Open more avenues to permanent residency for temporary foreign workers, Canada told
A senior policy officer at Toronto Metropolitan University and former deputy secretary of immigration says temporary foreign workers in Canada need more roads permanent residence.
“If there are certain professions that are really needed and we have become dependent on temporary foreign workers. We should include them in a permanent system,” Naomi Alboim is said to have said Canadian production.
“Ultimately, the demographics of Canada’s workforce mean we have to work internationally.”
The most recent data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) shows that there were 465,350 foreign nationals in the country who had obtained work permits through the International Mobility Program (IMP) last year.
Based on the first four months of this year, the IMP can be expected to end the year with an even higher number, as there were 249,060 such foreign workers through the program at the end of April.
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That’s according to the IMP, which allows Canadian employers to hire foreign workers on a Canadian work permit without a Impact assessment of the labor market (LMIA), on track to end the year with 747,180 foreign workers coming to Canada through that program if the trend continues.
There were also 135,760 foreigners working in Canada through the Temporary program for foreign workers (TFWP) in 2022, a number that may be surpassed this year, as 72,030 such workers had already come to Canada through the TFWP by the end of April 2023.
If that trend continues, 216,090 temporary foreign workers would go through that program by the end of this year.
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The IMP and TFWP together resulted in 601,110 temporary foreign workers in Canada last year.
Once a foreigner has gained work experience in Canada, he or she can apply for permanent residency under the Express Entry System‘s Canada Experience Class Program (CEC) at the federal level or, if he or she is in Quebec, the Program de l’Expérience Québécoise (PEQ) or Quebec Experience Class immigration program.
But there’s a catch for many temporary foreign workers: Low-skilled jobs tend to have fewer opportunities to transition to permanent residency.
Expert recommends making more low-skilled jobs available for permanent residence
“We’ve developed a really split system, I think,” said Alboim, a former Ontario deputy secretary of immigration.
“Highly educated, sure. Low-skilled, temporary. And I don’t think that’s healthy for the economy, and I don’t think that’s healthy for the country.”
The senior policy officer hopes that Ottawa will add more low-skilled occupations to the list of those eligible for economic immigration.
As the TFWP becomes more widely used to recruit foreigners for jobs in Canada, there are also a growing number of reports of alleged abuse of these workers by Canadian employers.
Derek Johnstone, a special assistant to the national president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, reportedly told Canadian manufacturing that linking work permits to specific employers has a chilling effect on worker complaints of abuse.
“It puts the full responsibility on the migrant,” Johnstone reportedly said.
