ICYMI – Globe editorial: Ottawa’s enduring problem of a surge in temporary workers

2026/06/10 Leave a comment

Mirrors CPC calls although sceptical that any government could resist business pressures for caregivers and LMIA Temporary Foreign Workers:

…IRCC is doing a better job at managing new arrivals, but it needs to do more to reduce the overall number of work permits. The temporary foreign worker program outside of agriculture should be wound down. It’s also time to take a closer look at the International Mobility Program. 

Immigration is a key driver of Canada’s prosperity, but more needs to be done to move away from the two-step immigration system of the last decade, and return to selecting the highest-skilled immigrants from abroad for permanent residency. Restoring balance has been too slow. The federal government shouldn’t pretend otherwise. 

Source: Ottawa’s enduring problem of a surge in temporary workers

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While I was away: Temporary Residents

2026/06/08 Leave a comment

Some articles of interest:

Rempel Garner: Liberals spent $1.6B on Temporary Foreign Worker program, new data shows

Virtue signalling. A CPC government would face the same pressures from the business community and provincial governments:

….Therefore, particularly in light of the recession, the TFW program should be immediately abolished and replaced with a standalone program solely dedicated to fill legitimately hard-to-fill seasonal agricultural positions. In no universe should its administration in its present iteration be funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by Canadian taxpayers who themselves are struggling to find and keep work….

Tim Hortons commits to hiring 10,000 local employees, scaling back on temporary foreign workers

Hopefully, they will publish the numbers for accountability:

Tim Hortons is pledging to hire some 10,000 local employees, rolling back its reliance on the temporary foreign worker program.

The coffee chain says 400 hiring events have already taken place throughout March and April, and that the hiring blitz of local team members will continue throughout the year.

It’s a bit of a change for the company, which has in the past relied on the temporary foreign worker program to pull in new employees. Tim Hortons says it turned to the foreign worker program following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when the country experienced a shortage of workers….

ApplyBoard faces a reckoning as Canada’s immigration boom turns into a bust

Had it coming it appears:

….Behind the scenes, however, things were messier. The Logic spoke to 17 former ApplyBoard employees who worked at a variety of levels and in a wide range of roles—from the company’s launch to recent months—to tell the inside story of a startup that played a key role during a pivotal time in Canada’s history. The sources requested anonymity out of fear of professional and legal repercussions. 

The former workers talked of pervasive culture problems amid immense pressure to expand as ApplyBoard’s leaders lionized the work-hard, play-hard ethos of Silicon Valley at the expense of workplace boundaries and norms. The results, say the departed staffers, were incidents of recklessness and questionable judgment by senior managers, including sexual harassment and discrimination. They also said managers brushed off well-known problems with document fraud and unscrupulous recruiting agents, prioritizing growth over academic integrity and student well-being….

Usher, the college and university consultant who has worked with ApplyBoard, likewise doesn’t pin the consequences of high foreign-student numbers on the company that helped match students to schools that wanted them.

“Business conditions are a function of government regulation,” says Usher. “Did they strike it rich in Canada because of the policy environment? Yeah, they did. Good for them. They didn’t create that policy environment. They took advantage of it. That’s what businesses do.”…

ApplyBoard’s services especially appealed to colleges that don’t have the reputations of major universities or the resources to run wide recruitment operations overseas, and they offered too little in return, Skuterud says.

“If you look at the programs these students were in, overwhelmingly the growth was in these business programs with low cost for the college,” Skuterud says. “You just need one more seat in the classroom.”

That’s not arranging a beautiful intellectual marriage, he says—it’s much grubbier….

End the sleight of hand of immigration consultants 

Ongoing debate between lawyers and consultants. Certainly the latter are more prone to fraud:

The new rules give the immigration ministry more power to take action if the college doesn’t fulfill its mandate: the immigration minister can appoint someone to take over the board’s duties if it doesn’t meet its responsibilities. But instead of doubling down on a failed model, it’s well past time that Ottawa moved on to a new solution. 

Given attempts for separate regulation haven’t worked, immigration consultants should be required to work under the supervision of lawyers. There should still be requirements for training, like paralegals, but they would operate under the rules of provincial and territorial law societies, which closely monitor lawyers. For example, lawyers are subject to spot audits to examine their financial records. This more proactive approach would help root out problems. 

