreign workers as business model for success.

“We would encourage employers — I’m not talking about any region or industry in particular — we would encourage employers to redouble their efforts to hire and where necessary accommodate local unemployed workers,” Kenney said.

That could mean raising pay, allowing more flexible hours, investing in training or providing transport to work from hard-to-reach areas, he said.

“We think those options are all preferable than picking up the phone and calling a labour recruiter on the other side of the world and having someone fly you in from a developing country, into a region of double-digit unemployment.”

Kenney to consider exemptions to temporary foreign worker plan – Macleans.ca.

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Tinkering is not Jason Kenney’s style – Yakabuski

2014/07/08 Leave a comment

Good piece on the political astuteness of Jason Kenney by Konrad Yakabuski:

Friday’s Federal Court ruling labelling that latter move “cruel and unusual treatment” is a decidedly unflattering one for the practising Catholic that Mr. Kenney is. But even if Ottawa is forced to reinstate health care for these claimants, their numbers are now so low that it will still save hundreds of millions annually compared to what it cost to run the refugee system before Mr. Kenney got his hands on it.

Now, Mr. Kenney’s paws are all over the TFW program. Whether his reforms turn out to be good policy will depend on whether the market works, specifically whether more Canadians migrate to Alberta to fill what are supposed to become good-paying fast-food jobs. That’s a leap of faith not even the supposedly free-market business lobby is willing to make.

But you know Mr. Kenney is on the right track when Justin Trudeau, who railed against the pre-reform TFW program and whose father created the national energy program, confusingly calls the latest overhaul “one of the most anti-Alberta federal policies we’ve seen in decades.”

If that’s all the opposition’s got, the Smiling Buddha should be laughing.

Tinkering is not Jason Kenney’s style – The Globe and Mail.

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Scrapping TFW program for low-wage jobs will be on the table in 2016, Kenney says – The Globe and Mail

2014/06/26 Leave a comment

More public comment and foreshadowing by Jason Kenney on the Temporary Foreign Workers program and live-in caregivers:

But in a meeting with The Globe and Mail’s editorial board Tuesday, Mr. Kenney insists the warnings from business leaders are exaggerated. He also indicated the government could soon go much further.

Through a phase-in of new caps on low-wage foreign workers and the launch of more detailed labour market surveys, Mr. Kenney indicated that the government will be in a position by 2016 to assess whether it should take the next step.

“At that point [in 2016], I think the government can do a reassessment and look at whether it would be desirable to go to zero right across the country,” Mr. Kenney said. “So I’m saying quite publicly that we’re leaving our options open. There will be great resistance to that.

”The overhaul of the program has been called an “appalling overreaction” by business groups and has the Conservatives suddenly playing defence in the Western stronghold of Alberta, where the changes are expected to hit hard….

As far back as 2009 when he was immigration minister, Mr. Kenney said he recalls meeting in Manila with 70 women who were on their way to Canada via the program and every single one of them planned to work for a relative.

“The biggest problem I see in it is that … to a great deal, it has mutated into an extended family reunification program, which was not its intent,” Mr. Kenney said Tuesday. “As best we can tell, a majority of the entrants in that program were actually coming to work for relatives – for family members.”

The fact that the caregiver program allows workers to apply for permanent residency for themselves and their family has “clogged” up the immigration system, said Mr. Kenney. The minister would not speculate on whether the government is considering the elimination of this benefit.

Scrapping TFW program for low-wage jobs will be on the table in 2016, Kenney says – The Globe and Mail.

Tom Walkom’s commentary in the Star aims at Temporary Foreign Workers covered under free trade agreements like NAFTA and CETA, forgetting to mention that these agreements also provide equivalent access to Canadian workers in the  US and other countries we have these agreements with:

But regardless of the judge’s ultimate decision, the B.C. case points to a fatal flaw in Kenney’s much-publicized get-tough policy:

In the end, he and the rest of Stephen Harper’s government aren’t serious about protecting Canadian jobs and wages.

