Imagine a society where a ruling elite can hardly be bothered to work. The elite worldview holds that only certain “higher” preoccupations are fit for them. They abhor heavy or manual labour and are embarrassed by visible evidence of industry. Such pursuits are entrusted only to a specific class of people who live far away—either in a foreign country or in the peripheries of large cities. Either way, such labourers have no stake in the society that they serve. Even those who technically live among the elite are paid little, have no influence over government, are not permitted to organise themselves, and are bound to a single master.
What sort of society would this be? Would it be one like Rome or the American South with its vast underclass of slaves, or more like Sparta with its serf-like order of “helots,” midway between slaves and citizens? Perhaps the migration of poor Englishmen to serve in the tobacco fields of the Virginia Company comes to mind. Or would we think of the British use of indentured Indians on sugar, tea, or rubber plantations throughout the empire?
The answer should be “all of the above,” because those examples all fit the description to one extent or another. Not all are equally objectionable or evil, of course. And yet, all are so bad that most of us probably like to think that that elite anti-work attitude and contemptuous exploitation of others are ancient injustices that we’ve overcome.
But if we thought so, we would be wrong.
Canada has built seemingly an entire economy on exploiting cheap, foreign labour through the so-called Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP). These are two slightly different programs that allow foreigners to work in Canada, and most go to Ontario. Contrary to its name, there is nothing “temporary” about the TFWP. Its original purpose was to remedy proven labour shortages while Canadians were hired and trained to do the jobs in question. The IMP allows international students to work—with or without a proven labour shortage—while they are studying in Canada.
The results of the TFWP and IMP are deplorable. The TFWP allows foreigners to be recruited abroad in vast numbers, brought to Canada, housed in degrading conditions, paid the minimum wage, forced to work long hours, forbidden from joining a union, and required to work for only one employer. The IMP is somewhat more flexible. The problem with it is well illustrated by the phenomenon of diploma mills. These are fly-by-night “schools” professing to impart some credential or other, but which are really in the business of recruiting “students” from abroad simply to exploit their labour on virtually open-ended work permits granted through the IMP.
Both the TFWP and IMP are used as business models. Hiring foreigners at minimum wage keeps prices low and profits high—most notoriously in the hospitality and trucking sectors, but no industry seems untouched now. The use of the TFWP in the health-care sector, for example, has grown by an appalling 1,700 percent since 2002. That state of affairs has no doubt been abetted by the absence of uniform standards of credential recognition among Canadian provinces. If medical personnel could move easily from one province to another, shortages could be filled by Canadians. But historically, this has not been possible, and so medical institutions have had recourse to the TFWP. Ontario’s recent determination to remedy this problem and speed up recognition of 50 “in-demand” professions from other provinces is a step in the right direction, and hopefully not too little too late. Meanwhile, the IMP is a vehicle for outright fraud, ranging from fake acceptance letters from bogus “colleges” to elaborate human-trafficking schemes. Not long ago, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle here. Most were migrants from India, and some have been trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law enforcement to investigate alleged links between dozens of “colleges” in Canada and two “entities” in India that are allegedly facilitating passage into the USA. When we reflect that an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are meant to expire this year, we have reason to believe that such abuse, exploitation, and fraud are on a much larger scale than presently acknowledged What is the material difference between these phenomena and those examples of indentured servitude above, or what Marxists call “wage slavery”? There is not much of a difference. The result is a moral rot that is eating away at Canada’s national identity as a fair and inclusive society. Prioritizing cheap labour over ethical treatment degrades us all. The TFWP and IMP inspire a culture of disposability, in which temporary workers—often from developing nations where they were at the bottom of a caste hierarchy—are viewed not as human beings with their own aspirations and inherent dignity but as interchangeable cogs in a gigantic GDP machine. This culture echoes that of the dehumanization seen in colonial indenture systems, where individuals were uprooted from their homes, stripped of agency, and discarded once their utility had been exhausted. Serial abusers of Labour Market Impact Assessments—which are supposed to demonstrate a real labour shortage—have been known to inflict psychological abuse on their temporary foreign workers. This includes threats of deportation to silence complaints about unsafe working conditions or unpaid overtime. Such practices not only violate basic human rights, but they also risk implicating “Buy Canadian” consumers and “elbows up” voters in a chain of complicity. Every low-cost meal at a fast-casual chain, or more-affordable ride-share trip, has been subsidized not just by government but also by the suffering of those workers. This moral complacency undermines the very principles of dignity and equality that Canada claims to pride itself on, turning the nation into a modern-day beneficiary of global inequality rather than a beacon of progress. For all our hectoring of our neighbours to the south, why would we borrow from the employment practices once witnessed further south of the Mason-Dixon line? This is why a report by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, published in late 2024, included the TFWP among examples of modern-day slavery. And a recent report by Amnesty International has reinforced this view. If there’s any exaggeration here, it’s a small one. But the truth is that you don’t need to be a Marxist or a reflexive supporter of the UN and Amnesty International to be repulsed by the moral problems of Canada’s openness to foreign labour. Both the TFWP and the IMP serve to keep wages artificially low and profits high, and to price Canadians out of the