With abuses of Canada’s temporary foreign worker popping up across the country, Employment Minister Jason Kenney conducting an ever-widening crackdown and accusations flying in every direction, a Vancouver economist has finally brought a note of sanity to the inflamed debate.

Dominique Gross of Simon Fraser University was commissioned by the C.D. Howe Institute to take an in-depth look at the troubled program. What she found essentially is that the federal government is flying blind. It does not know enough about Canada’s labour market to judge whether skill shortages are real; it doesn’t know which occupations are experiencing shortages; and it does not know enough about the availability of domestic workers to judge whether employers need to recruit abroad.

Moreover, the flood of guest workers into Alberta and British Columbia has driven up domestic unemployment, suggesting Canadians are being shoved aside.

“Canada needs a temporary foreign worker program,” she concluded, but it should be an emergency stop-gap. The range of occupations should be narrowed, the number of temporary foreign workers (TFW) accepted annually should be capped and the program should not be used to fill permanent jobs.

Gross would also like to see an amendment built into the 12-year-old program to motivate employers to train Canadian applicants to replace the vast majority of the 338,000 guest workers now occupying jobs in Canada.

She gives Kenney credit for the modest constraints he imposed on employers in 2013, requiring them to advertise job vacancies for four weeks in Canada before recruiting abroad, imposing a $275 fee per foreign worker and paying TFWs the market rate in the region.

“But Ottawa should do better,” she argued, offering a blueprint.

To turn today’s sprawling, poorly designed program into a smart plan for addressing genuine skill shortages, Ottawa needs “excellent information about the state of the labour market at both regional and occupational levels,” she said. Employers need a reliable up-to-date national database of the supply and location of Canadian job-seekers who can meet – or to be trained to meet – their requirements.

Such knowledge does not exist. Federal officials haphazardly approve TFW applications. Employers stretch or break the rules, gambling they won’t be caught. Ottawa waits for a complaint or an embarrassing news story to take action. Kenney’s latest move, slapping a hasty moratorium on the food services sector’s access to the program pending yet another review, is just the latest scramble.

This program needs an overhaul, as Gross is recommending. She is right that federal officials lack the basic knowledge to run it properly. And she is right that the problem goes far deeper than a handful of aggrieved food servers.

Kenney can bluster all he likes. Canadians know there is something wrong with the job market. They see employers filling the entry-level positions their children need with foreign temporary workers. They know people who can’t get work while companies are recruiting abroad.

It won’t be easy to rebuild this program from the ground up. But it will keep failing until it is rooted in knowledge, and enforced consistently.

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