As one government program designed to undercut domestic wages ratchets down, another is already gearing up.

True, Ottawa understands the politics around jobs. In response to a scandal last year in which the ICT program was used to outsource highly paid information technology jobs from Canada, the government tightened its definition of “specialized knowledge.”

Yet tellingly, this tighter definition doesn’t apply to workers from countries that have free trade agreements with Canada — such as the U.S. and Mexico.

The temporary foreign workers program may have been hobbled. But the war against good wages continues.

How Canada lets employers avoid temporary foreign worker reforms: Walkom

On the other side, Dan DeVoretz tries to defend the Temporary Foreign Workers Program for the food and hospitality industries:

How are economic benefits generated by the unnecessarily maligned hospitality and restaurant TFWs? These benefits arrive in two forms. First, the vast majority 70 per cent circa early 2014 of these TFWs reside in Alberta, where the restaurant and accommodation sector have the largest and fastest growing job vacancy rate of any industry in Canada. The province’s labour market is characterized by high wages and low unemployment. Unless unemployed workers migrated from the rest of Canada to work for minimum wage in Alberta’s hospitality and restaurant sector, many of Alberta’s existing hotels and restaurants would not be in business. Since low-priced restaurants provide a benefit to Albertans the loss of these restaurants would deprive Albertans of an important economic benefit.

Does not pass the common sense test unlike for agricultural workers. And, surprising for an economist, increasing supply by increasing wages (classic theory) ignored.

New foreign-worker rules a solution in search of a problem – The Globe and Mail.

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Ottawa’s foreign workers decision hogs spotlight in Western Canada

2014/06/24 Leave a comment

From “There are tens of thousands of employers who tell me that they would go out of business if they couldn’t find people to fill those jobs” to “I can’t count the number of people who tell me their kids can’t get jobs in the fast-food industry.”

Along with a shift to data and evidence-based policy by Jason Kenney:

But federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney insisted in an interview that the program had caused serious “distortions” in the labour market, and Albertans, like most Canadians, understand that. The reforms are based on data and evidence, not on “special-interest politics,” he said.

“There are some political actors in Alberta who are more attuned to a few thousand beneficiaries of this program than to the broader public,” Mr. Kenney said in phone interview from Calgary. “Everywhere I go people are thanking me for the changes, unprompted. Most people here believe the program grew beyond its original intent and caused distortions in the labour market. … I can’t count the number of people who tell me their kids can’t get jobs in the fast-food industry.”

The changes are expected to hit hard in Alberta’s fast-food industry, where employers complain they can’t find Canadians to work because of tight labour markets.

The government is showing a rare populist streak with its about-face on the foreign worker issue, baffling traditional allies in the business community.

Ottawa’s foreign workers decision hogs spotlight in Western Canada – The Globe and Mail.

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Canada Today: Less Hotel, More Live-in Condo – My Take

2014/06/23 Leave a comment

Growing Diversity (National).001My take on changes to the multiculturalism program by Jason Kenney over the past 7 years, starting with this initial 2008 quote from him:

But having criss-crossed this great country; having attended hundreds of events and talked to thousands of new Canadians, I am certain of this: we all want a multiculturalism that builds bridges, not walls, between communities.

We want a Canada where we can celebrate our different cultural traditions, but not at the expense of sharing common Canadian traditions.We want a country where freedom of conscience is deeply respected, but where we also share basic political values, like a belief in human dignity, equality of opportunity, and the rule of law.

We don’t want a Canada that is a hotel, where people come and go with no abiding connection to our past or to one another, where citizenship means only access to a convenient passport. We want a Canada where we are citizens loyal first and finally to this country and her historically grounded values.

The key to building such a Canada, to maintaining our model of unity-in-diversity, is the successful integration of newcomers.And that should be the focus of today’s multiculturalism.

