Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is flanked by Fraser, right, and Treasury Board President Anita Anand, left, during a press conference in Oakville, Ont., on Wednesday, April 24, 2024.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to unveil changes to the temporary foreign worker program Monday morning as his government wrestles with immigration streams that exploded in numbers during the pandemic, which critics say have put pressure on housing and health care.
Two government sources said Mr. Trudeau will release the details in Halifax before heading behind closed doors with his cabinet for day two of their retreat.
The Globe is not identifying the officials who were not permitted to disclose the still-private plans.
The news was hinted at by Housing Minister Sean Fraser at a Sunday press conference in Dartmouth. Just as the temporary foreign worker rules were relaxed to address the pandemic-driven labour shortages, he said the government needs to again make changes because the country is no longer dealing with a scarcity of workers.
The government will make “additional changes that will ensure that the programs we put in place to help grow the Canadian labour force, first and foremost, create opportunities for Canadian workers,” Mr. Fraser said.
The fact that use of the program has increased while the domestic labour shortage has eased ”demands we take a different approach,” he added.
In March, the government announced that it planned to rein in the number of temporary residents and restrict how many foreign workers businesses can hire. At the time, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the government would reduce the proportion of temporary residents in the population from 6.2 per cent to 5 per cent over the next three years – and that the target would be finalized by the fall.
The Globe reported two weeks ago that the federal government was planning to sharply cut the low-wage stream of the temporary foreign worker program. Government officials said then that the changes would bring the program back to prepandemic levels.
Reliance on the low-wage stream has shot up since 2022, when Ottawa agreed to ease access to the program in response to calls from restaurant owners and other employers who said they were struggling to find staff after months of pandemic restrictions.
The 2022 changes included increasing the cap on the proportion of low-wage temporary foreign workers that an employer can hire to 20 per cent, or even 30 per cent in some sectors such as accommodation and food services, up from 10 per cent. The government also shelved a rule that barred employers in retail and hospitality from hiring certain low-wage workers when the local unemployment rate was 6 per cent or higher.
Federal Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault announced several measures and proposals in early August that he said were aimed at reducing the use of temporary foreign workers in Canada, including higher fees and stronger enforcement of caps. Those changes were positioned as the first step, rather than the final move.
Government records show Ottawa approved 83,643 temporary foreign worker positions in the low-wage stream in 2023, up from 28,121 in 2019 prior to the pandemic.