By Jen St. Denis, Business in Vancouver | Link to Article
Jason Kenney’s abrupt move to ban restaurants from using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) won’t fix the program’s many flaws.
By Jen St. Denis, Business in Vancouver | Link to Article
Jason Kenney’s abrupt move to ban restaurants from using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) won’t fix the program’s many flaws.
That’s the opinion of a professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) who recently published a study showing the program may have accelerated the rise in unemployment rates in British Columbia and Alberta.
“That’s a political response – it’s not an economic response,” Dominique Gross, who teaches at SFU’s School of Public Policy, told Business in Vancouver.
“I think he wanted to give a strong signal to all the industries in Canada that he could be very tough.”
Kenney, Canada’s minister of employment and social development, announced the moratorium on April 25. The new rule followed allegations that McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) and Tim Hortons (TSE:TSI) franchises had abused the program.
The federal government is now investigating the owner of three McDonald’s locations in Victoria after Canadian employees complained their shifts were cut back and local job seekers were turned away. Late last year, the RCMP opened an investigation into the alleged mistreatment of temporary foreign workers at a Tim Hortons franchise in Fernie.
It’s not the first time Kenney has had to do damage control for the controversial program. In 2013, he introduced several restrictions and a new application fee following media stories about Royal Bank of Canada replacing Canadian IT employees with temporary foreign workers.
While employers argue they still need temporary foreign workers in order to run profitable businesses, economists who have studied the program say there is a real risk that it is skewing the labour market and keeping wages artificially low for low-skilled jobs.
In her study, Gross detailed how several changes to the program made it easier and faster for employers to bring in temporary foreign workers. Low-skilled occupations were added in 2002. In 2007, TFW permits were extended to two years from one, and in 2011, they were extended again to four years. During a pilot program in place from 2007 to 2010, the amount of time it took to get a Labour Market Opinion (LMO) – proof that the employer had tried but was unable to find a Canadian worker for the job – was reduced from five months to five days.
The result? Between 2008 and 2012, use of the program skyrocketed, especially in B.C. and Alberta. In 2012, the federal government approved 99,315 TFW positions for B.C. and Alberta, compared with 57,685 for the rest of the country.