Canada Today: Less Hotel, More Live-in Condo – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Kenney Op-Ed: Foreign workers in Canada: Let’s separate the facts from the myths

2014/06/21 Leave a comment

From anecdotes (“”There are tens of thousands of employers who tell me that they would go out of business if they couldn’t find people to fill those jobs.”) to Minister Kenney’s more evidence-based approach announcing the changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers program.

His op-ed is particularly revealing:

Several recent studies have come to this conclusion, suggesting that over-reliance on the program’s general low-skilled stream has prevented wages from rising in some low-paid occupations in parts of Western Canada, and may have reduced labour mobility. For example, overall median wages in Alberta have gone up by an average of 31 per cent since 2006, but wages in the province’s food services sector, a heavy user of the program, increased by only 8 per cent. This kind of distortion is unacceptable.

Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney put it well last year when he said “We don’t want an over-reliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary… The intent of the government’s review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.”

Foreign workers in Canada: Let’s separate the facts from the myths – The Globe and Mail.

Lots of coverage on the changes, largely targeted towards abuse of the program for the fast food service industry. CBC overview on the changes, Changes to Temporary Foreign Worker Program include limits and fines, Macleans (Temporary foreign worker rules reformed, but tensions remain) and the Government briefing package with the key message of Overhauling the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

Initial commentary of interest:

Campbell Clark in the Globe, makes some valid points in Reforms to foreign worker program are welcome, but why the long wait?:

To their credit, they produced a serious plan. The reforms provide greater incentives for employers to find low-wage workers at home by raising application fees and limiting the percentage of each company’s work force that can be brought in from abroad. The caps will be phased in over two years. And Mr. Kenney promised to increase transparency by reporting the numbers for each employer.

Even the style used to unveil the reforms was refreshingly grown-up for a government that typically prefers slogans to explanations. The ministers briefed journalists on technical details, and did a talk-till-you-drop press conference explaining their rationale. They acknowledged some businesses might be hurt, but said companies should turn more to recruitment, training and wage increases. Mr. Kenney said he wants to return the program to what it is supposed to be: a last resort.

But there is also the past. Should the Conservatives have woken to the problems before? “No,” Mr. Kenney said. The Conservatives, he explained, accepted the policy in place when they took power as “normal.”

That is a frank admission. Governments do not look under every rock for worms. But it is a tad short on mea culpa. Under the Conservatives, the number of low-wage workers – those not in special programs for nannies or farm workers, or covered by agreements like NAFTA – grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Mr. Harper’s government spent to speed up processing for TFWs. If it is broken now, they should have fixed it sooner.

Helpfully, to the Government’s communications strategy, negative reaction from Alberta and the tone-deaf Canadian Federation of Independent Business (Alberta decries changes to foreign worker program):

“This is an appalling over-reaction,” said Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which has supported the Conservative government’s economic approach in the past. “This will be a serious knock on this government’s small-business credentials to have taken the kind of move that they just did.”

Restaurants Canada, which represents restaurant owners, predicts the formula, combined with new $1,000 user fees, will force some restaurants to close, while others will need to raise prices to cover higher wages.

“I think there are going to be business casualties,” said Joyce Reynolds, Restaurants Canada’s vice-president of government affairs. “Are Canadians prepared to pay double what they pay now for a steak?”

Andrew Coyne starts off with a somewhat predictable more libertarian economic approach in Hiring foreign workers in Canada is a crime, but outsourcing overseas is fine but ends up arguing for a pathway to citizenship:

And the reforms themselves? They will be widely praised, and should succeed in moving the controversial program off the front pages, adding to Mr. Kenney’s reputation as the safest pair of hands in cabinet. Unfortunately, that does not make them good policy.

Consider an employer in the manufacturing sector, who finds himself unable to attract enough workers for certain kinds of unskilled labour, at least at the going wage. He is entirely at liberty to outsource the work to a company overseas, paying a fraction of the wages he would have had to pay his Canadian employees. He can move the whole plant offshore if he likes, laying off every one of its current employees, and import the product he sells rather than make it here. ….

