2013-03-08
Don Butler
Canada.com
Canada.com
No company flaunts its Canadian credentials more than Tim Hortons. Marketing has transformed the coffee-and-doughnut colossus into a commercial embodiment of the virtues and values Canadians hold dear.
Yet the beloved icon has been a major beneficiary of a profound shift in immigration policy that some say is transforming the country’s labour market: Canada’s growing reliance on — some might say addiction to — temporary foreign workers.
The numbers are startling. In the past decade, the number of temporary foreign workers living in Canada has more than tripled.
As of last Dec. 1, more than 338,000 resided here. Canada admitted 213,516 temporary foreign workers in 2012 alone — by a large margin, the most ever. Between 2002 and 2011, the number of foreign students with work permits soared to 60,000 from just 6,800.
Because demand for temporary foreign workers is employer-driven, there’s no ceiling on the number who can be admitted each year. By comparison, the federal government limits the immigrants who can obtain permanent residency. Last year was typical: 257,515 permanent residents were accepted.
Moreover, the composition of the temporary foreign workforce has changed. Those in management, professional or skilled and technical occupations make up a shrinking share while those in low-skill jobs are growing rapidly.
This transformation is prompting hard questions about the design of the federal government’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Is it helping workers from abroad take jobs from Canadians? Is their presence depressing wages? And is the government program creating a European-style guest worker system, with all the attendant potential for abuse and social problems?
Next week in Ottawa, a major conference on immigration will ponder those and other questions. About 500 people, including many from government, are expected to attend the Metropolis Conference at the Ottawa Convention Centre.
Even the Conservative government is concerned. After a B.C. mining company revealed plans to hire 200 Chinese workers last year, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley said she’d review the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, agreeing there were problems with it.
Earlier this month, the Toronto Star obtained a Human Resources and Skills Development Canada background paper circulated as part of the review. It said the government is concerned employers are using migrant workers to address “long-term, structural labour gaps” instead of short-term needs.
Some companies, the paper said, “are using the program as a substitute for necessary adjustments such as investments in capital and (re)-training workers, or adjustments to wages.” It also questioned whether employers are genuinely trying to hire and train Canadians before turning to foreign workers.
The issue appears to have spooked the government. Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly got involved personally after HD Mining’s plan to hire the Chinese workers made headlines. While Harper’s government has maintained immigration at historically high levels, there may be political consequences if foreign workers are perceived to be taking jobs from Canadians.
While recruiting highly trained migrants to fill clear gaps in skilled jobs remains relatively uncontroversial, the same can’t be said for the thousands of unskilled workers Canadian firms hire every year from countries such as the Philippines, Mexico, India, China and Sri Lanka.
Tim Hortons was an early and enthusiastic convert. The company and its franchisees began hiring temporary foreign workers in 2005. The company says it doesn’t track the numbers. But an anti-immigrant website, immigrationwatchcanada.org, citing HRSDC data, says the firm received government permission to hire more than 14,000 migrants between 2007 and October 2012. (Typically, though, only about half of approved jobs are filled.)
Alexandra Cygal, Tim Hortons’ senior manager of public affairs, says franchisees only hire foreign workers when they have exhausted all avenues to fill vacancies locally.
“Our owners prefer to hire locally rather than go to the expense and administrative needs of hiring temporary foreign workers,” Cygal said in an email. “But without this employment program, many Tim Hortons restaurants would not be able to operate full time or, in many cases, remain open at all.”
Tim Hortons is hardly alone. McDonald’s makes heavy use of foreign migrants, as do other fast-food chains, including Subway, Wendy’s, A&W, Boston Pizza and KFC. They’re also widely used by the hotel industry, by such brands as Fairmont, Holiday Inn and Best Western. Even retailers such as Canadian Tire have dipped into the pool.
Migrant farm workers and live-in caregivers also make up sizable segments of the temporary foreign worker population and come with their own unique set of problems.
Jenna Hennebry, director of the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., says companies look abroad because they have trouble retaining employees. The work they offer is not lucrative, often difficult and requires working long and sometimes inconvenient hours. “Not every Canadian will want to do that work.”
Because temporary foreign workers’ visas tie them to their employers, they can’t quit and go elsewhere, as Canadian residents can. Once they’re trained, firms know they have a good worker for at least two years, after which they can apply for a further two-year renewal.
The downside for migrant workers is that they are utterly dependent on their employer. If they’re mistreated or abused — and there’s evidence that some are — they have little recourse. If they file a complaint, they’re likely to be fired, leaving them two unpalatable options: return to their homeland, or melt into the growing undocumented population of illegal residents.
Companies may also be able to pay temporary foreign workers less. Under a policy change announced last April by Finley, companies are allowed to pay as much as 15 per cent below the posted median wage for higher-skilled jobs and up to five per cent less for lower-skilled occupations.
The policy comes with many caveats that are supposed to ensure that employers don’t underpay foreign workers, but Hennebry is unconvinced.
“What I see is that there’s a policy in place that allow employers to do that,” she says. “If they can come up with a rationale, which I’m pretty sure they can, then they can do so.”
Hennebry calls that “another potential carrot” for employers to hire foreign workers. “You can actually have a guarantee that you’re going to have someone work for you for the exact period of time for which you hired them, you can pay them slightly less and count on them to probably not take many holidays.”
The impact temporary foreign workers have on the Canadian labour market is hotly debated, but many believe they are allowing employers in low-skill sectors to hold down wages and working conditions that would otherwise have to rise if migrants weren’t available.
“If they didn’t have the option of bringing these temporary foreign workers in, presumably they wouldn’t leave the jobs vacant forever,” says Christopher Worswick, an economics professor at Carleton University. “They might start raising the wage offers.”
That isn’t always feasible, he acknowledges: “In booming areas like Alberta, you could have extraordinarily high wage increases before the jobs are all filled. That might cause some companies to shut down their operations in that area.”
Still, if companies can import foreign workers willing to accept wages that Canadians spurn, “It’s more favourable to your bottom line,” observes Leslie Seidle, a former senior public servant who now directs the immigration and integration program at the Institute for Research on Public Policy. “It’s no more complicated than that.”
For her part, Hennebry thinks the presence of so many temporary foreign workers has to have a “depressive influence” in some sectors. “You’re going to have a deflation across the board, not just of wages but also of working conditions.”
Until the late 1980s, Canada ramped up immigration during economic good times and scaled it back during recessions. “There’s certainly an argument that could be made to do that for the temporary foreign worker program,” says Worswick.
In Alberta, which has legitimate labour shortages, high demand for migrant workers makes sense. But what explains the influx to Atlantic Canada, which is saddled with double-digit unemployment?
The number of temporary foreign workers resident in Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island has grown by 140 per cent in the past five years — the highest percentage increase in the country. Both provinces have unemployment rates in excess of 11 per cent.
“That seems like a bit of a juxtaposition,” says Worswick. “If the economy really is weak, does it make a lot of sense to be bringing in temporary foreign workers when unemployment is high?”
If it’s true that Canadians don’t want the jobs now being filled by temporary migrants, the solution is to make those jobs better for everyone, Hennebry says.
That includes migrants. “I don’t see there necessarily being a problem with an extension in temporary migration if it’s coupled with better protections and access to permanent residency,” she says.
Unlike skilled migrants, who are able to apply for permanent residence through several programs, most low-skill temporary foreign workers are ineligible to live here permanently.
And while employers who violate the rights of temporary foreign workers are supposed to be blacklisted on a HRSDC website, Hennebry notes no company has yet been cited. “Like all the protections and rights that are there for migrant workers,” she says, “they’re there on paper, but in practice, this is really not going to happen.”
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