Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program

Policy Analysis and Advice: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Temporary migrant worker, also known as foreign worker (TFW), programs are employed by virtually every country, and there are varying degrees of effectiveness in regards to the enforcement of human rights, economic development and consideration of the domestic workforce. Foreign workers, defined as “workers...employed in a country other than their own” (ILO, 1999, p. 1), face challenges such as lack of worker mobility and worker exploitation. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), Canada’s program “allows Canadian employers to hire foreign nationals to fill temporary labour and skill shortages when qualified Canadian citizens or permanent residents are not
available” (CIC, 2012, para. 1). In countries that receive TFWs, local jobs that can employ qualified local workers should prioritize local workers over equally qualified TFWs. Once TFWs are treated to the same standard as their local counterpart, both in wages and rights, it is far more likely that they will fill temporary labour shortages instead of replacing Canadian workers. To ensure maintenance of labour rights and economic development that would impact the social, political and economic aspects of the Canadian TFW program (TFWP), the Canadian government should offer the option of permanent residency to low-skilled TFWs and allow greater worker mobility within TFW permits, i.e. not restricting work permits to one employer, while ensuring local Canadian workers are prioritized in Canada’s job market.
Canada’s TFWP includes two streams: high skilled and low skilled (Faraday, 2012, p.
11). The low skilled programs are further broken down into four different streams: the Live-in Caregiver Program, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), the Pilot Project for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training (National Occupational Classification C & D) (“NOC C & D Pilot Project”) and the Agricultural Stream of the NOC C & D Pilot Project (p. 11). These four streams all require a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) (Mertins-Kirkwood, 2014, p. 11). The TFWP operates on a request-based system, which means employers file LMIAs and must gain approval by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) to ensure there is a legitimate labour shortage (p. 10). If approval is granted, employers can hire foreign workers, who work for them throughout the duration of their stay. Permanent residency is only a possibility through the live-in caregiver program, in which workers can gain permanent residency in Canada after a minimum of 22 months (p.
11).
A major issue with the TFWP is the lack of mobility for TFWs in Canada, as Susanna Quail, a lawyer at the West Coast Domestic Worker’s Association argues (Quail, N.d., pg. 3). The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit legal advocacy group in the United States, argues that “guest workers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a competitive labor market — the ability to change jobs if they are mistreated” (Bauer, 2013, p. 3). This statement also applies to the TFWP in Canada, as TFWs are also tied to one employer. Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood (2014), a policy researcher for the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) explains that this power imbalance creates opportunity for employers to abuse vulnerable workers who have “few avenues for recourse” (p. 1). Karl Flecker for the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) says that employers attain further control through the threat of deportation, and the withholding of documents such as passports and health insurance cards (Flecker, 2011, p. 6). In turn, the vulnerability of TFWs is exactly what makes them appealing to employers. Dominique Gross (2014) for the CD Howe Institute, a nonprofit policy organization, explains that because “[e]mployers are concerned about labour costs and labour productivity [...] when they can choose between domestic and foreign workers, they will hire the workers costing less for the same productivity” (p. 2). In order to protect the employment of local/domestic workers, the rights and wages of migrant workers must be raised and enforced until it is no longer advantageous to employers to hire foreign workers over their equally capable local counterparts (p. 5). To ensure workers rights are protected, Canada must allow easier paths for permanent residency and greater mobility within work sectors for temporary workers. The very temporary nature of the TFWP creates human rights violations, for which the solution is to admit to long-term labour shortages in sectors such as agriculture, caregiving, and other low-skilled occupations. According to Craig Alexander, Senior Vice President & Chief Economist at TD Bank, Derek Burleton, Vice President & Deputy Chief Economist at TD, and Francis Fong, an economist (2012):
[A male foreign worker] who arrived in the late 1970s earned roughly 85 cents for every dollar earned by a Canadian-born within the first 5 years upon his arrival.
That gap closed to 98 cents within 25 years [...] However, that disparity has become both larger and more difficult to close [...] Those individuals who landed between 2000 and 2004 earned just 61 cents on the dollar relative to a Canadian-born. (p. 5-6)
This growing wage gap between foreign workers and Canadian workers is a worrying sign that the TFWP needs to adapt to the changing socioeconomic state of affairs in Canada as well as more effectively enforce labour rights standards to ensure that TFWs are treated as equals and human beings, not a commodity or item to be bought and
used.