This is the crime of which these [food service] employers, whom Mr. Kenney vows to harass and punish with $100,000 fines, are guilty: operating a business while in the service sector. They “cost” no more jobs than their manufacturing counterparts. It’s just that the hard-working, low-wage foreigners they employ are in our midst, and visible to us, not toiling away in some sweatshop overseas we never see. …

It certainly won’t help the foreign workers themselves, who will now be subject, as a support group, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, put it, to a kind of “mass deportation order.” Many had hoped to convert their demonstrable fitness for life in Canada into permanent residency, and ultimately citizenship. Those hopes will now be dashed.

Yet if any reform were needed, that remains the more promising route. If temporary foreign workers were not temporary, they would no longer be foreign. They would not be “taking jobs” from Canadians. They would be Canadians.

John Ivison sides with the CFIB and other small businesses in With the temporary foreign worker changes Jason Kenney has done a great deal to insulate himself:

The Employment Minister has certainly gone to great lengths to insulate himself from more incendiary allegations of abuse. Unfortunately, the risks will be borne by those small businesses that are about to see their costs soar.

Tom Walkom from the Star, from a different perspective, ends up in the same place (Jason Kenney’s temporary foreign worker changes not enough):

Public pressure has forced Kenney to make the arrangement seem more palatable. But it is not. If we need more foreign labourers, let them come as full-fledged immigrants.

If paying Canadian fast-food workers a decent wage means we must shell out more for a cup of coffee, so be it.

 

 

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Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending

2014/06/12 Leave a comment

More indications of the botched up Temporary Foreign Workers program, linked to bad labour market data, cutbacks and overall approach to evidence-based policy making:

“Things are getting done in the opposite direction,” said economist Don Drummond, who will release a paper Wednesday for the Institute for Research on Public Policy calling on Ottawa to tackle Canada’s long-standing labour market data problems. “Normally you create an information infrastructure and that informs the policy. But here we’ve had dramatic changes in policy with the temporary foreign worker program and the Canada Job Grant, while we’re undermining the lousy information infrastructure we already had.”

Mr. Drummond chaired a 2009 panel on labour market information and says many of the panel’s recommendations have not yet been fully implemented.

A spokesperson for Mr. Kenney said the minister has repeatedly noted the need for better labour market information in Canada and is looking for ways to achieve this. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada explained the spending reduction by stating that the department has modernized its data portfolio in a “tighter fiscal environment,” in part by stopping low-priority surveys to fund higher-priority research.

The recent debate over labour data has focused in part on the government’s decision to reduce funding for Statistics Canada, which gathers labour data through phone surveys of employers, while relying more on private-sector data based on scans of Internet job boards.

Internal memo reveals Ottawa cut labour market data spending – The Globe and Mail.

Update:

The Government announced that it would restore funding to StatsCan to improve labour market information:

“The government will be launching two significant, robust, new labour market information studies,” Mr. Kenney told the House of Commons Wednesday. “Of them, one will be a quarterly study on job vacancies and the other a robust annual survey on wage rates, just as experts have asked us to do.”

Sources say the new $14-million would largely reverse the 20 per cent cut by 2015-16, returning the department’s annual spending on labour market information to more than $80-million.

Ottawa increases funding for labour-market surveys

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Jason Kenney says ‘there’s nothing we can do’ to stop extremists from leaving Canada to fight elsewhere

2014/06/10 Leave a comment

Sensible comments from Minister Kenney on the limits of what he government can do about Canadian extremists fighting abroad:

Canadian extremists fighting in Syria should be viewed as security risks when they come home but there is little the government can do to prevent them from leaving, Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney said in an interview Sunday.

“At the end of the day, if it’s a Canadian who’s been radicalized and they choose to leave this country, there’s nothing we can do to stop them,” he said. “You can’t have police standing at the airport detaining them as they seek to leave the country.

