The Trudeau government is not committing, as requested by a Senate committee, to gradually getting rid of “closed” work permits, or those linked to a single company, for temporary foreign workers.
The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller, indicated Wednesday that he is “not against, in principle” giving these foreign workers the right to choose their employer in Canada. However, he added that he has “a certain reluctance to destabilize the market”.
“Farmers, agriculturists or others who invest capital expect that a certain labor force will come to work in their fields, in their factories or whatever, then that [les travailleurs temporaires embauchés] go elsewhere as soon as they came… that’s the risk,” Minister Miller clarified.
Created in 1973, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) was created with the objective of filling positions for which no qualified Canadian worker is available. Fifty years later, the Canadian economy is heavily dependent on this migrant workforce, documents a report tabled in the Senate last week.
More than 135,000 foreign workers arrive in Canada each year, including nearly 35,000 in Quebec, to join a particular company for a time. These “closed permits” practically prevent workers from simply changing jobs, even if they do not receive their pay or if they are victims of mistreatment.
Rather by sector
The Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology therefore recommended that the federal government gradually eliminate work permits linked to a specific employer, replacing them with work permits linked to a region and a sector of the economy.
This would allow, for example, a temporary worker who came to work in a fish processing plant in the Atlantic to change jobs for another fish processing plant in the region.
“The overwhelming majority of migrant workers, rights advocates, academics and economists said that work permits tied to a particular employer caused the most glaring vulnerability problem,” the report reads, which requires action “now”.
Even the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery recommended that Canada allow workers “to freely choose their employers without any restriction or discrimination,” in a preliminary report tabled last summer.
Minister Miller agrees that the system in place “is not the ideal one”, but he questions the idea that closed work permits are the source of abuse by some employers.
“Is this the right way to stop abuse? That’s another question. If there are people who abuse their employees, that is a social issue that perhaps needs to be resolved in another way,” he said, before promising to read the senatorial report for a week on his desk.
The senators also suggest that the government create a commission to deal simultaneously with complaints from workers and requests from employers, who are also dissatisfied with the current system because of bureaucratic delays.