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So what’s the problem? Poilievre blames the Liberals for relaxing rules tightened by the previous Conservative government.

“Employers need to raise wages and work harder to employ local workers. The government has loosened rules to bring in temporary foreign workers, without employers having to look locally first,” he said. “It distorts the marketplace.”

The Liberals have indeed changed the rules, after the Harper government took a pounding over foreign workers coming over here to take our slaughterhouse jobs.

The Tories had planned to cap the number of low-wage foreign workers at 10 per cent in any one workplace, but the Liberals froze that cap at 20 per cent for companies that regularly access the program. Seasonal industries like fish plants are exempt from the cap for up to 180 days a year.

There is obviously a public-policy misfire here, but I’m not so sure the temporary foreign worker program is to blame. The problem was hyped in the first place by images of tearful waitresses claiming their jobs had been taken by foreigners. The Conservative government was faced with a political problem and overreacted by reducing the already minuscule number of foreign workers — at the time just 1.1 per cent of the 19-million-strong workforce.

Nat Richard, director of corporate affairs at Westmorland Fisheries, said his company would happily avoid participating in the temporary foreign worker program if it could. “It’s costly and complicated. We are always hiring — we spend a lot of money on radio and print ads — and we have significantly increased wages by 12 per cent on base salaries. We would prefer to hire locally but the reality is it’s tough work and we are forced to supplement our workforce with people from Mexico and elsewhere.”