The federal government’s latest changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program take effect on Thursday.
While the government insists the alterations are designed to reduce Canadian employers’ reliance on the program to fill vacancies, Restaurants Canada is predicting severe consequences.
The agency says there are currently 73,000 openings in the industry, with positions in rural, remote, and tourist regions the hardest to fill.
The updated program will restrict workers to one-year contracts, down from the current two, and will limit workplaces to fill only 10 per cent of total positions with foreign workers. That is down from a 20 per cent cap.
Mark von Schellwitz is the vice president of the western branch of Restaurants Canada. He points out that employers spend a lot of time doing paperwork and paying fees to hire international employees. They then put in more time training the employees, which he believes going forward is hardly going to be worth it just for 12 months of work.
“And then by the time the workers are actually in the business and contributing to the business, they’ve got a year, which is down from the previous two-year contract,” Schellwitz said.
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
He doesn’t think tweaking the TFW system is the solution.
“Our real goal is to bring immigrants in, have them become permanent residents, rather than this Band-Aid solution, which is a temporary foreign worker where you get them for one year instead of two years, and you have to send them back and get a new batch again,” he says.
“We have about a million workers here as refugees or family members of immigrants that aren’t working right now. So, we need a program to match those individuals so we can hire them.”
It’s not the first time the program has been altered. Over the years, it has been the subject of controversy over the number of foreigners it brings in and whether local employers make a concerted effort to look for Canadian candidates before going abroad.
Employers now have to provide a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to confirm a foreign worker is indeed needed.
Advocates for the workers themselves have long argued that the contracts should not be tied to a single employer, as that makes the employee vulnerable to abuses and prevents the worker from seeking work elsewhere.
People in the program are generally expected to leave Canada after their term is over, but in some cases, they can apply through other immigration streams to become permanent residents.
Von Schellwitz says the best success stories are when the workers are allowed to stay.
“Let’s face it. Many temporary workers come in order to stay,” he said. “We’ve had many foreign workers end up in the permanent streams. We have examples of foreigners who came ten years ago who are now managing their own restaurants.”
He says while only about three percent of all workers employed in the restaurant sector in Canada belong to the Temporary Foreign Worker program, the changes will severely impact establishments in smaller towns, where they will have no choice but to reduce hours or close altogether.