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A B.C. mining company was also in hot water for hiring more than 200 Chinese workers after an ad seeking Mandarin-speakers failed to attract Canadian applicants.

“We are taking action to ensure that Canadians are always first in line for available jobs,” Jason Kenney, minister of employment and social development, said in a statement on the new rules, which were first announced in the wake of those controversies.

But Daniel Kelly, head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, calls the crackdown “the worst decision for business since the Harper government took office in 2006.”

“This is absolutely putting politics ahead of policy,” Kelly said in an interview Tuesday.

The worst decision for business since the Harper government took office in 2006

“They know this is bad policy. Minister Kenney knows that in his own riding in Calgary, labour shortages are sky-high. There’s virtually no employer in his riding that doesn’t have a help-wanted sign on its door.”

The government is taking aim a big corporate abusers with its flurry of new rules, Kelly added, while small businesses get caught in the crossfire with a temporary foreign workers program now bogged down in red tape and ballooning fees.

“We have tens of thousands of members across Canada struggling to find workers, particularly in rural communities where there are few young people, and now their access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is severely limited because of abuses by large corporate bad apples.”

Among the new restrictions is the elimination of the so-called 15% rule, which allowed companies to pay temporary foreign workers 15% less than the going rate for any given position as long as the employer had paid Canadians that lower rate as well.