“What we can do is to try to monitor networks that recruit and radicalize youth,” he said. “They can’t catch every single instance but I think that the extremist networks know that there’s an extremely high level of vigilance in Canada.”…

“I think it’s a legitimate concern, not just with respect to anti-Semitism but violent extremism in general,” Mr. Kenney said. “Obviously, Westerners who’ve been radicalized to the point of risking their lives in fighting for, for example, Al-Qaeda-linked militants, constitute a prima facie security risk when they get back to their home countries.”

RCMP, as noted earlier, has a program to identify those most at risk (RCMP set to tackle extremism at home with program to curb radicalization of Canadian youth).

Interestingly, as C-24 Citizenship Act revisions advances to the Senate this week, Kenney made no distinction on single or dual nationals. He talks of “Canadians” and “Westerners,” while C-24, developed under his watch, authorizes revocation for dual citizens convicted of terror or treason-related offences.

Jason Kenney says ‘there’s nothing we can do’ to stop extremists from leaving Canada to fight elsewhere | National Post.

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Tory MP given federal contracts months before, after failed 2008 election bid

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

Interesting story. In contrast to multiculturalism and  historical recognition grants and contributions (G&Cs), not delegated to officials, integration programming, largely language training, was delegated. When Minister Kenney became Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, officials had to explain why the sheer volume of G&Cs made Ministerial review impractical.

Minister Kenney had bad experience with the multiculturalism G&Cs as officials remained in denial mode, continuing to favour traditional organizations and approaches, leading the Minister to reject most proposals. Ministerial staffers would routinely Google organizations, to check for consistency between departmental descriptions of individual projects and the overall approach of the organization. It sometimes led to uncomfortable discussions, but his office was applying due diligence, more so than some of the officials (I eventually also would Google before approval).

Given the Minister’s concerns about delegation, a system was put in place to provide a heads-up on planned project approvals, an early detection system to avoid surprises and reduce the likelihood of project approval contrary to the Minister’s wishes. This was partially prompted by the Canadian Arab Federation case (Jason Kenney’s decision to cut funding to the Canadian Arab Federation):

When asked whether Diane Finley, who was the CIC minister at the time, was aware of the contract, spokesman Marcel Poulin said only that “officials award contracts, not ministers.”

That fall, Ms. Young ran in Vancouver South for the Conservatives, losing by just 20 votes to Liberal incumbent Ujjal Dosanjh.

The questions about the first contract didn’t deter Ms. Young’s consulting firm – her office declined to say how many employees the firm had beyond Ms. Young – from seeking a second one just over a year after the election. The November, 2009, pact totalled $452,900 for planning the same conference, this time in early 2010. It included $337,000 for “program delivery” and $115,900 for “administrative” functions. Again, the specific costs are redacted.

A spokeswoman for Jason Kenney, who had succeeded Ms. Finley as CIC minister when the second contract was awarded, said he had “no knowledge of or involvement” with the contracts.

A statement from the department echoed that. “Both contracts were assessed and approved by the appropriate delegated departmental official,” spokeswoman Sonia Lesage said.

Tory MP given federal contracts months before, after failed 2008 election bid – The Globe and Mail.

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Alberta Labour Minister blasts feds over foreign workers

2014/05/22 Leave a comment

Kind of amusing given previous bad blood between the two Ministers (Jason Kenney apologizes to Thomas Lukaszuk for a-hole email gaffe). But substantively, another call for pathways to permanent residency and citizenship:

“We need you here to stay. A revolving door is simply not humane, and economically not sound,” he said.

“In most cases what we need in Canada, and particularly in Alberta, is permanent foreign workers.”

Lukaszuk blasted federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney for suspending the TFW program in the food sector last month to launch a review, after several Canadian businesses were accused of giving TFWs more hours or priority work status.

Alberta Labour Minister blasts feds over foreign workers | Alberta | News | Calg.

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