Temporary foreign workers from Mexico plant strawberries on a farm in Mirabel, Que., on May 6, 2020.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Standing by a lectern with a sign that read “Bring Home Our Jobs,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had words for both the government and for businesses that he implied were abusing Canada’s temporary foreign workers program.
“Trudeau has destroyed our entire immigration system,” he said, referring to the massive expansion of workers applying under the low-wage labour market impact assessment (LMIA) stream.
“Our temporary foreign worker program should only be available to fill jobs that employers have proven beyond a doubt cannot be filled by Canadians,” Mr. Poilievre said. “It should never be used to bring in low-wage workers from poor countries to take jobs away from or suppress the wages of Canadian workers.”
It’s the right message, but it’s not clear why Mr. Poilievre needed to make a whole show of it. Indeed, he could have delivered his censure in person, say, to his friends at The Albany Club in Toronto, where surely it would have had more effect.
Indeed, the place that calls itself the “premier private club for leaders in Canada’s business and Conservative political spheres,” where Conservative MP Lianne Rood and Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP Matthew Rae sit as directors along with former Conservative cabinet minister Tony Clement, applied under the low-wage program stream for temporary workers, according to public Q1 LMIA records. That was approved for two “food and beverage servers,” since, as we all know, it is impossible to find food and beverage servers in downtown Toronto.
This is not really shocking. The use, or misuse, of the temporary foreign worker program is not a Liberal or Conservative thing; as Brian Lilley wrote in the Toronto Sun last week, a land-surveying company owned by Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal hired “legal administrative assistants” through the program in 2023. Rather, it is a business thing, aided by whichever government is in power at the time.
In 2014, a guy named Justin Trudeau wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Star lamenting that under then-prime minister Stephen Harper, “the number of short-term foreign workers in Canada has more than doubled.” He prescribed that the program needed to be “scaled back dramatically over time, and refocused on its original purpose: to fill jobs on a limited basis when no Canadian workers can be found,” and that Canada should refocus on bringing in people with a permanent path to citizenship.
He was right. According to a C.D. Howe report at the time, policy changes that eased conditions for bringing in temporary foreign workers led to a threefold increase in the number of these workers between 2002 and 2012, from 101,000 to 338,000; the think tank observed that “eased hiring conditions accelerated the rise in unemployment rates in Alberta and British Columbia.” The Conservative government responded by tightening the rules around the program, and then imposing a moratorium on temporary foreign workers in the restaurant industry.
Nearly the exact same thing is happening now, albeit on an even larger scale. In response to post-pandemic pressure from businesses, the Liberal government loosened restrictions on hiring temporary foreign workers, which included raising the cap on the proportion of an employer’s work force from 10 per cent to 20 per cent (and 30 per cent for some sectors). The result of these changes and others to temporary immigration streams – including regarding off-campus work for international students, which in practice makes them temporary foreign workers by another stream – means the number of people in Canada on a temporary basis has ballooned to 2.8 million in 2024. That’s double the number from just two years ago.
In response, the Conservative Leader is essentially reading Mr. Trudeau’s 2014 Toronto Star op-ed aloud, insisting that this government is ruining our immigration system by bringing in foreign workers “at a time when we’re losing jobs.” (Mr. Trudeau’s words were that the program under the Harper government had “grown dramatically in regions facing high unemployment,” but close enough.) And now this government, like the one before it, is responding by tightening the rules around temporary foreign workers: on Tuesday, it announced it would accept a request from Quebec for a six-month pause on applications for low-wage temporary foreign workers in Montreal, with exceptions for certain sectors. The cycle thus continues.
As my colleague Tony Keller wrote last week, the temporary foreign worker program is a great scam that serves the interests of business, at the expense of the wider Canadian economy. It’s also politically prudent in the short-term, which is why both the Conservatives and Liberals have yielded to business requests while in power. Perhaps Mr. Poilievre can explain how he will end the cycle if given the chance to form government – a message that, I’m sure, will be well-received in The Albany Club dining room.