This Ontario resort can’t find enough employees. Businesses say cuts to Canada’s temporary foreign worker program are to blame

2025/08/14 Leave a comment

Predictable business lobbying. Valid critique by economists below:

…Economists and worker advocates say the call for more foreign labour by employers points to a deeper problem.

“This whole idea of a labour shortage is an employer-driven narrative,” said Katherine Scott, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Many employers have grown accustomed to the ceaseless supply of temporary foreign labour and international students to fill low-wage jobs in fast-food restaurants, retail, warehouses, factories and gig work.

The number of foreign workers in Canada’s $100-billion food service sector shot up by more than 4,000 per cent between 2016 and 2023.

Scott argued that while some businesses in rural areas are indeed struggling to find staff, many employers seeking to hire temporary foreign workers are multimillion-dollar corporations like McDonald’s and Tim Hortons.

“These employers have not changed up their business model to offer higher wages, better working conditions and more training.”

The workers’ temporary work permits tie the employee to a single employer, making it challenging for the worker to switch jobs or speak out against abuse in the case of exploitation as it could cost the worker their job and status in Canada.

Chris Ramsaroop, an activist with Justicia for Migrant Workers, said without permanent status, the threat of deportation still hangs over any worker who complains about abusive conditions, making workers vulnerable.

Both Kelly from CFIB and Higginson from Restaurants Canada agree that clearer and faster pathways to permanent status for temporary foreign workers are essential to ensure they receive the same protections as other Canadian workers and to retain much-needed labour.

“We’ve been calling on the fact that we need to look at faster, more efficient ways to issue permanent residency to people that are brought in on a temporary basis because we want them to stay,” Higginson said. 

Ramsaroop argues employers must address labour needs by improving wages and conditions for all workers.

“Precarious immigration and precarious workers should never be the solution or the business model of any employer, of any boss.”

Source: This Ontario resort can’t find enough employees. Businesses say cuts to Canada’s temporary foreign worker program are to blame

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With move to limit temporary residents, Ottawa is ‘attacking the demand curve now’

2024/03/26 Leave a comment

Good analyst by Matt Lundy of the Globe. Sensible comments by academics and economists, more self-serving ones by the business community and organizations. And interesting that the “head of inclusion and resilience economics” at Bank of Nova Scotia seems to have a contrary position to the Bank’s overall economic assessment (Raising the Bar, Not Just Lowering the Number: Canada’s Immigration Policy Confronts Critical Choices):

…“The cap on temporary-resident admissions isn’t a silver bullet since supply and demand in the housing market are currently extremely imbalanced,” Royce Mendes, head of macro strategy at Desjardins Securities, said in a note to clients. “However, by way of just slowing the upward momentum in shelter inflation, this reinforces our view that the central bank will cut rates more forcefully than” investors are predicting.

Also on Thursday, the federal government announced a partial curtailment of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Starting on May 1, employers in four sectors, including hospitality, will see the share of staff they can hire through the program’s low-wage stream lowered to 20 per cent from 30 per cent. (Employers in health care and construction will be exempt from the reduction.)

Most employers are subject to the 20-per-cent cap, which was raised from 10 per cent as part of a 2022 overhaul of the program. At the time, the government set a temporary 30-per-cent limit for a handful of industries with acute labour shortages.

“We are disappointed in the announcement on temporary foreign workers, as this will make it even more burdensome to fill the current 100,000 job vacancies in the food-service industry and create more red tape,” Kelly Higginson, president and CEO of lobby group Restaurants Canada, said in a statement.

“Ottawa should be careful when placing arbitrary caps on immigration,” Diana Palmerin-Velasco, senior director on the future of work at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. “Temporary residents, including temporary foreign workers, can be a critical pool of talent for some sectors of our economy.”

Rebekah Young, head of inclusion and resilience economics at Bank of Nova Scotia, said Thursday’s announcements were largely “backward-looking,” in that Ottawa is trying to manage the accumulation of temporary residents.

Ms. Young said the federal government needs to articulate its objectives for economic immigration. As an example, she said those goals could be tied to gross domestic product per capita, which has tumbled to multiyear lows of late.

“That gives you a hard metric to evaluate all your programs,” she said.

In theory, the new limits on temporary residents will marginally change the relative cost of labour versus capital, Ms. Young said. However, business investment in Canada has been weak for a long time, predating the population surge.

“We need more of a productivity agenda that looks at what are the really big levers to unlock substantial business investments,” she said. This “is ultimately what will drive welfare gains.”

Source: With move to limit temporary residents, Ottawa is ‘attacking the demand curve now’

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“Keeping the price of latte low” – Why the Conservatives need to make changes to the foreign worker program fast

2014/05/31 Leave a comment

Good piece by Campbell Clark in the Globe on Temporary Foreign Workers. Latte line is priceless:

Temporary foreign workers really shouldn’t be part of any company’s basic business model, especially if it’s their strategy to fill jobs that don’t require training. Governments should be expecting wages to rise, not stepping in to provide thousands of visas for low-paid workers.

But the government has watched that grow into a common practice over several years. Freezing it has just added unpredictability.

The moratorium won’t kill Canada’s economy. Most consumers will spend their dollars elsewhere in Canada if a restaurant with a labour shortage has a long wait. But the tourism industry does have some reason to worry that the sudden freeze just as their busy season starts will cause problems for some businesses, and perhaps hurt the sector….

But whatever the government decided to do, it should have provided a transition program so the sector wasn’t hit suddenly, he [Garth White, Restaurants Canada] said. And the government should stop moving its deadline and announce its plans to reform the program, he said….

The president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, David Goldstein, said most in the industry don’t like the current program, but they do need the workers. There are some jobs it’s just hard to fill with Canadian workers, he said.

“The inconvenient truth is that in a Richard Florida society, somebody still has to make him his latte,” he said.

It’s not clear that Canadians should make it a policy priority to keep the price of the latte low, by making it easy to recruit lower-paid workers from abroad.

Why the Conservatives need to make changes to the foreign worker program fast – The Globe and Mail.

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