Guest column: Little-known program dominates Canada guest-worker scheme

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By: Douglas Todd

Union leader Mark Olsen is frustrated Canadians know almost nothing about the International Mobility Program. And he’s afraid company bosses want it that way.

The program is the vast federal guest worker program that now brings by far the most newcomers into Canada — with more than one million in the country now.

It’s also the program that Olsen believes makes it most easy for employers to exploit guest workers, which in turn harms Canadian workers.

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As the western manager of the Laborers International Union of North America, Olsen said that the International Mobility Program (IMP) is drawing more than four times as many guest workers as the more discussed Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently promised to modestly trim the TFWP by up to 80,000 workers after protests that it was responsible for too many low-wage workers at a time of high unemployment among Canadian young people.

Most Canadians believe the Liberals are bringing in too many temporary workers, making it harder to access housing and obtain decent wages.

Olsen believes Trudeau’s gesture with the TFWP is window-dressing. If the past is a guide, he said, the federal government and corporations will just use the decline of the TFWP to funnel more foreign workers into the expanding International Mobility Program.

The government’s strategy, Olsen said, will continue to “institutionalize foreign worker exploitation, discrimination and abuse, distort the labour market, suppress Canadians’ wages and lead to a loss of training opportunities and jobs for Canadian workers, including Indigenous people and women.”

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There is a need, Olsen said, for qualified people to come from other countries to work in Canada. That’s especially the case in Canada’s gigantic construction industry, which employs most LiUNA members. But guest workers, Olsen said, must be invited to the country in a way that’s fair both to them and to Canadian workers.

The major defect in the International Mobility Program, Olsen said, is that, unlike the TFWP, it doesn’t require Canadian employers to provide evidence to the government that they’re unable to find a Canadian to do the job.

“This has made the IMP ripe for abuse of both the system and the temporary worker, and has fuelled explosive growth under the program,” said Olsen.

A second problem with the IMP is that employers are allowed to pay the foreign guest workers significantly less than they pay Canadians in the same job, whether they’re in the field of high tech, health care, retail or construction. That’s because bosses only have to commit to paying IMP workers a wage that is higher, even only slightly higher, than the median Canadian salary, which Olsen said is currently in the $23-an-hour range.

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That leads to IMP workers often doing the same tasks as Canadian workers at far lower wages.

Obviously, Olsen said, the big wage disparity hands bosses an incentive to hire cheap labour through the IMP program, rather than seek Canadian applicants.

“It results in employers paying substandard wages and often no benefits to foreign workers,” Olsen said in a joint memo with Eric Olsen, his brother, who is the political director for the western arm of LiUNA, which has about 400,000 members in the U.S. and 150,000 in Canada.

“It also allows employers to pay Canadian workers less than the market would ordinarily require, distorting the market.”

Since 2015, the Liberal government has dramatically increased the number of temporary residents in Canada, to about 2.8 million. Immigration Minister Marc Miller said this year that nine per cent are in the TFWP stream, 44 per cent are employed in Canada through the IMP category and another 43 per cent are foreign students, most of whom are allowed to work.

Canada’s migration system is complex and confusing. Even politicians, pundits and pollsters often make comments that suggest they mistakenly think the TFWP is the only Canadian stream for “temporary” workers.

One top LiUNA recommendation is that bosses using the IMP must prove there is a need for each guest worker. Such declarations exist with the TFWP.

Douglas Todd is a columnist with the Vancouver Sun.

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