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It was under a Liberal government in 2002 that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was drastically expanded to include low-wage workers. This trend has continued under the Conservative government. Since 2008, more migrants arrive through migrant worker programs that grant temporary status than via avenues that grant permanent residence. Avenues that grant permanent residency, such as those that facilitate entry of skilled workers, refugees or family members, have plunged 20 percent, 50 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

The number of temporary migrant workers in Canada has tripled over the past decade. Temporary migrant workers are indentured laborers: they are tied to a single employer with no guaranteed access to social services or labor protections and they do not have permanent residency upon arrival. Their temporariness is precisely what makes these migrants precarious: it ensures legal control by bosses, while their categorization as “foreign” signals their position as permanent outsiders – even to the left-of-center New Democratic Party which has called for a moratorium on migrant workers.

Canada has yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the rights of all migrant workers and their families. The Convention upholds the right to free association and unionization for migrant workers, equal rights to employment insurance and other employment benefits, and the right to remain in the country when pursuing a complaint against an employer. No political party has made the U.N. Convention a part of their platform.

All federal parties love appealing to “family values,” but the number of family-class immigrants has dropped by 14,000 people, or 20 percent.

After a complete two-year moratorium and then quota on sponsoring parents and grandparents, the government initiated a (you guessed it!) temporary visa program that requires the pre-purchase of private Canadian health insurance. Many sponsored spouses now arrive with conditional status for two years. This makes immigrant women more vulnerable as their legal status is contingent on their partners. Stricter income requirements for sponsoring any family member are in place and wait times have, despite claims otherwise, doubled or tripled.

In a Manifesto on Family Reunification, over 70 organizations call on the federal government to remove all barriers to family reunification, including the “excluded family members” category first implemented by the Liberal Party. No political party has endorsed this manifesto.

More migrants than ever are being incarcerated and deported. In fact, migrants are the only population in Canada who can be jailed simply on administrative grounds without being charged. Over the past 10 years, the federal government has detained an average of 11,000 migrants per year, including up to 807 children. In some cases, young Canadian children have spent their entire lives behind bars.

Worse than the U.S. and EU, Canada is one of the only Western countries to have indefinite detention, which can mean incarceration without charges for over a decade. And now Canada is one of the few Western countries to adopt the internationally condemned Australian model of mandatory detention upon arrival for some refugees.

For the first time since records are available, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention strongly chastised the Canadian immigration detention system in 2014. But no political party has spoken out against this medieval system. No political party has endorsed the demands of the End Immigration Detention Network. No political party is taking steps to move forward the dozens of recommendations from inquiries and inquests into deaths in immigration custody over the past fifteen years.

With the government's ‘tough on crime’ and ‘tough on terror’ agendas, immigrants and refugees are being torn apart from their loved ones and facing deportation for minor offenses, including traffic offences, or for being alleged security risks. The new “Stealing Citizenship Act” allows for revocation of citizenship in certain circumstances, while anti-terror legislation expands government powers of surveillance, preventative detention and secret trials. Heightened Islamophobia casts Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities as omnipresent threats, leaving migrant families, especially women wearing the hijab or niqab, susceptible to hate crimes and legislated racism.