The United Nations’ special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery is right: Canada’s low-wage temporary foreign worker program is deeply rotten. He’s right that the problem is systemic. He’s right that the defects are baked in.
But his focus on the potential for abuse of our new guest-worker underclass merely scratches the surface of what’s wrong with Canada’s suddenly gigantic temporary immigration system, which as of this spring had ballooned to a record 2.8 million “temporary” residents.
The hard truth about the temporary foreign worker ecosystem is that it’s a scam. And the con is well understood by many, and probably most, participants.
The result is a charade of how our immigration is supposed to work, and how it used to work. It’s economically counterproductive and socially destructive. It serves some individual interests, while sticking a fork in the eye of the national interest.
Canadians may be in the dark about what’s going on, but they don’t have a lot of company.
This new immigration system has gaping loopholes, put there by the Trudeau government. The loopholes are now central to the system. They are used by hundreds of educational institutions, thousands of recruiting agents, tens of thousands of employers and millions of aspiring immigrants.
Problems have been obvious for more than a decade. But instead of making things better, the Trudeau government made things much, much worse.
On Thursday, The Globe and Mail reported that Ottawa is finally preparing to scale back the temporary foreign worker program’s non-agricultural low-wage stream, which is just one part of the visa-worker swamp.
Employment Minister Randy Boissonault needs to stop dithering, forgo fiddling and be bold. He should outright kill the use of temporary foreign visas to fill low-wage, permanent jobs. Just stop it, completely and immediately.
Canada’s visa-worker ecosystem has two unspoken but clear purposes. And it successfully achieves them. The trouble is that neither is beneficial to Canada.
The first purpose is the suppression of wages at the bottom of the market. As the saying goes, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” This one ensures that employers looking for burger flippers or store clerks or janitors need never pay more than minimum wage, and may even get away with less.
It also helps explain the exponential growth of Canada’s visa-student population, which numbered a million students at the start of this year, up almost fivefold since 2015.
If you think hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from India, are attending Ontario colleges they’d never heard of until they applied – and are simultaneously working full-time at minimum wage – to gain world-beating skills to take back to their countries of origin, give your head a shake.
How can the Trudeau government fix its immigration mess? Press ‘Rewind’
Schools know what they’re selling, and students know what they’re buying: legal entry to Canada, a temporary work visa and the hope of eventual citizenship.
That trade is the second purpose of the system. It explains why millions of non-Canadians are lining up for low-wage jobs here. It explains why they are eager to pay tuition for the privilege, and sometimes even pay employers for jobs.
All of which stands the old Canadian immigration system on its head. Instead of recruiting the most-skilled, the focus is on the least-skilled and most desperate. Do we have a program to recruit 10,000 foreign family doctors? No. But we have multiple immigration pathways to ensure that no fast-food restaurant need ever pay more than minimum wage.
The economics are all wrong. So is the arithmetic.
The Trudeau government appears to have finally grasped that handing out an unlimited number of temporary visas, leading to 2.8 million temporary residents, far outstrips the capacity of the permanent immigration system, even after doubling the immigration quota to 500,000 a year. That quota includes refugees, economic immigrants and family reunifications from overseas, leaving just half a million spots or so each year to accommodate the 2.8 million temporary residents already in Canada.
The only way out, as I wrote last week, is to press rewind.
The Trudeau government turned student visas into an alternative low-wage job scheme by allowing students to work an unlimited number of hours while in school. It’s time to go back to the way things used to be: foreign students should not be allowed to work off campus. Postgraduate work visas should be restricted to high-quality graduates in high-wage fields.
And with the exception of seasonal farm work, only jobs paying at least 150 per cent of the median wage, or more than $110,000 a year, should be eligible for temporary visas
Business lobbyists will scream, but voters will cheer.