Ottawa stepping up inspections of foreign worker job sites

OTTAWA — The federal Liberal government, chastised last year in an auditor’s report that found a lack of oversight of Canada’s controversial temporary foreign workers program, is stepping up employer inspections and naming and shaming those caught breaking the rules.

Since the start of the year, roughly 1,600 employers have been flagged as “high-risk employers” and selected for inspections by the Employment and Social Development Department, with more than 1,340 on-site inspections launched and in various stages of completion.

That’s more than seven times the number of on-site inspections conducted during 2016-17.

It’s all part of the government’s effort to address oversight concerns with the temporary foreign worker program flagged last year by auditor general Michael Ferguson.

Employers often hired temporary foreign workers without first demonstrating they had exhausted all other options for finding local workers, and applications were frequently approved without being challenged, Ferguson found.

He also found enforcement officers lacked access to sufficient data to ensure employers were being honest about local labour availability, and rarely conducted on-site inspections. Those inspections that did go ahead were “flawed,” since employers always had prior warning, Ferguson concluded.

The federal public accounts committee, which held its own hearings to ensure Ferguson’s concerns were addressed, also found that while the number of temporary foreign workers has declined, oversight of employers using the program remains “not sufficient.”

Labour Minister Patty Hajdu recently tabled a response to the concerns raised by both the committee and the auditor general, outlining the steps her department has taken to improve oversight.

In addition to more on-site inspections, the department has streamlined its processes to allow integrity officers to more quickly take action against employers who are breaking the rules. Gone is a tedious bureaucratic approval process that Ferguson described as “time-consuming, onerous and administratively insufficient.”

A list of penalized companies and employers has been posted online. Since August 2017, the number of sanctioned employers jumped to 62 from just one. Many have been banned from using the program for up to two years; others have been hit with fines.

Kameron Coal Management Ltd. was banned from the program for a year and ordered to pay $54,000 — the largest fine to date. The Cape Breton mining company faced criticism from a local union two years ago for hiring foreign workers where qualified locals were available for work.