Law societies could create public blacklists of consultants, lawyers, employers and recruiters found guilty of fraud. They could also crack down aggressively on ghost consultants. While it might seem that putting lawyers in charge will drive up costs for clients, in reality, many of the independent consultants – in particular the shady ones – already charge their clients very high fees. 

Instead of more half-measures, Ottawa needs to implement real reform. The immigration consultant sector is a stain on Canada’s reputation, and it needs to be cleaned up now. 

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Temporary Foreign Worker Permits Are Destroying Trucking

2026/05/05 2 Comments

Another area of less expensive temporary workers being used, similar to the restaurant and food service industry:

…If the goal is to fix the transport trucking industry, and protect the workers who keep it running, the solutions are not complicated. They do, however, require political will, and perhaps most importantly, workers and unions organized and willing to fight. 

The Teamsters are calling for: a reduction in closed work permits that tie workers to a single employer; a meaningful wage floor and enforcement to ensure pay for all hours worked; pathways to permanent residency for migrant workers; stronger enforcement against employment misclassification and other labour violations; and recognition of truck driving as a skilled trade. 

All of these proposals would raise standards for migrant and Canadian-born workers alike, and should form the basis of solidarity. 

What’s happening in the trucking industry is not unique. It’s part of a broader pattern in the Canadian economy whereby employers refuse to accede to demands for better pay and working conditions (even when their own cost-cutting produces a qualitative labour shortage), instead depending on a supply of precarious and exploitable workers. 

As the Teamsters’ report makes clear, we are faced with a choice. We can continue down the current path, where labour shortages are solved not by improving jobs, but by making workers more disposable. Or, we can raise wages and improve work as the foundation of a better economy. As Burgan put it, “Trucking can’t be outsourced abroad. These jobs are here to stay. So let’s make sure they’re good jobs.”

The trucking industry, like so many others, doesn’t have a labour shortage. It has a shortage of good, union jobs. 

Source: Temporary Foreign Worker Permits Are Destroying Trucking

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Migrant farm workers’ class-action suit against Canadian government certified

2026/02/25 2 Comments

To watch:

An Ontario court has cleared a major hurdle for migrant farm workers to pursue a Charter challenge against Ottawa for systemic racism and discrimination.

On Monday, the Superior Court of Justice certified a $550 million class-action lawsuit initiated by two lead plaintiffs, Kevin Palmer and Andrel Peters, who were brought to Canada under the federal government’s seasonal agricultural farmworker program (SAWP).

The lawsuit alleges that their rights were violated under the “tied employment” provisions of the program that restricted them to work for a named employer only, and their “compelled” payments to Canada’s employment insurance premiums despite their disqualification from receiving the benefits.

The certified class will cover current and former agricultural workers who are or were employed in Canada on a contract basis under SAWP, on or after Jan. 1, 2008. The federal government has already identified precisely 74,785 people who are members of the class, and has produced a class list with each member’s personal information.

Launched in 1966, the SAWP allows agricultural employers to hire temporary foreign workers from Mexico and participating Caribbean countries for up to eight months a year when qualified Canadians are unavailable. Between 30,000 and 40,000 seasonal migrants come to work here via the program each year.

In his decision, Judge Edward M. Morgan concluded that the plaintiffs’ proposed common issues predominate over any individual issues in the action, and focus on a common set of conditions imposed on all class members in the SAWP. 

“The breaches alleged are systemic and apply across the class,” Morgan wrote in his 25-page decision. “The Charter claims focus on state action in imposing oppressive and liberty-restricting terms in the SAWP contracts and legislation/regulation.

“Likewise, the unjust enrichment claim arises from a set of facts imposed by legislation and held in common by all class members — i.e. the payment of EI premiums, accompanied by restrictions imposed in the EI scheme and the SAWP that prevented access to EI benefits….

Source: Migrant farm workers’ class-action suit against Canadian government certified

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Some employers using foreign worker program facing bigger fines for violations

2026/02/23 Leave a comment

Encouraging:

Amid increasing scrutiny on the use of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, the total dollar amount of fines imposed on employers who are found to violate the terms of the program has risen dramatically.

However, some observers think changes to monitoring and enforcement of the program are still required.

Catherine Connelly is a professor of human resources and management at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., who has studied the temporary foreign worker program.

She says the federal government historically seemed to take an “educational approach,” with fines that were usually in the hundreds rather than the thousands of dollars.

“There just didn’t seem to be too much of a deterrence in terms of how they were approaching the enforcement of the rules of the program,” she said.

