The best way to fix problems with Canada’s temporary foreign worker program may be to get rid of it, according to a new report.
The report — Permanent Jobs, Temporary People: Temporary Foreign Workers’ Struggle for Permanent Residency in Prince Edward Island — is a joint project involving Dalhousie and St. Thomas universities, P.E.I.’s Cooper Institute and the Madhu Verma Migrant Justice Centre. Released Wednesday morning, the research focuses on how the program is working on P.E.I.
The report’s recommendations include improving workplace inspections, providing full access to employment insurance and health care, ending employer specific work permits, and ensuring reliable funding for groups supporting migrant workers.
But the first recommendation is simply to grant permanent residency status to workers when they arrive in Canada — that is, remove the “temporary” element.
“That overall recommendation is, OK, we could solve this all if we granted permanent residency upon arrival. Most of these things wouldn’t be necessary,” said Eliza MacLauchlan, lead author of the report.
The other recommendations are meant to clarify the other problems with the program, she said.
In preparing the report, researchers conducted 27 interviews with 29 participants, including 12 current or former temporary foreign workers; 10 current or former service providers; four provincial government employees; and three employer representatives. The interviews were conducted between October 2022 and July 2023.
A growing reliance
The temporary foreign worker program was launched in the 1970s as a last-resort option for businesses that could not find enough workers in Canada. The farming and fish plant sectors were particularly in need.
But in the following decades, temporary foreign workers have become an essential part of the Canadian workforce.
It’s a trend that has grown in recent years. An estimated 40 per cent of P.E.I.’s agricultural workforce is now made up temporary foreign workers. Adding in employees in seafood processing, the trucking industry and other jobs, the number of temporary foreign workers arriving on the Island every year grew from about 400 in 2015 to more than 1,600 in 2023.
