The “immigrants are taking our jobs” line used to be dismissed as a xenophobic trope, stigmatized in Canadian politics with such intensity that it lulled the population into a decade-plus sleep even as wages stagnated. But it’s turned out to be completely true — and only the Conservatives are coming up with solutions to the problem.
On Wednesday, Pierre Poilievre and immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner announced their proposal to scrap the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program, which in 2023 authorized
240,000 foreigners to work in Canada. This, we’re told, is only the beginning: Rempel Garner
that more proposals are in the works.
Of course, scrapping the TFW program alone isn’t going to fix the country, but it was the first program in the immigration envelope to spin wildly out of control. It was marketed as a responsible way to fill very particular jobs, requiring most employers to establish that the Canadian labour market can’t meet their needs. That process, however, is notorious for
and for government officials
to pump intake numbers.
So it does feel good to see its potential executioner raise his axe: the number of TFW permit holders
from 73,000 in 2015 to 184,000 in 2023, which should have never been remotely acceptable.
Some of that increase was in agriculture, where there is often difficulty in filling positions, and where work is genuinely temporary due to the seasons; the Conservatives sensibly plan to account for this with a
tailored agriculture-specific program
.
The biggest growth in TFW use, however, has been in work that was once the domain of Canadians. Cooks and kitchen help TFW permits
279 and 4,802 per cent since 2015, respectively; construction-related permits are up 3,955 per cent; administrative assistant permits are up 1,063 per cent; cleaner permits are up 1,414 per cent; retail worker permits are up 426 per cent; truck driver permits are up 361 per cent.
You’ll notice that many of these jobs were once the domain of young Canadians, as well as regular workers with a college certificate or two, or perhaps never attended post-secondary to begin with. Increasingly, these people are being crowded out by a new fleet of imported labour. Their hundreds of applications go unread as a greater share of non-Canadian workers man tills and flag construction sites.
These anecdotal observations reflect the conclusions Canadian economists have been drawing
— but in 2025, the situation has reached a breaking point.
Last month, BMO
that while the 15 to 24 labour force grew by 2.8 per cent in the past year, job growth has grown by only 1.1 per cent. And while youth unemployment has grown by five percentage points over the past two years, the youth labour pool has grown by 7.4 per cent.
“This is not a participation story (youth participation has actually fallen notably); it’s a population growth story,” wrote BMO economist Robert Kavcic. “With immigration caps now in place, namely on students and nonpermanent residents, look for a gradual rebalancing of conditions in the youth job market — it’s just going to take a while.”
CIBC
in a report last week: “The ballooning in Canada’s population from 2022 to 2024, particularly in non-permanent residents (NPRs), clearly played a role in the overall increase in joblessness, as labour demand failed to keep up with that supply surge.” This is hurting youth even in economically strong Alberta,
, the provincially owned bank.
It’s not just the TFWs that are to blame. The much larger International Mobility Program, which allows employers to hire certain kinds of foreigners without establishing a market need, had one million workers last year and
85 per cent of temporary workers in 2023. It has some useful strains, but it largely authorizes former international students who have graduated, as well as students, spouses of temporary workers and people eligible to work for
reasons (these include destitute students, asylum claimants and people who have been
from Canada but cannot be sent home for whatever reason — their country won’t send us their travel documents, for example).
Temporary residents, which include both TFWs and IMP workers, made up about 7.2 per cent of the country and one-fifth of its private workforce last year, according to
by Western University demographer Don Kerr. In 2022, this figure was
, and in 2006 it was closer to 1.5 per cent. The Liberal target is a massive five per cent, which would be funny if it weren’t such a disaster for the country’s youth.
Most of the increase in temporary residents, the Bank of Canada noted in a May paper, has come from young, low-skill workers from poor countries — and the effect has been one of
. It’s Canada’s youth who are most drastically affected: they’re the ones who are struggling to get on the first rung of their career ladders, and who are losing out on important earnings. Long term, they’ll push back family formation, and fail to make it into housing markets their parents glided into with relative ease.
The TFW program is a flagship of sorts for the decade-long Liberal overcrowding project, so it’s a morale-booster to finally see it in the crosshairs of a major party leader. Many more problems exist in the immigration system that aren’t related to the cascade of temporary residents, and the momentum needed to fix them starts with proposals like these.
National Post
