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Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program is once again under the microscope with the recent release of a parliamentary committee report on the controversial program. The report’s main focus is to give employers easier access to TFW’s. Instead, we need a rethink of the program so it considers the interests of low-skilled Canadian workers.

When it introduced the program in the early 2000s, the federal government argued the TFWP was needed to solve a labour shortage because “Canadians won’t do this work.” However, these supposed labour shortages were actually the result of government and corporate policies that made a number of jobs with low wages and poor working conditions unacceptable to most Canadian workers.

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Three industries that relied heavily on temporary foreign workers illustrate this point: farm labour, fast food and meatpacking.

Beginning in 2004, B.C. farmers received permission to hire foreign workers under an existing program, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). By then, farmworkers already were among the lowest-paid people in the province, due in part to decisions the provincial government had made. For example B.C. government regulations reduced farmworkers’ wages by four per cent by eliminating holiday and vacation pay, and the government later eliminated overtime rates for farmworkers.