But Connelly says as public perception of the program soured, she noticed a gradual change that built into a “dramatic shift” over the last year.

“Now the approach seems to be more of a deterrence approach and we see fines easily into the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said.

In the 2018-19 fiscal year, 74 companies faced a total of $102,250 in fines.

By comparison, during the last fiscal year, 147 companies faced $4,882,500 in fines.

Connelly believes the number of companies caught and fined is likely a “fraction” of those who are actually breaking the rules. But she says large fines may catch the attention of companies that are using the program.

“They are risk-averse and they are strategic in their planning. And so a well-run company will see that non-compliance with this complicated program is a serious issue that needs to be avoided,” she said.

Meanwhile, the number of employers applying to use the temporary foreign worker program has dropped in the last two years, according to recent numbers released by the federal government.

After hitting roughly 150,000 applications in the 2023-24 fiscal year, the number fell to roughly 63,000 so far in the current fiscal year. …

Source: Some employers using foreign worker program facing bigger fines for violations

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Temporary foreign workers switch jobs and earn more after becoming permanent residents, study finds

2026/01/12 Leave a comment

Of note, not terribly surprising but good to see the data behind it:

…The research, which was conducted by economists at universities in Toronto and Chicago, found several benefits for workers who transitioned to permanent residency status.

Temporary foreign workers who were granted permanent residency in Canada between 2004 and 2014 – and thus were no longer on closed work permits which tied them to a single employer – saw an earnings increase of 5.7 per cent three years after they obtained PR status. 

The workers directly benefited from being able to switch positions, the researchers found. There was a “sharp” and “immediate” increase in the probability of a job-to-job transition of 21.7 percentage points over the three years, the paper estimates. And many of those workers switched into better-paying industries. 

“Our main question of interest when we began this research was: what is the effect of being on a closed permit relative to an open permit?” said Kory Kroft, a professor of economics at University of Toronto, and one of the paper’s authors. 

“The main takeaway is once you relax the restrictions, you see a big increase in job mobility. You find that immigrants who were clustered at low-wage jobs quickly sorted themselves into higher-wage jobs.” 

The TFW program is a key immigration stream in Canada that allows employers to hire mostly low-wage foreign workers on a temporary basis in sectors where the government determines there is a shortage of domestic labour, such as agriculture….

Source: Temporary foreign workers switch jobs and earn more after becoming permanent residents, study finds

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Inspections of temporary foreign worker employers in Canada have plummeted — despite a surge of workers

2025/10/11 Leave a comment

Not a good take:

The number of inspections of employers hiring temporary foreign workers has plummeted over the past five years — with most conducted without inspectors ever setting foot on worksites — even as the number of migrant workers and reports of abuse have surged, according to government data obtained by the Star.

Annual inspections fell 57 per cent, from 3,365 in 2020 to 1,435 in 2024, according to Employment and Social Development Canada, the department that oversees the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program.

There are three triggers for an inspection listed by the Immigration Department: a history of non-compliance, random selection and a reason to suspect non-compliance including a received allegation or complaint.

From 2020 to the end of 2024, 77 per cent of more than 12,000 employer inspections have been “paper-based only,” meaning the vast majority of these inspections take place remotely without any on-site reviews of the workplaces where it’s suspected that violations occurred.

The declining number of inspections comes at a time when the TFW program has ballooned, undergoing a massive expansion in the last decade, amid rising allegations of abuse and penalties issued to employers violating the program. Labour experts and advocates say the combination of fewer on-site inspections and rapid growth of the program raises serious concerns about oversight, enforcement and the protection of vulnerable workers.

The number of TFW approvals has more than doubled in recent years, rising to nearly 51,000 approvals in the third quarter of 2024 alone, more than triple the 15,507 approvals from the third quarter of 2021.From 2020 to the end of 2024, 77 per cent of more than 12,000 employer inspections have been “paper-based only,” meaning the vast majority of these inspections take place remotely without any on-site reviews of the workplaces where it’s suspected that violations occurred.

The declining number of inspections comes at a time when the TFW program has ballooned, undergoing a massive expansion in the last decade, amid rising allegations of abuse and penalties issued to employers violating the program. Labour experts and advocates say the combination of fewer on-site inspections and rapid growth of the program raises serious concerns about oversight, enforcement and the protection of vulnerable workers.

The number of TFW approvals has more than doubled in recent years, rising to nearly 51,000 approvals in the third quarter of 2024 alone, more than triple the 15,507 approvals from the third quarter of 2021….

