Hiring people under the temporary foreign workers program is so popular that even Liberal MPs are doing it. While online outrage focuses on companies like Tim Hortons filling their stores with out-of-country, low-wage workers, Sukh Dhaliwal has taken advantage of the program.
In addition to being an MP, Dhaliwal is also the owner of a land surveying company in British Columbia.
“Dhaliwal & Associates Land Surveying was founded in 1997 by Sukh Dhaliwal, MP. In addition to being a practicing BC Land Surveyor, Mr. Dhaliwal is also registered as a Professional Engineer with the Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia and he is the sitting Member of Parliament for the constituency of Surrey-Newton,” reads the firm’s website.
On the federal government’s website, Dhaliwal’s firm was approved for hiring “legal administrative assistants” through the temporary foreign workers program in late 2023. Were there really none available in Surrey, a city with a population of close to 600,000 in an area with a population of more than three million and growing?
Dhaliwal’s firm is just one of a growing number of companies turning to the temporary foreign workers program. While some might claim that the people coming into Canada on this program are doing jobs Canadians won’t do, that’s hard to fathom given the rising unemployment rate.
In April 2022 when the Trudeau Liberals made significant changes to the temporary foreign workers program, the unemployment rate was 5.2% and the working aged population — that’s everyone aged 15 and older — was 31,663,000. Today, the unemployment rate stands at 6.4% and the working aged population is 33,685,000.
We’ve added more than two million people, aged 15 and over, to the labour market while unemployment has risen from 5.2% to 6.4%. In April 2022, there were just over one million unemployed people in Canada, now that sits at 1.4 million.
The youth unemployment rate — those aged 15-24 — stood at 10.2% in April 2022 but now it is 14.2%. That’s a 40% increase in youth unemployment as the types of low wage, low skilled jobs that would normally go to students and those just entering the workforce go elsewhere.
These are not good stats and there is no way to spin them into something resembling a positive story.
So, how did we get here?
In large part it is due to unbridled immigration on all fronts, something StatsCan has been warning about in their monthly jobs report for at least a year. In the August 2023 report on jobs, StatsCan noted that while 40,000 new jobs were created that month, the working population increased by 100,000.
The Trudeau Liberals have not only radically altered the requirements for hiring someone under the temporary foreign workers program, they have added hundreds of thousands of new workers who came as students.
We had one million foreign students enter into Canada in 2023 and right now, there is no cap on how many hours they can work. It had been 20 hours per week, but that cap was removed during the pandemic to ease worker shortages.
As of September, a new cap will come in for foreign students at 24 hours per week.
So, we’ve more than tripled the number of foreign students and increased their ability to work. That is all on top of the massive changes in rules for temporary foreign workers that employers are taking advantage of.
Prior to April 2022, an employer could only have 10% of their workforce come from the TFW program. The Trudeau Liberals raised that to 20% for most industries but 30% for manufacturing, hospitals, nursing homes, food and accommodation among other industries.
They removed restrictions on using foreign workers when the unemployment rate goes above 6% and they got rid of seasonal restrictions.
In 2014, when he was still in opposition, Justin Trudeau said that abuse of the TFW program under the Harper government was driving down wages of low income Canadians. That was at a time when there were less than half of the number of foreign workers than there are now.
Trudeau still says they are driving down wages but other than accusing businesses of abusing the system his government created, they aren’t doing anything about it.