Maple Observer - Why do we need Temporary Foreign Workers?

Arriving in Canada 20 years ago, one of the first things I tried to master was placing an order for a “double-double” at Tim Hortons. It was an unnerving experience given that most of the folks at the counters were white and I always had trouble saying it right with the appropriate cadence: “May I please have a medium dark roast, double-double?”

Today, I have the reverse problem. I’m hard-pressed to see a white person at a Tim Hortons counter; everybody is either brown or black. They have accents like I did on arrival, and I try to slow down my delivery above the din in most coffee shops. It’s still unnerving. I watch some staff struggle to understand what exactly customers are asking for, their English skills iffy.

In many ways, this transformation captures what has happened in Canada over the last two decades. We have become over-reliant on temporary foreign workers, launching multiple immigration streams at the behest of business, dissuading resident Canadians from taking up low-wage, hard-labour professions even as we brand ourselves a “knowledge economy.”

We’ve allowed international students, who pay atrocious amounts of their parents’ hard-earned money to our universities and colleges so our kids can pay less, to work as cheap labour at coffee shops or drive for Uber or Lyft.

One of the great things about Canada is what I’d call the “dignity of labour.” Unlike in India, the UAE and Qatar – my previous homes – our neighbours are drawn from all vocations and occupations. Mine include chauffeurs, tradesmen, roofers, home renovators, call centre specialists, seniors’ caregivers, professors and public servants. That’s the hallmark of an egalitarian society.

I fear though, that we are becoming a multi-tiered society, creating a permanent underclass mainly of migrant workers who do jobs that Canadians no longer want to do, in conditions that are unworthy of Canadian ideals. Employers complain they don’t find local applicants for jobs that require back-breaking work, such as picking fruit or lifting and packing heavy shipments.

I worry we are headed for the same “banlieues” of Paris that have become perennial hotbeds for discontent and malcontents.

Tony Keller in his book Borderline Chaos (2025) has compared living and employment conditions for temporary foreign workers (TFWs) as similar to those in the UAE and Qatar. And Marcello Di Cintio, whose father arrived in Calgary as a migrant worker in 1956, decries the plight of “people we don’t see, whose stories we don’t hear and whose dreams don’t concern us.” (Precarious, 2025)

Di Cintio, who spent three years crisscrossing the country to interview migrant workers and their advocacy organizations, discovered they were not just Latino farmhands and Filipina nannies. “Temporary workers are everywhere. They build our homes, drive our trucks, clean our offices, and pour our coffee.”

Three facts belie our national sense of fair-mindedness. First, we don’t allow most temporary foreign workers to apply for permanent status or citizenship. Some of them have been arriving here for decades, a few months every year, without ever being offered a chance to live here permanently. There is nothing more un-Canadian than that.

Second, in the face of backlash against immigrant policy writ large, the government began counting their numbers as a proportion of the national population rather than raw numbers. Why? Finally, government data show that TFWs are “increasingly concentrated in three sectors that mostly offer low-paying jobs: accommodation and food services; retail trade; and administrative and support, waste management and remediation services.”

Despite this, we still swear by our TFW policy. “When I talk to businesses around the country, particularly in Quebec but elsewhere in the country, their No. 1 issue is tariffs, and their No. 2 issue is access to temporary foreign workers,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said after a Cabinet retreat in September. The TFW program itself has become a political lightning rod, with the Conservatives arguing for an end to the program as we know it. But if there is one issue on which all business lobby groups agree it’s the need for foreign workers – even as Canada struggles with high unemployment.

Politicking aside, there is clearly a need to rethink a program that began at a time when we had a very different outlook on immigration – one that was overtly racist. This has morphed into a beast of a program that is already a source of international ridicule. We can and should do better if we want to be demonstrably better than the Americans in how we treat our newcomers, foreign labour and immigrants.

Our own parliamentarians have roundly criticized the way the program is run and a UN special rapporteur last year called it a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” How do we allow this to happen even as we preach about our humane Canadian way?

Marc Miller, the immigration minister at the time of the 2024 UN report, was defensive about its critical findings relating to worker exploitation by employers. “On the margins there is some abuse,” the minister acknowledged, but affirmed that, “If there is one bad actor, we’ve got to crack down on it. We’re Canada.”

Precisely. We are Canada – not Qatar or the UAE.