As the federal government issues fewer permits for foreign workers, some British Columbians say they’re already feeling strained.
Migrant workers whose work permits are expiring say they’re feeling abandoned, and some rural B.C. business owners say they are looking at a staffing crisis.
As data shows the number of foreign workers across the province has begun to decline, one economist says Ottawa is trying to fix past mistakes after boosting immigration past sustainable levels in 2020.
New temporary immigration caps
New federal limits on immigration are coming into effect that the government says will result in a 35 per cent reduction in new study permits and 20,000 fewer temporary foreign workers across the country.
While permanent immigration can bring skilled workers into Canada, economist Jim Stanford says the recent surge in temporary workers has just allowed businesses to continue to exploit them.
Stanford, the director of the Centre for Future Work, and others say the temporary work programs allowed businesses to hire workers for low wages — and without sufficient access to labour and legal protections.
“The addiction that employers have had to no-strings-attached, low-cost, non-permanent migrant labour — that addiction has to end,” Stanford said.
The federal government has reduced permits issued through programs like the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Maja Stefanovska, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada, said the program was designed to be a temporary measure for businesses to fill pressing gaps in the labour market.
She said the program was not intended to give businesses a permanent alternative to recruiting Canadian workers and that it is employers’ responsibility to create jobs that Canadians want to take.
“It is not a substitute for Canadian talent and is conditional on ensuring that measures have been taken to recruit Canadian workers,” she said.
In the past decade, workers have used the program to enter Canada before seeking permanent residence. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, temporary residents have driven Canada’s population growth — in part due to the way the federal government marketed migrant worker programs.
Meanwhile, employers have grown increasingly reliant on foreign workers to fill job vacancies — especially in industries like hospitality, food service and farming.
Five years later, the federal government is slowing the acceleration of new work permits for B.C. jobs. Last November it announced new plans to decrease Canada’s reliance on foreign workers and international students.
The plan included reductions in the number of permanent residences and new targets on the number of temporary residents in the country. Ottawa hopes the changes will reduce the share of temporary residents from about 6.5 per cent of Canada’s population to five per cent by 2027.
Sofica Lukianenko, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, said in an email that the reductions would help ensure jobs were available for permanent residents and Canadian citizens and ensure Canada is able to provide enough support to people who do arrive in Canada.
“Successful immigration requires an alignment between immigration levels and the ability to properly welcome newcomers,” Lukianenko said.
Now, the new targets and policy changes are starting to show up in the data. The federal government allows businesses to hire migrant workers who aren’t students mainly through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the International Mobility Program.
IRCC tracks the number of new permits that come into effect under the program each quarter.
While the number of new permits issued under both programs rose slowly through the 2010s, British Columbia saw the rate of new permits accelerate in 2020.
That year, the federal government announced it planned to boost immigration.
The data shows the federal government has issued 3,405 fewer International Mobility Program permits for B.C. jobs for the first quarter of this year than the 33,565 issued during the same period last year — a 10 per cent drop.
‘It’s not a good outlook’
The changes may be hitting some B.C. communities harder than others.
In Prince Rupert, John Farrell, the executive director of business development agency Community Futures Pacific Northwest, said the new limits come amid a staffing crisis in rural B.C. communities.
“We’ve had one restaurant already close in town. We’re starting to see reduced hours being posted on doors,” Farrell said. “It’s not a good outlook for the future.”
He said migrant workers and international students in the region are finding themselves unable to renew expiring work permits.
“These people are sitting in their homes with no cash flow,” he said. “They have no income. How are they even supposed to pay rent?”
Farrell said that means a mass attrition of Prince Rupert’s workforce. Workers are leaving the city, and he said few locals want to replace them.
Farrell, who owns a brewery and a restaurant, said the federal temporary worker limits have hit local eateries, cafés and hotels particularly hard.
“We’re not Vancouver, we’re not Toronto,” Farrell said. “We don’t have those young people that are willing to work at McDonald’s or Fatburger, or go to the local hotels and make up rooms.”
He said that at his own restaurant, one chef left the country after realizing the new limits meant he likely would not have a pathway to permanent residency. The executive chef also decided to leave the country after being unable to renew his work permit.
“The problem is we broke our promise to them, and now they’re leaving. We said we would give them a path to permanent residency,” Farrell said. “We promised them a new life, and it’s just not there.”
He’s calling on the federal government to give Prince Rupert a special designation that would allow employers to grandfather in labour market impact assessments, or LMIAs, and keep hiring migrant workers.
Prince Rupert is already being excluded from one policy that makes it more difficult to hire foreign workers, according to Stefanovska from Employment and Social Development Canada.
The federal government will not process LMIAs for low-wage positions in cities with unemployment rates higher than 6 per cent — a policy Stefanovska called the “refusal to process” or “RTP” policy. But because Prince Rupert is not an urban centre or census metropolitan area, it is exempt from the policy.
‘A shortage of business imagination’
Stanford said the new limits are the result of Ottawa’s attempt to correct mistakes made three years ago. He said the large influx of foreign workers in 2022 coincided with a surge in unemployment.
Canada’s unemployment rate stood at 6.9 per cent as of June — up from 4.9 per cent three years prior.
Stanford said that shows there are plenty of citizens to staff Canadian businesses — if they pay workers what they are worth.
“Business leaders have been crying wolf about a so-called labour shortage to justify their demands for more access to migrant labour for years,” he said. “Those claims were never true. It’s a shortage of business imagination.”
Stanford said the onus is on employers to attract workers by creating better jobs and paying higher wages.
“Instead of hoping that workers magically show up to take the job at whatever price you want to pay, what you need to do is invest over the long term in training people, motivating them and building up your company.”
But Byron Cruz with the Migrant Rights Network said the new limits don’t make sense while Canada is still managing health-care and education staffing shortages.
“Where are the local applications for these jobs?” Cruz asked. “Who’s going to work to meet these targets?”
He said that as permits expire with lower chances of renewal, some migrant workers are feeling abandoned.
Instead of addressing housing and public service shortages, Cruz said, the new limits are undercutting tax revenue and making workers more vulnerable. He noted that temporary foreign workers and international students pay sales and income tax and contribute to social benefit programs they never benefit from.
Cruz said he has heard from several construction and hospitality workers whose work permits expired this year. Instead of leaving the country, they’re choosing to stay and work undocumented, Cruz said.
Despite the federal government’s insistence that the program was always meant to attract temporary workers, he said many workers came to Canada believing the program offered a pathway to permanent residency.
Now the new limits are cutting off those pathways for thousands of workers.
“They felt there was a promise from the federal government that they would become permanent residents,” he said. “The workers are feeling disposable.”
