The Trudeau Liberals are channeling Captain Louis Renault as they react in shock to problems with Canada’s temporary foreign worker program. Movie fans will know Captain Renault as the corrupt police chief in Casablanca.
After Captain Renault barges into Rick’s Cafe — more of a nightclub and casino — Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, walks up and asks on what grounds his establishment is being shut down.
“I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here,” Captain Renault says.
“Your winnings sir,” says a card dealer handing money to Renault, who thanks him and continues his bust.
The Liberals are Captain Renault, guilty of gambling in the illegal casino and now threatening to throw everyone out. It was the Trudeau Liberals who changed the rules to ramp up Canada’s temporary foreign workers program and now they are promising to punish anyone abusing it, using the rules they changed.
“Abuse and misuse of the TFW program must end,” Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault said last week.
“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 number of people coming in under the TFW program has been ramping up for years, especially under the Trudeau Liberals. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who was employment minister in 2015, called this out during a recent news conference.
“Trudeau has destroyed our entire immigration system, and he has expanded our temporary foreign worker program by well over 200% at a time when we’re losing jobs,” Poilievre said during an event at Stelco Steel in Hamilton last Friday.
Poilievre noted that when he was responsible for that program there were only 60,000 people admitted under the TFW program but now that number is near 200,000.
“On top of that, you have international students who are effectively temporary foreign workers who came under the wrong stream.”
There was a time, let’s call it 2014, when Justin Trudeau was leader of the third party in Parliament, that he railed against this program. Trudeau said the Harper government was allowing the program to drive down wages of Canadians.
“The government has allowed the temporary foreign worker program to become a force that drives down wages across the country and takes advantage of vulnerable people from abroad,” Trudeau said in April 2014.
Even as recently as this past April, Trudeau was saying that out of control immigration was hurting wages.
“Increasingly, more and more businesses are relying on temporary foreign workers in a way that is driving down wages in some sectors,” Trudeau said five months ago.
If only he knew someone who could do something about this!
He truly is Captain Renault, shocked that there is gambling going on and pocketing his winnings at the same time.
It was Trudeau who changed the rules in April of 2022 to allow a massive deregulation of the program. Under the changes announced then, seasonal industries could hire under the TFW for the full year while the cap on an employer having only 10% of their workforce come from the TFW program was lifted to 20% in most industries but higher in others.
The feds raised the cap to 30% for manufacturing, food and accommodations, hospitals and nursing homes. They also got rid of a stipulation that if unemployment was above 6% then TFW approval would not be granted.
“This was a deliberate move by the federal government to suppress wage growth for low-income Canadians, and increase the number of temporary workers, who have much weaker labour rights than permanent residents,” Mike Moffat posted on X last week.
Moffat is an academic and self-styled progressive who has advised the Trudeau government and worked for the Canada 2020 think tank that is closely tied to the PM. That’s what makes Moffat’s criticism sting so much for the Liberals.
That and the fact that he pointed out these changes were announced less than two weeks after the coalition deal with the NDP was announced.
The Trudeau Liberals say they are there for the little guy, the middle class and those working hard to join it. If actions speak louder than words then that is clearly not true, by the PM’s own admission, his policies are driving down wages for low-income Canadians.
Now he’s claiming he’s shocked, don’t believe him.