A temporary foreign worker feeds cattle at the MCF Leclerc Farm in Trois-Rivieres, Que., in April. In the first half of 2025, Canada renewed or newly issued 105,195 Temporary Foreign Worker permits.Andrej Ivanov /The Globe and Mail
The Conservatives are right: The Temporary Foreign Worker program mostly should not exist.
But the Conservatives are also missing something: the Temporary Foreign Worker program, or TFW, is only a small part − in fact the smallest part – of Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs.
These programs are not only about providing business with a steady supply of low-wage workers without permanent status – but they are partly, and even mostly, that.
They are not exclusively about driving down pay at the bottom end of the labour market – but as currently structured, they often are.
They are not entirely about lowering business investment and productivity through cheap labour – but that’s partly, and even mostly, what’s happening.
It’s not all a scam, but a lot of it is.
Poilievre calls for federal government to end temporary foreign worker program
Those parts of the Temporary Foreign Worker and temporary foreign worker programs should be wound up and closed down.
Prime Minister Mark Carney used to get this. Back in 2013, when he was governor of the Bank of Canada, he told a parliamentary committee that “one doesn’t want an overreliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skill jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages but also that firms improve their productivity.”
He added that temporary foreign workers should be for “those higher-skilled gaps that do exist.”
In plain English, he said that bringing in highly skilled people to fill high-wage jobs was good for Canada, but allowing business easy access to lots of temporary foreign workers for entry-level jobs was a recipe for suppressing the wages of low-wage Canadians, and discouraging companies from raising productivity through labour-saving technologies.
That was the right answer. It was also a good foundation for future immigration policy.
But last week, Mr. Carney said the opposite. Pushing back against Conservative criticism, he said that “when I talk to businesses around the country … their number one issue is tariffs, and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers.”
Mr. Carney, please rediscover your 2013 answer. Aside from being economically sound, it is immeasurably more politically saleable. Just ask British Columbia Premier David Eby.
Back to the data on Temporary Foreign Workers − and temporary foreign workers. In the first half of this year, 105,195 TFW permits were renewed or newly issued. There were also almost 150,000 study permits, and more than 302,000 new or renewed permits under what is known as the International Mobility Program, or IMP.
Student visas are partly a temporary foreign worker program, while the IMP is entirely so.
Under the Trudeau government, visa students were allowed to work full-time while in school, which juiced enrolment at dubious institutions and transformed student visas into an alternative low-wage temporary foreign worker program. It grew larger than the TFW program, and with none of its protections.
As for the IMP, it is heavily drawn from former students who, after completing their course of study, generally receive a postgraduate work permit, a type of temporary foreign work visa.
These temporary streams were once a tiny part of Canadian immigration and an even smaller part of the labour market. That went out the window after 2015, and especially after 2020, which is how Canada’s temporary resident population exploded to more than three million by 2024.
The Liberals finally began to tighten things up last year, scaling back student work hours, with graduates of shorter and weaker programs no longer automatically eligible for postgraduate work permits. The government also promised to reduce the temporary worker population, notably by reducing the number of student visas.
Temporary foreign workers may get more flexibility to move jobs as Ottawa eyes changes to program
The Liberals have said they will bring the temporary resident population down from more than 7 per cent of the Canadian population to (a still historically high) 5 per cent. So far, however, the number has barely budged. It topped three million for the first time in the third quarter of last year and was only barely below three million by the second quarter of this year.
Canada’s immigration spike after 2015, and especially between 2021 and 2024, was mostly not about traditional, permanent immigration. It was above all about temporary immigration, and temporary foreign workers − most of whom were not Temporary Foreign Workers.
The TFW program has to be scaled back and smartened up, but the rest of the temporary ecosystem is far larger.
The way to address all this? It’s there in Mr. Carney’s 2013 answer. Make it easy for businesses to recruit from overseas for the most highly skilled and highly paid positions. Make it impossible to bring in temporary workers from overseas for low-wage and low-skill work.
An exception has to be made for some jobs in agriculture and food processing, because the sector has become dependent on people paid less than what Canadians would demand. But that’s a warning of why we don’t want the practice to grow, and why its massive growth in recent years must not become widely entrenched. This is Canada, not Qatar.
The country could have used tens of thousands of immigrant doctors. But hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers to make pizzas, stock shelves or deliver food orders?
At a time of rising unemployment and near-record youth unemployment, it makes less sense than ever.