The temporary foreign worker program has never been easy to defend. But it should be reformed, not scrapped

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Marcello Di Cintio’s latest book is Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers.

Pierre Poilievre stood in front of a microphone in Mississauga earlier this month and called on the Liberal government to “permanently scrap” the temporary foreign worker program (TFWP). The Conservative Leader also demanded the government stop issuing visas for any new migrant workers coming into the country. Mr. Poilievre insisted the workers themselves weren’t the problem, but were “being taken advantage of by Liberal corporate elites who want to use them to drive down wages.”

Meanwhile, in Mr. Poilievre’s riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, more than 25 businesses were seeking temporary foreign workers to fill job vacancies when I last looked. According to the federal government’s Job Bank, Tim Hortons locations in Drumheller and Wainwright needed four supervisors each, while the Tofield Timmies required seven. Hofman’s Poultry Farm in Linden was hiring two farm workers and Ryley Sausage was looking for a sausage wrapper. The Burger Barons in Tofield, Stettler’s Otherside Restaurant and the Wok Box in Camrose need cooks. The Hardistry Fresh Market, Wainwright Cannabis, and Acme Foods need managers.

Editorial Board: The necessary pain of ending the TFW dodge

These businesses all have active or pending Labour Market Impact Assessments affirming they cannot find citizens or permanent residents to take these jobs. And they offer decent wages. That sausage wrapping gig in Ryley pays $21 an hour, and the new managers in Acme and Wainwright will bring home more than $41. The Tim Hortons supervisors and the Burger Barons cook will earn around $18 an hour – not great, but $3 more than the provincial minimum wage.

I wonder how these business owners feel about their newly-minted MP lumping them in with “Liberal corporate elites.” I wonder, too, how many see the irony of being lectured about the ills of foreign labour by a recently unemployed man from 2,600 kilometres away – about as far from the riding as Chihuahua, Mexico – who showed up to take the job of a local resident.

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Then again, as someone who spent the last four years researching a book about migrant labour in Canada, I find the entire “scrap-the-TFWP” rhetoric wholly cynical.

The TFWP marked its 50th anniversary last year, and there has never been a serious effort to abolish the program by either governing party. While the migrant labour certainly ballooned during the pandemic under Justin Trudeau, as the Conservatives rightly claim, he wasn’t the only Prime Minister to oversee the program’s rapid growth. In 2007, under Stephen Harper’s watch, Canada welcomed more temporary than permanent residents for the first time in the country’s history – largely due to an expansion of the TFWP.

That same year, the Conservatives introduced policy changes that allowed employers to hire migrants more quickly and to keep them employed for longer. TFW numbers swelled even further. Between 2000 and 2020, during which the Liberals and Conservatives enjoyed about an equal time in government, the number of TFWP permit holders in Canada more than tripled. The Conservative’s current assertion that the TFWP is the monster to Trudeau’s Dr. Frankenstein conveniently ignores history.

Opinion: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs

The invocations of worker abuse coming from the Conservative camp also smack of hypocrisy. When Mr. Poilievre and his immigration-critic Michelle Rempel Garner speak of ending the TFWP, they typically throw in a line about the program being exploitative. In his Mississauga press conference, for example, Mr. Poilivere demanded to know why the Liberals were replacing Canadian youth with temporary foreign workers “who are ultimately being exploited?” Ms. Rempel Garner told The Hub the only people arguing for the TFWP “are people profiting off of exploited, racialized, temporary foreign labour.” She’s also invoked a 2024 UN report that accused the TFWP as being a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

I find the UN report reference particularly galling. When the preliminary report was first discussed by the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Conservative MP Brad Redekopp demanded Canada submit a rebuttal to the UN, and asked the deputy immigration minister if she’d “be able to tame down the language of slavery.” When the report’s author visited the committee himself in February 2024, Conservative MP Larry Maguire called the slavery accusation “appalling” and “a sensational conclusion.” Now Ms. Rempel Garner is waving the report as evidence for the moral case to trash the TFWP.

The sudden breathless empathy for migrant worker welfare shouldn’t fool anyone. No federal government, red or blue, has shown much concern about the exploitation of foreign workers. For a half century, TFWs have recounted stories of filthy and crowded bunkhouses, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, humiliation, physical and sexual assault, and all manner of cruelty. I heard many of these stories first-hand. Penalties for these crimes are too soft and too rare. Victims have little recourse.

Opinion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program needs deep reform

Some don’t make it out alive. A quick search of news reports from the last two decades or so uncovers a narrative of deadly tragedies. In 2009, four TFWs fell more than 13 stories to their deaths in Toronto when their scaffolding buckled. In 2002, a collapsed tobacco bin killed a Jamaican worker, and a falling water tank crushed a Mexican worker at an Ontario orchard in 2012. I could go on.

The federal government has issued a dizzying number of changes to our migrant labour structure over the years. For the most part, though, these tweaks intended to prevent employers from abusing the system, namely by hiring TFWs when citizens and permanent residents were available, rather than from abusing the workers themselves. Keeping employers happy has always been the program’s primary concern and government measures intended to protect workers have long been half-hearted and ineffectual. Workers hesitate using the government’s employer abuse tip line – which, until 2021, was only available in English and French, languages many TFWs don’t speak – for fear of being outed as complainers and sent home by vindictive bosses. A new program for “vulnerable workers” allows them to find safer employment, but only after bureaucrats determine they’ve been sufficiently mistreated by their employers.

The TFWP has never been easy to defend. I suspect one day a future Prime Minister will stand in the House of Commons to apologize on behalf of Canada for the abuses of the program just as we did for residential schools and Japanese internment. The program needs wholesale reforms that focus on worker well-being. TFWs should be unshackled from their employers, and granted reliable pathways to permanent residency. Inspections of workplaces and accommodations should be frequent, thorough and unannounced. Cruel bosses should face serious consequences.

In the meantime, the program’s opponents should spare us false tears for workers they never cared much about in the first place.