Statistics based on government inspections find nearly 95 percent of employers follow temporary foreign worker rules
Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program may be controversial, but it is transparent.
The federal government has a public website with a list of employers who have broken the program’s rules. It explains what the business owner did, or failed to do, and the consequences of non-compliance.
For instance:
- The Calgary Kickboxing Company was fined $18,000 in July because the “business was not actively engaged in the business” that the foreign worker was hired to do.
- Jack’s Donairs & Pizza in Fredericton, N.B., was fined $2,000 this summer because the owner didn’t give an inspector the required documents.
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The list of infractions on the website goes on for pages.
However, nearly 95 percent of business owners are following the rules.
“The vast majority of employers using the TFWP respect workers’ rights and are found compliant with program rules and guidelines,” says an Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) document that was released in late September.
From April 2022 to March 2023, ESDC inspected more than 2,100 businesses that employ foreign workers.
The inspectors found that 94 percent of employers were compliant.
That result is an important piece of data for Canada’s agriculture industry. Many farmers rely on temporary foreign workers because of the labour shortage in Canada’s agri-food industry.
Beekeepers, hog producers and fruit and vegetable and mushroom growers say they could not operate their farms without those workers. As a result, they need public and political support for the foreign worker program.
“Mushrooms Canada is happy to see (government) transparency in releasing these findings; making them public,” said Ryan Koeslag, executive vice-president of Mushrooms Canada.
Government statistics from temporary foreign worker inspections show that the agriculture sector has above average compliance rates, compared to other industries that use foreign workers, Mushrooms Canada said in a release.
Mushroom growers are one of the biggest users of the program, employing about 2,400 agricultural stream workers.
“We are proud of our members’ track record with the TFWP compliance,” Koeslag said.
“Our mushroom members work hard to do the right thing by following the very strict TFWP rules.”
The federal report confirming that the “vast majority” of businesses treat foreign workers fairly is very different from a recent statement from the United Nations.
In early September, a UN representative said Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs are a “breeding ground for … slavery.”
“Employer-specific work permit regimes, including certain Temporary Foreign Worker Programs, make migrant workers vulnerable to contemporary forms of slavery because they can’t report abuses without fear of deportation,” said Tomoya Obokata, who spent two weeks in Canada in late August.
His comments generated a massive amount of news coverage as international media outlets and even the Iranian government picked up the story of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program being a “breeding ground for slavery.”
However, the UN’s analysis doesn’t jive with the findings from the federal government report, which found most business owners are treating their foreign employees fairly and foreign workers can report potential cases of abuse.
ESDC has a confidential, toll-free tip line, and the government says it acts on the information.
“From April 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023, the department received over 5,465 tips through the various tools available to help workers report issues,” ESDC says.
“Every tip was triaged within 24 hours, and 41 percent of the tips received either triggered an investigation or were added to an ongoing inspection.”
