A decade ago, when the federal Conservatives allowed businesses to exploit Canada’s low-wage temporary foreign worker program, this space published a series of editorials that called for reforms.
The fundamental argument, then and now, was twofold. First, Ottawa should not rig the labour market to help employers to avoid paying higher wages to attract workers, and to dissuade them from investing in their businesses to increase productivity. Second, bringing in low-wage workers for short durations to work at a coffee shop or a fast-food restaurant is un-Canadian: “a society with a permanent underclass of second-class non-citizens is a coarse and mean place.”
Yet the federal government keeps making the same mistakes, as it coddles businesses that complain about labour “shortages” while they do little to compete for labour.
The number of low-wage temporary foreign workers in 2013 – before reforms in 2014 – reached almost 60,000 people. It fell to about 10,000 in 2015. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government took charge that year, businesses returned to the program. In 2019, people in low-wage temporary foreign workers jobs numbered almost 30,000. After the Liberals loosened the rules in 2022 – as the economy recovered from the worst of the pandemic – the number of low-wage temporary foreign workers surged to almost 80,000 people, and then eclipsed that level last year.
Like so much of the Liberals’ approach to immigration policy, marked by continual tinkering and seemingly ad hoc decisions that react to short-term issues, there’s been a staccato retreat on low-wage temporary foreign workers. On Monday, amid rising unemployment and following other changes since last fall, the Liberals largely reversed what they had put in place in 2022.
Mr. Trudeau on Monday said businesses should invest in training and technology, instead of a “reliance on low-cost foreign labour.” This statement is as true today as it was in 2022 (and 2014), yet it is hard to take sincerely coming from a government that purposefully enabled too many businesses to do what the Prime Minister purports to be against.
Enough of this patchwork policy-making. What’s necessary is back-to-basics reform. The low-wage component of the temporary foreign worker program is only a small part of immigration as a whole, but the way in which it’s treated – like a random dial to increase and decrease numbers, depending on the day – is a distillation of what’s broadly gone wrong.
Monday’s policy shift is the same as Ottawa’s extended scramble to remedy the problems it has caused in immigration in general, such as the uncontrolled arrival of international students. It’s an incoherence that has led to a souring of Canadians’ long-standing support of robust immigration.
This country was built on immigration – and it will continue to be built on immigration.
The system to welcome new Canadians – the comprehensive ranking system, colloquially known as the points system – was designed to minimize political meddling. It’s the core method used to select economic immigrants, who account for about 60 per cent of all new permanent residents. Yet the Liberals, like their back-and-forth changes around temporary foreign workers, have weakened a system that prioritized newcomers with high levels of education and promising futures in Canada. Instead, they have politicized the system with a lengthening list of exceptions that does an end run around the central philosophy of the points system.
The latest proposal, as The Globe reported last Friday, is to potentially allow people who have at most finished high school and are currently in low-wage temporary foreign worker jobs a path to permanent residency. This is not what economic immigration is supposed to be. The future of Canada’s prosperity cannot be built on low-wage jobs.
The low-wage temporary foreign worker program for jobs such as those in food service was never a key pillar of our immigration system, nor should it ever be. It’s a relatively recent invention, created in 2002. The experience of a decade ago should have been a lesson: as this space wrote last year, Mr. Trudeau himself urged reform in 2014.
Loosening the rules in 2022 should have never happened. While Monday’s changes are welcome, what would be more welcome is an immigration policy that does not react to the latest news and instead focuses on long-term results.