Temporary foreign workers plant strawberries on a farm in Mirabel, Que., on May 6, 2020.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Adnan R. Khan is an independent writer and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s response to last week’s United Nations report characterizing Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as “a breeding ground for contemporary slavery” follows a familiar pattern: part denial, part shrug. After all, the report was nothing new. In the past five years alone, the TFWP has twice been accused of promoting practices that amount to forms of exploitation that closely resemble the UN’s definition of modern-day slavery.
First, during a debate in the 2019 federal election campaign, Kate Storey, a Green Party candidate in Manitoba, called programs for hiring seasonal farm workers “nothing more than modern-day slavery.” Four years later, in 2023, the UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery made a similar accusation: “I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country,” he said. “Agricultural and low-wage streams of the temporary foreign workers program constitute a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”
Ms. Storey, a farmer herself, was vilified for her comment. The Green Party quickly apologized on Ms. Storey’s behalf for her “unfortunate choice of words.” The UN condemnation, meanwhile, barely caused a ripple; indeed, apart from the requisite news items in the national media and a call from a few MPs for the House to launch a study, the very disturbing possibility that people on Canadian soil were being subjected to conditions that amounted to contemporary forms of slavery just sort of evaporated.
While Mr. Miller naturally took offence to the recent UN report’s use of the word “slavery,” at least this time a government minister also admitted the program needs some reform. In saying this, though, he was protecting his home turf: If immigrant labour is in fact being exploited in Canada to such a degree as to constitute modern-day slavery, he will have to answer some difficult questions.
But there was something else going on, too – something that long predates the current concern. Just five months ago, Mr. Miller announced that the government would reduce the numbers of temporary foreign workers allowed into Canada, and promised to overhaul labour market impact assessments (LMIAs), the procedure used by federal officials to approve employer requests to hire such workers. The system’s “integrity,” he told the Missing Middle podcast, was in doubt.
In the same interview, Mr. Miller added another revealing tidbit: “Even in provinces where I’ve heard that they want to decrease the number of temporary residents quickly,” he said, “when you break down the categories, there’s this kind of ‘whoa-whoa’ approach. ‘Don’t touch [those workers] and don’t touch [those].’ There needs to be an honest conversation with my colleagues in provinces that come up and tell me how much they need people, as well as industry.”
On Tuesday, Quebec Premier François Legault clarified what some of those “don’t-touch” industries might be, as he announced a freeze on the TFWP in the Montreal area starting this September, while exempting construction and food processing. Limiting the freeze to Quebec’s largest urban centre also, presumably, exempts farmers, who can continue to hire temporary foreign labour.
The freeze looks more slushy than frozen. It keeps the doors open to exactly the industries that have the worst records for the treatment of their temporary employees. Mr. Legault’s response, together with Mr. Miller’s comments, tells us something that’s been hiding in plain sight: Canada’s politicians have been in “honest conversation” with employers for decades over how to keep the steady stream of cheap foreign labour flowing into Canada.
Canada was built on such labour. The TFWP, which was set up in 1973, expanded in 2000 and again in 2022, is only the latest iteration of a labour-market tool Canada has been using – and abusing – since its founding. Back in the late 19th century, Canadian industrialists in railway construction, mining and forestry worked with politicians and bureaucrats to develop a “contract labour” scheme to import the raw muscle power they needed for their labour-intensive industries. Their preferences were simple: The labour needed to be cheap, and it needed to be easy to control.
In 1897, the president of CP Rail complained that workers from Britain were becoming difficult because they came to Canada “expecting to get high wages, a feather bed and a bath tub.” Bureaucrats suggested employers recruit from eastern and southern Europe instead, where they said workers were more “obedient and industrious.” Eastern Europeans were preferred, they believed, because of their supposed “racial superiority” compared with Mediterranean peoples. They also liked the fact that Slavic people tended to use wage labour as a way to purchase land and permanently settle, providing the population growth Canada desperately needed.
Employers had different preferences. Permanence was seen as a liability. Settled labourers tended to organize and form unions. Temporariness was advantageous from a capitalist perspective because it gave employers power over their work force. They preferred Italians, who had a reputation as itinerant and easily disposable. Politicians, under pressure from powerful industrialists, and against the advice of bureaucrats, decided to promote high numbers of Italian immigration.
Such a calculated commodification of human bodies came with costs. Shipping lines saw an opportunity for profit-making supplying the burgeoning Canadian economy with labour from southern Europe. They partnered with a new cottage industry of “employment agencies” that connected the European labour pipeline with major industries in Canada. Employment “brokers” quickly developed a reputation for exploitative practices. According to one migrant worker from the period, brokers “send you out on a job for a dollar fee and give you a contract with certain information, but when you get out to the camps, the boss gives you different orders. … When you come back and go to the [employment agency] office asking for the return of your fee, the shark chases you out.”
If it all feels eerily familiar, that’s because things have not changed much since. The employment brokers of old are today’s private immigration consultants, running shady operations that exploit the TFWP to swindle desperate workers around the world with promises of a new life in Canada. They work with labour-intensive industries – such as farming and food processing – to game the LMIA system, using fake job postings to secure LMIAs in bulk that are, in some cases, sold to desperate foreign workers, or used to attract workers who are then underpaid and overworked. When advocates demand change, politicians – still under the influence of these businesses – promise reform but rarely deliver.
The TFWP itself was the product of such a devil’s bargain between employers and politicians. In the 1960s, labour-intensive industries, including those represented by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the Mining Association of Canada, complained to politicians that the points system being developed to revamp Canadian immigration put too much emphasis on skilled labour. They demanded an expansion of contract labour schemes to help them import the low-skilled labour they needed. In 1973, they got their wish in the form of the TFWP.
Since then, the combination of the points system and the TFWP has allowed Canada to select the “right kind” of foreigners for permanent immigration, while at the same time maintaining a steady supply of cheap – and temporary – labour for employers. The system was exploitative from the beginning, and now it is out of control.
Mere reform won’t be enough to fix these problems. That will require an end to the temporariness that undergirds our country, and its economy, altogether.