Canada’s Employment and Workforce Development Minister Randy Boissonnault told business associations Tuesday that the federal government is considering refusing temporary foreign worker (TFW) applications under its low-wage stream, his office told CBC News. The policy change would apply to jobs that pay below the median hourly wage in each province and territory. That median wage varies by jurisdiction, ranging from $24 per hour in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia to $39.24 per hour in the Northwest Territories.
“I’ve been clear over the last year, abuse and misuse of the TFW program must end. The health and safety of temporary foreign workers in Canada is a responsibility I take very seriously,” Boissonnault said in a media statement. “Bad actors are taking advantage of people and compromising the program for legitimate businesses. We are putting more reforms in place to stop misuse and fraud from entering the TFW program.” The minister’s Tuesday meeting included representatives from the food and beverage, transportation and agriculture industries.
CEO of Food and Beverage Canada Kristina Farrell attended the meeting. She said businesses in the food processing sector are worried about the prospect of seeing their applications for low-wage stream TFWs turned down. “Obviously if that applied to food and beverage manufacturing, it would be a crisis,” she told CBC News. “At the end of the day, that would have an impact on the price of food.” Farrell said it’s hard to estimate the amount of TFWs in working in food processing because the numbers can vary greatly year to year.
More than $2 million in fines were issued under the TFW program in the 2023-24 fiscal year, a 36 per cent increase over the previous year. Immigration lawyers, agencies and consultants have been raising the alarm over bogus labour market impact assessments (LMIA) being sold for tens of thousands of dollars. “We have seen amounts ranging from $30,000 to $50,000, $60,000 being charged for these positive LMIAs by those employers,” Manan Gupta, president of Brampton, Ont.-based Skylake Immigration, told CBC News. An employer looking to hire a TFW must submit a labour market impact assessment to the federal government to show it could not find a qualified Canadian to fill the job within 28 days. The standard processing fee for this file is $1,000 and is supposed to be covered by the employer.
Canadian businesses were given the green light to fill roughly 240,000 jobs with temporary foreign workers in 2023, more than twice as many as they were a half-decade earlier.
CBC