job market. It wouldn’t be far wrong to think of those programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The problem is especially grievous for young Canadians trying to get started in the labour market. Canada lost 40,800 jobs this past July, the unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent, and youth unemployment (those between 15 and 24 years old) is now 14.6 percent. Worst of all, it was among that age group that the most recent job losses occurred. And yet, we are constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ “unwillingness” to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers. If you ask a typical employer about hiring practices and employee retention, you are likely to hear such things. Employers call the domestic workforce lazy, entitled, and unreliable. Such things have been said of Millennials, and Gen Z is supposedly worse. It’s obviously a generalization, but it’s not uncommon to hear that retaining Canadian workers in entry-level or low-wage jobs is too hard, and that’s why foreign labour is preferred But it shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of retaining younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more biddable and cooperative because they are bound to their employers, cannot form unions, and have no attachment to the community in which they are expected to work. In comparison, the domestic population is generally better educated and rooted in the local community. Young Canadians can therefore afford to be discriminating and should rightly expect higher wages than foreigners. Employers should therefore work harder to invest in and to reward their domestic workforce. In any other era, this would have been obvious and normal. But now there is little incentive for businesses to look beyond cheap, foreign labour. To get an idea of the magnitude of our collective failure here, consider the following fact. A 2024 study by RBC Economics revealed that Canadian businesses are sitting on a stockpile of cash worth almost a third of our country’s GDP. In other words, Canadian companies have the means to invest in hiring and training Canadians, but simply refuse to do so. The results of this refusal are stagnant wages, structural unemployment, and a kind of de-skilling of the domestic population. The example of temporary foreign workers in the health-care sector proves how serious the problem is. And so, the foreign labour crisis can also be seen as perpetuating intergenerational injustice by sidelining Canadian youth. The result is a sense of alienation and despair that makes people call into question the very legitimacy of Canada’s social contract. Many Canadian youth, especially those burdened by student debt and high living costs, view government and business as having abdicated their proper role in the natural order of a high-trust society: to contribute to public cohesion and nurture a skilled workforce. Instead, they have opted for importing an easily exploitable foreign population in order to suppress innovation and wage growth. Apart from all that, unchecked expansion of the TFWP and IMP has created a cascade of systemic inefficiencies that burden public infrastructure and exacerbate social tensions. The influx of over a million temporary residents annually since 2021 has strained housing markets in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, driving up rents and contributing to the indignity of shelters overrun with newcomers. Both groups are then left to fight over space and scarce resources. For those who can secure housing, foreign workers have endured overcrowded, substandard accommodations, to the benefit of predatory landlords and employers, not the grown adults forced to sleep fifteen to a basement, sharing a single washroom. Canada’s failing health-care systems, already under historic pressure, face additional demands from workers, students, and asylum claimants who may lack adequate coverage, records, or access to services, leading to rising costs to taxpayers, longer E.R. backlogs for citizens, and more delayed diagnoses and time spent waiting for urgent specialist referrals. To add insult to injury, the diploma mill scandal has overwhelmed immigration enforcement, with the Canada Border Services Agency reporting a 300 percent increase in fraud investigations by mid-2025. This has diverted resources from genuine asylum claims and border security alike. This logistical quagmire is compounded by that aforementioned and impending expiration of millions of visas, potentially triggering the further expansion of underground economies, as seen in the 2024 probes linking fake colleges to smuggling rings. Without urgent reform—and orderly deportations—these programs risk creating a volatile and resentful underclass, primed for social unrest on a scale we’ve not seen before. Ultimately, without addressing these intertwined failings, Canada risks further devolving into a stratified society where prosperity for the few comes at the expense of opportunity for our young and able-bodied. So what should we do about all this? First, all temporary labour schemes must be abolished in all sectors of the economy—with the exception of certain areas, such as seasonal agriculture, where the TFWP and IMP have never been controversial. Second, provincial and federal governments must use every means at their disposal (from tax incentives to public expressions of esteem) to reward businesses for hiring and training Canadians. Third, we must shut down those diploma mills and punish everyone who ran them. Any non-citizens involved must be deported. Fourth, government, post-secondary institutions, and employers must work together to ensure that skills training is well funded and that there is an organized pipeline from education into industry. In the era of de-globalization, tariffs, and re-shoring that now dawns before us, such measures will be vital. A final point. Perhaps the worst moral problem here is that Canadians have long been complacent. It is as though we have simply given up on transmitting skills and a work ethic to our younger generations. It is as though we are happy to be served by exploited foreigners rather than our fellow citizens being paid a fair wage. This state of affairs should never have been allowed to take shape. No amount of moral preening and self-congratulation can make up for it. Is this really who we have become?
Alexander Brown is a contributor to Project Ontario, and a director with the National Citizens Coalition. Dr. Michael Bonner is a former immigration policy advisor who once held the temporary foreign worker and international mobility files in Ottawa, and is a former Director of Policy within the Government of Ontario.
