OTTAWA – The federal government will increase the minimum hourly wage that must be paid to temporary foreign workers, in hopes of encouraging employers to hire more Canadian staff in their place. 

Currently, in the labor market impact assessment flow (the so-called “LMIA”, i.e. the selection process of foreign temporary workers), an employer must pay at least the median income in their province to qualify for a permit from give to a foreigner. Now things will change.

According to the Canadian Press, a government official (whom the same news agency didn’t publish the name because “not authorized to speak publicly about the news”) said that the federal Minister of Employment, Randy Boissonnault, will announce tomorrow (Tuesday) that that threshold will increase to 20% above the provincial median hourly wage – the change is expected to take effect Nov. 8. In Ontario, the average hourly wage is $28.39 for the high wage range, so once the change takes effect, the employer will have to pay at least $34.07 an hour. The official estimates that this change will affect up to 34,000 workers under the “LMIA” stream (the “high-wage” ones): existing work permits will not be affected, but the official himself said that the expected change will affect their renewals.

As with previous changes to the temporary foreign worker program, the government’s goal is to encourage employers to hire more Canadian workers and fewer temporary foreign workers who, as the government should be aware, come to Canada to do jobs that Canadians do not want to do or that Canadians are unable to do due to a lack of specific skills. The “LMIA”, in fact, serves precisely to demonstrate that there are no Canadian workers to fill the required positions (and therefore foreigners are hired for those positions).

However, the Liberal government is doing everything it can to try to respond to the criticism it has received for the increase in the number of temporary residents admitted to Canada, who – according to some – are “responsible” for the housing shortage: a link however indirectly denied by experts of the real estate market who in recent weeks have repeatedly underlined that in Canada, and in the GTA and Toronto in particular, there is in fact a record of new and empty homes, remaining unsold, for which governments at all levels could provide some form of rent relief/incentive to make them accessible.

The temporary immigration program has also been criticized for accusations of mistreatment of workers: another problem, which however depends exclusively, as the UN also underlined in a recent report (you can find it in our article here), on the fact that work permits are “closed ” (the foreign worker who arrives in Canada with the “LMIA” can only work for the employer who hired him) and this puts the workers themselves in conditions of subjection to the “boss”. But in this case no changes were made to the federal government.

And no changes, not even to the minimum hourly wage, have been made for temporary foreign workers in the agricultural sector, as The Canadian Press writes. Which means – if confirmed – that they (the lower-paid workers) can continue to be exploited by companies in the increasingly “welcoming” and “inclusive” Canada.