Don Cayo: In my opinion
Thoughtful proposals: CFIB report suggests tougher oversight, cutting red tape and a bill of rights for workers themselves
A business lobby group is calling for reforms to the temporary foreign workers program that would benefi t both workers and employers.
If temporary foreign workers weren’t temporary — if the program that brings them here became a steppingstone to permanent residency and eventual citizenship — it would go some distance to solving a chronic labour shortage in many parts of Canada.
This is the thoughtful, though likely controversial, conclusion of a study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
The federation has been a key defender of the program in the face of criticism after media reports earlier this year of employers fudging the figures so they can use foreign workers to keep down wages and displace Canadian workers. The companies in the eye of the storm — McDonald’s and Tim Hortons, for example — were giants. Yet a small, but significant, percentage of CFIB members report being hurt by the federal reaction to the complaints.
Employment Minister Jason Kenney responded to the controversy in June by revising and tightening the rules. This included nearly quadrupling the fees and adding paperwork for companies bringing in foreign workers, banning the use of low wage temporary foreign workers for jobs in regions with more than six per cent unemployment, capping the number of foreign workers at 10 per cent of a company’s workforce, and forbidding the layoff of Canadians to maintain hours for foreign workers. Later Ottawa imposed a moratorium on the food services sector.
The upshot, CFIB says, is to “virtually cut off access to the program for large numbers of businesses.”
The federation blames the bad publicity on “misuse of the program by a few firms.”
It argues — rightly, in my view — that the feds would have been better advised to simply enforce the existing rules rigorously rather than impose a lot of new ones.
Much of the 35- page report is given over to skewering what it calls myths about use or misuse of the program. For example, it was never an easy and cheap alternative to hiring locally — it was complex and time- consuming and more expensive, meaning companies tried hard to find Canadians first.
Nor was it used nearly as frequently as some critics assume, at least by small business. Only 18 per cent of CFIB members even considered using it, the report said, only 14 per cent tried to get approval, and only 10 per cent succeeded. And the median number of foreign workers employed by small business firms was two.
B. C. was the fourth- largest user of the program, behind the other three western provinces but ahead of the national average with 13 per cent of its firms using the program at one time or another.
The report says no sector should be barred from employing foreign workers, and the criteria used to determine when they’re allowed should be more flexible.
It calls for both lower fees — now more than $ 1,000 just to apply to bring a worker in — and for an accreditation system that would check out companies in advance, then quickly approve their applications.
But it also calls for changes that would benefit the workers themselves, not just the businesses that employ them. It proposes a new two- year initial visa allowing foreigners to work in a sector or a region with high demand.
It asks that government ensure workers who get such visas have enough time in Canada to complete the permanent residency process, and that a well- defined pathway is laid out for them to obtain permanent residency “for instance, by expanding the Canadian experience class and/ or giving an expanded number of TFWs access to provincial nominee programs.”
It also calls for a Temporary Foreign Worker Bill of Rights that would include a dispute- settling process and the ability for foreign workers to change employers if things don’t work out.
You can — no doubt some will — quibble with some of the details in these proposals. But on balance they’re not a bad blueprint for a course of action.
The policies in place now are little more than a kneejerk response by a government embarrassed at being caught out after years of lackadaisical enforcement of the rules. Both Canada’s business community and the workers who come to this country to help make our economy tick deserve better than that.