Source: Inspections of temporary foreign worker employers in Canada have plummeted — despite a surge of workers

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Worswick: Why the Temporary Foreign Worker Program needs to be eliminated

2025/10/09 Leave a comment

More sensible proposals from Worswick:

…The TFW program was controversial under both the Harper government and the Trudeau government. In both cases, the government of the day ultimately bent its will to employer lobbying to make the program larger until an understandable public backlash ensued. The result is that the TFW program’s brand is severely damaged and should be retired. In its place, smaller, targeted programs would make sense. Two, in particular, are worth considering. 

Retaining a separate agricultural temporary visa program has merits. These types of jobs are unique in that they are geographically remote and seasonal by nature. Filling them with Canadian citizens or permanent residents may require large increases in wages, putting many farm enterprises at risk. 

Having a standalone global talent temporary visa program would also benefit the Canadian economy so long as the earnings are above the Canadian average. Such a program should be limited in size to minimize any negative effects on wages of higher-income Canadians. The program could prioritize the highest-earning jobs, as has been suggested for the U.S. H-1B program. Individuals taking these jobs would be excellent candidates as economic permanent residents.

Source: Why the Temporary Foreign Worker Program needs to be eliminated

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Carney says temporary foreign worker program needs a ‘focused approach’

2025/09/12 2 Comments

Not much new in terms of messaging:

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday the temporary foreign worker program needs a “focused approach” that targets the needs of specific sectors and regions.

Carney’s comments came as he outlined the government’s plans for the fall during an address to the Liberal caucus at their annual retreat in Edmonton.

The prime minister said the government’s plan to return immigration rates to “sustainable levels” includes reducing the number of non-permanent residents to “less than five per cent” of the total population.

Temporary workers and international students made up 7.1 per cent of Canada’s population as of April 1, according to Statistics Canada.

“Now, it’s clear that we have to work to continue to improve our overall immigration policies, and the temporary foreign worker program must have a focused approach that targets specific strategic sectors and needs in specific regions,” Carney said in his speech to caucus.

“So we’re working on that. Setting those goals, adjusting and working to ease the strain on housing, public infrastructure and our social services while we build that strong economy.”

At a press conference in Brampton, Ont., on Tuesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre once again called on the government to scrap the temporary foreign worker program due to high youth unemployment, which hit 14.6 per cent in July.

Poilievre said immigrants are not responsible for housing and employment challenges and instead blamed the government. 

“They’ve allowed massive abuses of the international student, temporary foreign worker and asylum claims system, with rampant fraud that happened right under their nose. And as a result, our youth can’t find jobs or homes,” Poilievre said.

”(Carney’s) allowing corporations to bring in a record number of temporary foreign workers this year at a time when youth employment numbers are their worst in three decades.”

Government data show the number of temporary foreign workers coming to Canada decreased significantly in the first six months of the year. About 119,000 temporary workers arrived in the first half of 2025, down from more than 245,000 in the first half of 2024.

The government’s current target for temporary workers is to admit about 368,000 this year and 210,000 next year.

Before Carney’s speech, former immigration minister Marc Miller said “you can’t just scrap” the temporary foreign worker program and accused Poilievre of trying to whip up “anti-immigrant sentiments.”

“We need immigration whether we like it or not in this country,” Miller said….

Source: Carney says temporary foreign worker program needs a ‘focused approach’

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Keller: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs 

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Nice reminder of previous comments (Trudeau did the same in 2014):

…Prime Minister Mark Carney used to get this. Back in 2013, when he was governor of the Bank of Canada, he told a parliamentary committee that “one doesn’t want an overreliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skill jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages but also that firms improve their productivity.”

He added that temporary foreign workers should be for “those higher-skilled gaps that do exist.” 

In plain English, he said that bringing in highly skilled people to fill high-wage jobs was good for Canada, but allowing business easy access to lots of temporary foreign workers for entry-level jobs was a recipe for suppressing the wages of low-wage Canadians, and discouraging companies from raising productivity through labour-saving technologies. 

That was the right answer. It was also a good foundation for future immigration policy.

But last week, Mr. Carney said the opposite. Pushing back against Conservative criticism, he said that “when I talk to businesses around the country … their number one issue is tariffs, and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers.”

Mr. Carney, please rediscover your 2013 answer. Aside from being economically sound, it is immeasurably more politically saleable. Just ask British Columbia Premier David Eby.…

Source: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs

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