In the span of just over a year, immigration went from a political non-starter to regular headline news. Now, just about everybody–including the federal Liberals–agrees immigration simply can’t continue as is. Unfortunately, “can’t continue as is” is manifesting more as a rebranding exercise than a substantial policy overhaul.
In 2022, the federal government dramatically expanded the low-wage Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) stream, which predictably resulted in exploitative working conditions, surging youth unemployment, and stagnant wage growth. The Wild Westification of the program has been bad for Canadians and newcomers alike.
Yet, the Liberals appear astonishingly reluctant to fix their mistake–that is, if it was ever a mistake at all and not a deliberate policy choice intended to benefit low-wage employers at the expense of those who either can’t vote (non-citizens) or often don’t vote (younger Canadians).
The government’s lack of urgency to this clear crisis suggests perhaps our immigration system isn’t broken but rather working more or less how they intended, minus the public blowback.
As documented in The Hub’s recent DeepDive, the recent mass immigration influx could be described as the human equivalent of quantitative easing (QE), the infamous strategy central banks embraced during the pandemic that effectively printed money to deliberately stoke inflation and pad the pockets of the already-wealthy to the detriment of workers and savers.
The age of QE is over, but now Canada might as well be printing low-wage workers to similar effect. The ideology that underpins QE and mass, barely-controlled immigration is one and the same: that markets from real estate to labour should be rigged to favour the wealthy.
The real problem is Canada’s immigration program has become a wage suppression program. Until that core objective changes, the crisis will persist.
Which could explain why Liberals appear to be treating immigration more as a PR problem than a policy one. While Immigration Minister Marc Miller has publicly spoken about change for months, little has actually been done. Rather, Canada continues to welcome record numbers of both permanent and temporary residents.
In the first quarter of 2024, according to Employment and Social Development Canada, employers received approval to hire 25 percent more temporary foreign workers than they did the year before.
So far, the Trudeau government has begrudgingly announced what amounts to tinkering around the edges of the issue. They should roll back all the TFW program changes they made in 2022, but instead, they’ve merely shifted sector quotas by a few percentage points and promised increased enforcement of employer abuses. This, of course, ignores the reality that the program itself is inherently predatory.
Then, last week, an announcement as cynical as they come. The government plans to make low-wage TFWs a permanent fixture of Canada’s immigration process. Specifically, they propose an amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations that “would include the introduction of a new permanent economic class for workers with experience in Training, Education, Experience and Responsibilities occupations (TEER) 4 and 5.”
The current TEER classification system replaced “Skill Levels” in 2016. TEER 4 includes occupations that require only a high school education or on-the-job training while TEER 5 requires no formal education. Workers in these TEERs are often considered “semi-skilled” and are often in the retail and food service industries.
People take part in a rally calling on the federal government to expand the permanent status program to include all refugees, international students, undocumented migrants and temporary foreign workers near Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s constituency office in Montreal, May 16, 2021. Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press.
More details on the change are due in the fall, but the government’s announcement provides clues on how they intend to sell the program to Canadians. It says, “The initiative would support the modernization of the economic immigration system by expanding the selection of permanent residents to candidates with a more diverse range of skills and experience.”
The gist: they plan to fold their TFW scheme into the permanent resident stream, pat themselves on the back for increasing “diversity,” and hope voters don’t pick up on the rebrand.
This move kills several birds with one stone. First, converting a large number of TFWs into permanent residents will help them achieve one of their marquee goals: 500,000 new immigrants per year by 2025. Despite the obvious stresses placed on housing, health care, and other infrastructure by this sky-high target unburdened by any signs of strategic planning, there’s been no indication Liberals intend to rethink it.
Second, low-wage employers will get continued access to these workers, preventing any serious pressure to raise wages.
Third, it will allow Liberals to earnestly claim they’ve cut back the TFW program, which is what’s getting all the bad press, without actually having to do any cutting.
Finally, it allows them to avoid the growing mess of expired work permits, which this government clearly doesn’t have the appetite to enforce. In their worldview, enforcing immigration rules isn’t progressive. Yet, moving a mess to a different room still means it’ll eventually have to be cleaned up—and, if it gets bad enough, someone’s eventually bound to argue the best course of action is to simply throw the entire thing out.
This is why it’s so difficult to take the Liberals’ pro-diversity claims seriously. Their actions, as already evidenced by rapidly shifting public opinion on immigration, continuously undermine long-term shared economic and cultural gains in favour of key stakeholders’ short-term financial interests.
Canada is lucky to still be a country where nuanced and level-headed conversation about immigration is not just possible but desired by voters. The public wants thoughtful solutions from policymakers, not marketers trying to sell them the same failed product in new packaging. That begins with recommitting to immigration in service of shared prosperity, not low-wage employers’ bottom lines.
