REMPEL GARNER: Temporary Foreign Worker Program must be abolished

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Once upon a time not so long ago, if you were a young Canadian, you could learn vital skills in an entry-level job, and earn enough to pay for school while saving. In return, employers would benefit from a skilled, productive domestic labour workforce.

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But that agreement has been broken, as evidenced by Canada’s staggering youth unemployment and the countless gut-punching stories about young Canadians who have put out hundreds of resumes without getting as much as a single callback.

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So why is the Liberal government still allowing tens of thousands of entry-level positions to be filled by temporary foreign workers?

The answer is simple: they shouldn’t be.

Canada’s economy is teetering on the brink of a recession, productivity is in the toilet andtechnologies like artificial intelligence are upending the job market. At the same time, our country faces acute crises in housing and healthcare. Caught in the middle are Canadian youth, who cannot imagine buying a home or starting a family without a good-paying job, yet cannot secure those jobs without experience, which they cannot gain while competing against temporary foreign workers for scarce entry-level positions.

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This is why the Conservative Party of Canada is announcing the first in a series of reforms to fix Canada’s broken immigration system: the permanent abolition of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), with a distinct, separate, standalone program for legitimately difficult-to-fill agricultural labour.

The TFWP was created over 40 years ago to address short-term labour shortages in a narrow range of industries and regions. But over the last decade, Liberals allowed it to morph into a mechanism for systemic abuse of workers, wage growth suppression and elimination of entry-level job opportunities for Canadians.

Under the current government, Canadian employers have had access to a near-endless supply of temporary foreign labour. Instead of investing in training or raising salaries, some businesses have come to rely upon the TFWP as a profit-maximizing crutch, subsidized by taxpayers who foot the bill for social services these underpaid workers often require — all the while allowing a temporary, foreign, low-wage underclass to become normalized in Canada.

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The workers who come to Canada through this program aren’t to blame for its abuses, rather, they’re often the subjects of it. In 2023 the United Nations went as far as to describe the TFWP as a “contemporary form of slavery,” as workers’ permits are most often tied to one employer and have to leave the country if their employer terminates their position. This structure means temporary foreign workers in Canada are heavily disincentivized from reporting fraud and mistreatment they experience at the hands of unscrupulous employers who profit from what amounts to their government-sanctioned indentured servitude.

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Reforms to the program have been attempted and failed. Over a decade ago, then-Conservative Minister Jason Kenney undertook significant changes to the TFWP to put in greater safeguards against abuse. But, the Liberals reversed these reforms and as a result, the negative consequences we are seeing today arose. It’s clear the only path forward for the program today is that it must be abolished.

The process for issuing permits via the program has seen widespread and rampant fraud. Further proof can be found in recent stories about employers embroiled in schemes where TFWs have been forced to pay for their job as part of workarounds to existing boundaries, with unscrupulous employers and immigration consulting firms shamelessly flipping a middle finger to Canadian labour law.

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The only reason the Liberals allow the program to continue is a lack of political will and a desire to kowtow to lobby groups advocating for cheap indentured labour.

Instead, the government must stand up for Canadian workers and permanently abolish the program.

We call on the government to immediately halt all new permit issuances nationwide, and wind down the program so that those with valid TFW permits continue working in their current jobs until those permits expire. For ultra-low-unemployment regions, where there are truly no Canadian workers available to fill the jobs, there could be a transition period for existing permit holders of, at most, five years while the program winds down, but no new permits will be issued anywhere in Canada.

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This would give employers and governments time to reprioritize upskilling of domestic labour, implement labour mobility strategies for unemployed Canadians and bring in productivity-enhancing operations while cauterizing the inflow of foreign labor who put additional pressure on housing and healthcare.

Any arguments that the Canadian economy would suffer without the TFWP are bunk. There is already a large unemployed workforce in Canada, there are multiple other streams for skilled labour to enter the country on a permanent basis, and numerous other streams by which non-permanent residents can work on a temporary basis. Conservatives will be announcing requests for further reforms in these areas too.

It’s time for Canadian workers to have Canadian jobs.

The Liberals must slam the door shut on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, admitting zero new entrants via this stream starting today.

– The Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Nose Hill and the Shadow Minister for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.

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