Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to the media in Vancouver, on Sept. 12.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
Does the Trudeau government want to repair the many things it broke in the immigration system? Or does it want to give the impression of furious action, while doing as little as possible?
The latest bit of grudging change came late last month, when Immigration Minister Marc Miller and Employment Minister Randy Boissonault announced reforms to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Since 2014, I’ve been calling for Ottawa to end the TFW stream, except for seasonal agricultural workers. I’m in good company. Addressing the federal cabinet last month, economist Mike Moffat told ministers that “the low-wage stream should be entirely abolished,” because it “suppresses wage growth, increases youth unemployment, creates the conditions for the exploitation of foreign workers, and reduces productivity.”
But instead of putting a stick in it, the Trudeau government is tinkering with the beast it inherited and expanded, and promising to study further tinkering. For those keeping score, ministers Boissonault and Miller are in their 14th month on the job.
As of Sept. 26, Ottawa will no longer allow recruiting of low-wage TFWs for jobs in census metropolitan areas – that’s cities and suburbs – with an unemployment rate above 6 per cent.
Fun fact: Nearly a third of Canadians live outside a census metropolitan area.
And several metropolitan areas have a three-month rolling unemployment rate – the government’s yardstick – of less than 6 per cent. That includes Quebec City, Moncton, Saskatoon, Kelowna, Victoria, Guelph, Peterborough, Belleville and Thunder Bay.
Other metropolitan areas – including Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Montreal and Ottawa – were below the 6-per-cent threshold until a few months ago.
In other words, the low-wage TFW program remains open for business in rural and small town Canada, and in some cities. It will be automatically restarted in many other cities, if unemployment drops even slightly.
Announcing his reforms, Mr. Boissonault said they will “take 65,000 workers out of the TFW program.” But as of this spring, Canada had 2.8 million temporary foreign residents. For all the attention it gets, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is but a small part of our temporary foreign worker programs.
So a new rule that most employers (with exceptions for health care, construction and “food security”) may not draw more than 10 per cent of their work force from TFWs is not what it seems. A job site could have 100-per-cent temporary foreign workers, so long as only 10 per cent are Temporary Foreign Workers.
Foreign students make up a big part of the temporary foreign worker pool. In 2022, the Liberal government told visa students they could work full-time while in studies, opening the door for schools to supercharge foreign recruiting. They could sell multiyear employment permits, and maybe a path to citizenship, in return for often minimal tuition.
Since late last year, Mr. Miller has been promising to markedly scale back the number of student visas, to prioritize quality institutions, and to cut off what he correctly labelled as “puppy mill” colleges.
What has happened since?
The rule allowing notionally full-time foreign students to engage in very real full-time work wasn’t ended until this month. Visa students are now limited to 24 hours a week of paid work during the school year. (Don’t ask how this is being policed.)
That number of work hours for visa students ought to be zero, as is generally the rule in the United States, and as it once was here. Canada’s dramatic increase in the visa student population was not driven by the world’s brightest choosing our best institutions. Instead, we incentivized and rewarded low-quality and bad actors.
There were more than one million foreign students in Canada at the start of this year. That’s more than the number of foreign students in the U.S., a country with eight times our population.
Universities and colleges say they’re seeing a considerable reduction in foreign enrolment this semester. However, in the first seven months of this year, Canada issued 278,250 new educational visas – just 5 per cent fewer than in the first seven months of last year.
The final issue, for which the government appears to have no answer, is what to do about a rapidly expanding population of formerly legal temporary residents who are, or soon will be, illegal residents. I’m talking about people whose work or study visas have expired, but who don’t plan on leaving.
Hundreds of thousands of people were under the impression that an educational credential from a Cracker Jack box, plus a few years on the night shift at Tim Hortons, meant citizenship. For many, it will not. Canada mints half a million new citizens annually, but that includes spots reserved for family reunifications from overseas, economic immigrants from overseas and refugees from overseas. That leaves around a quarter of a million permanent residency spots a year – and 2.8 million temporary residents, plus a constant flow of new arrivals, competing for them. The math doesn’t compute.
When the Trudeau government shuffles off its mortal coil, this may be the hardest problem it hands its successor.