Most of the hysteria around immigration has focused on the Temporary Foreign Worker program. Those workers make up barely 1 per cent of total employment.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
Did you know that Canada has admitted more than 15 million temporary workers since 2015? Neither did I, until I read it on X.
The post includes an “official government of Canada chart.” Sure enough, it shows the numbers admitted under three temporary work programs – not only the Temporary Foreign Worker program, but also the International Mobility Program, as well as study permits, which allow the bearers to work up to 24 hours a week – have grown from about 750,000 as of 2015 to 3.1 million in 2024.
All you have to do is add them together, and you get: 15.7 million! Holy cow! No wonder the post went viral – “this is insane,” one respondent put it, “Canada imported 36.5% of its population in the last 10 years” – reposted by Elon Musk, no less.
Except … the figures are for the total number of permit holders in the country as of Dec. 31 each year: the total, not the number admitted that year. If you added up the number of permits issued each year, you’d get a little closer to the truth, but even then you’d have to account for permits that are reissued to the same person year after year. If you did that, you’d find the actual number of people admitted under these programs over the last decade is fewer than 3 million.
I would not quote this drivel, except it shows how completely unhinged the immigration “debate” has become. Most of the hysteria has focused on the Temporary Foreign Worker program, though it is responsible for a small fraction even of the number of temporary workers in this country: of the 3.1 million total at year-end, just over 200,000 were TFWs – barely 1 per cent of total employment.
Opinion: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs
Nevertheless, it’s the Temporary Foreign Worker program that gets all the heat: column after column, editorial after editorial, after-dinner speech after after-dinner speech. Polls now show more than four in 10 Canadians now want the program scrapped. The Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre, is only too happy to oblige.
There’s no doubt that the Temporary Foreign Worker program, amid the postpandemic rush to get the economy back on its feet, got a little out of control. It’s also clear that the program, by forbidding workers from taking another job once they are here, often exposes them to exploitation.
But it’s equally clear that, for most of the critics, the problem isn’t how the program has been administered: it’s the program itself.
From the rhetoric, you’d think that all of Canada’s problems stemmed from this one program – everything from long wait times for health care to high housing prices to youth unemployment. There’s a peculiar vehemence to the language, as if this were not merely another mismanaged program, like dozens of others, but an existential threat.
Even the program’s more measured critics depict it as an unfair subsidy to employers. If they can’t find local workers to fill the jobs, runs the argument, employers should not be recruiting overseas: they should simply pay the locals more. This is presented as if it were Economics 101, but it’s anything but.
In most markets, it is permissible, where demand exceeds supply, not only for prices to rise, but for new supply to enter the market. That usually includes the market for labour: no one objects to Alberta oil rigs taking on Newfoundlanders in a boom. Only when an international border is crossed is the sacred principle of the impermeability of labour markets invoked.
The idea behind this – that there is a fixed quantity of work to be done, such that jobs must be hoarded, like precious stones – is known in the literature as the “lump of labour” fallacy.
Temporary foreign workers are hardly the first foreign workers to be accused of “taking” jobs that “belong” to Canadians. Their numbers are indeed dwarfed by the millions of foreign workers supplying goods to the Canadian market – from overseas. Is it a “subsidy” to business that they are allowed to employ these workers at $5 an hour rather than hire Canadians at $20 or $30 an hour? Or is it comparative advantage?
Services are no different: outsource a call centre to Bangladesh, staff it with Bangladeshis, and no one bats an eye. But locate the same call centre in St. John’s or Saskatoon, bring those same Bangladeshis over here, and suddenly it’s a scandal.
Temporary foreign workers, needless to say, did not cause the problems in our health care or housing or labour markets, all of which predate the recent surge in foreign workers. Tighten the controls on the program, by all means. At the same time, make it easier for TFWs to change jobs, and to move from temporary to permanent status.
But scrap the program? Why?