Government Plans To Evaluate Its Temporary Foreign Workers Program

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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The federal government has announced to launch an evaluation of its controversial Temporary Foreign Workers program. The program has such vast effects that the workers which begun working at farms are now working in fast food restaurants, our strip joints and being recruited to work in coal mines.

The program has been critically scrutinized and highlighted in current headlines as a coal mine in northeastern BC stands determined to fill hundreds of vacancies with Chinese workers allowed by the program. A member of BC Federation of Labour, Jim Sinclair, assured that the government is going to take serious and decisive action against the program and its impacts on Canadian labour.

Sinclair mentioned that the employers are allowed to pay the foreign workers 15 per cent less than their Canadian counterparts, which allows the companies to make use of the program and get cheap labour. Sinclair claimed that “the program should go back to what it was when it was originally conceived: a short-term solution to a short-term problem, mostly in construction where we had to have people for a short period of time to do some work because we didn’t have enough skilled trades people in Canada to do it.”

At the time the program was launched, temporary foreign workers were hired at almost 300,000 vacancies in Canada. These laborers were hired at restaurants, farms, meat-packing plants, and more. Sinclair added that “we are talking every aspect of Canadian life. Certainly, the program went from providing workers on the skilled side where there was a shortage of labour in hard-to-fill positions. Now more and more it’s being used as a source of cheap labour at the bottom end of the scale which depresses the wages.”