TORONTO – Crackdown on temporary immigration: the federal Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau announced today a reduction in the number of low-wage temporary foreign workers, starting from September 26, to the benefit of Canadian workers. How? 

Canada will essentially reject applications for low-wage temporary foreign workers in provinces with an unemployment rate of 6% or higher (according to Statistics Canada’s latest employment report, Canada’s unemployment rate has remained stable at 6.4% in July: in Ontario it is even at 6.7%). Additionally, employers will be able to hire a maximum of 10% of their workforce from the temporary foreign worker program, up from the current 20%. Finally, workers hired through the low-wage stream will be able to work a maximum of one year, instead of two years.

“We are tightening rules and limiting eligibility to reduce the number of low-wage temporary foreign workers in Canada, with exceptions in some sectors such as healthcare, food and construction” Justin Trudeau said today, presenting the novelty together with the Minister of Employment, Randy Boissonnault (details are here). Which seems to mean that low-wage workers currently employed in, for example, healthcare (nurses?), food (farmhands?) and construction (carpenters?), will be able to safely continue to… be exploited by Canadian employers.

Exploitation. A problem affecting thousands of temporary foreign workers in Canada, and raised just a few days ago by the UN, in a very harsh report (you can read it, entirely, here: ONU in Canada) where the Canadian immigration program is defined as “fertile ground for contemporary slavery”: the system of temporary “closed” work permits, in fact, obliges foreigners to work only for the employer indicated in the permit and if, for any reason, they lose that job, they are “deported”, forced to leave the Canada without even having the possibility of finding a new job. This inevitably puts them in a position of extreme weakness towards the employer, who can actually put pressure on the worker and, in the worst case scenario, blackmail of all kinds. Hence, a series of UN recommendations to Canada, including  to end “the use of closed work permit regimes and allowing all workers the right the choose and change their employers in any sector without restriction or discrimination” and to ensure “that all migrant workers have a clear pathway to permanent residency from the time of their arrival in the country” (read our article about it: The UN dismantles the ‘Canada fairy tale’: “It’s a breeding ground for contemporary slavery”).

Recommendations gone unheeded, given the announcement by Justin Trudeau, today: in fact, Canada limits the number of low-wage temporary foreign workers, but not in the sectors where it is most needed such as healthcare, construction and food: there, evidently, it will be possible to continue to exploit foreigners, even if the Prime Minister today presented the innovation as a “remedy for injustice”: “The country no longer needs so many temporary foreign workers. We need Canadian businesses to invest in training and technology and not increasing their reliance on low-cost foreign labour. It’s not fair to Canadians struggling to find a good job, and it’s not fair to those temporary foreign workers, some of whom are being mistreated and exploited” said Trudeau, “forgetting” that the cause of such mistreatment and exploitation is the very nature of the Canadian temporary work permit: it is a closed permit, which makes you a “slave” of an employer, with all the consequences of the case, including low wages. As the UN wrote. But that hasn’t been changed.

Photo by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay