Changes in workforce program overdue

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This article was published 28/08/2024 (502 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s overdue.

The federal government announced Monday it would be making changes in the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program, dialing back the number of employees businesses can bring in to fill low-wage jobs from 20 per cent of their workforce to 10 per cent, and reducing the length of time TFW workers can stay in the country to one year from two.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the changes outside a federal cabinet retreat in Halifax.

Businesses using the program often argue that they need temporary foreign workers because Canadians simply aren’t willing to take certain jobs, particularly low-paying jobs in the service and agricultural industries.

But maybe we should be asking some larger questions.

Why, for example, don’t Canadians want to take the jobs?

Is it because the pay doesn’t match the workload?

And why do employers want temporary foreign workers?

Is it because a captive workforce — dependent on their employers to even be in this country — are less likely to complain about working conditions, pay and benefits?

There were 183,820 temporary foreign workers in Canada in 2023, compared to just 98,025 in 2019. The numbers almost doubled post-COVID, when the Liberal government loosened the rules on the program to help businesses fill empty positions. (The changes taking place now essentially move the program back to its pre-COVID structure, with a promise of more revisions in the future.)

The TFW program already raises a number of concerns.

Having employees who depend on their employers not only for wages, but for their ability to remain in Canada, has serious risks — as was pointed out by the United Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery last year. “The Special Rapporteur received reports of underpayment and wage theft, physical, emotional and verbal abuse, excessive work hours, limited breaks, extracontractual work, uncompensated managerial duties, lack of personal protective equipment, including in hazardous conditions, confiscation of documents and arbitrary reductions of working hours. Women reported sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse.”

There’s an argument to be made that, coming out of the pandemic, workers who had been in low-paying service industry jobs had used the time and funding provided by Canada Emergency Response Benefit to improve their skills and move to better, and better-paying positions.

But that doesn’t justify keeping the TFW program in perpetuity.

There are immigration programs that work better than the TFW program — and are fairer as well, because the TFW program doesn’t offer a pathway to Canadian citizenship. It creates, to all intents and purposes, a disposable workforce.

That’s something the United Nations rapporteur also highlighted: “The structural precarity for temporary foreign workers would be mitigated by systematically providing workers with a pathway to permanent residence.”

The fact is that businesses have to prepare for, and deal with, the potential for increased costs on a number of fronts: taxes, insurance, raw materials, transportation, and the list goes on. Labour costs are a big one, but they are just one of the business inputs.

Why, particularly, should a TFW workforce be approved by government to lessen the strain on business?

Left alone, supply and demand equations have a way of working themselves out.

If your business model won’t work without temporary foreign workers, it seems awfully easy to blame the problem on Canadians who are unwilling to work.

But there are people who pump septic tanks for the right wages and benefits.

It might not be the Canadians who have the problem.

Perhaps it’s the business model that is broken.