On Friday, Employment Minister Jason Kenney made headlines with his promise to overhaul Canada’s temporary foreign workers program.

The Conservative minister said his reforms were designed to ensure that employers didn’t hire foreigners at the expense of Canadians.

But as a Vancouver federal court case illustrates, Ottawa is still freely allowing companies to bring in temporary foreign workers.

It’s just using a different scheme.

This one is called the Intra-Company Transfer program (ICT). Foreign workers imported under it do not have to satisfy any of the conditions Kenney imposed Friday.

Employers who want to bring in ICT workers don’t need to first obtain so-called labour market opinions from the government. That means they don’t need to prove a dearth of qualified Canadians.

Nor are they required to pay a hefty $1,000 fee per foreign worker.

Nor is their ability to hire foreigners linked to the local unemployment rate.

All they need do is claim that the workers they are importing are managers, executives or employees who possess “specialized knowledge.”

Originally, the ICT category was created to let multinationals move their top executives from country to country more easily.

This week’s court hearing, brought by Local 115 of the International Union of Operating Engineers and Local 97 of the Ironworkers, shows it has expanded well beyond that.

The case involves construction of a wood-waste storage building for a bio-mass electricity generating plant north of Prince George, B.C.

Oregon-based O&S Contractors Inc. won the bid. It then tried to bring an eight-man, U.S. construction crew into B.C. to do the work.

Documents filed in the case by the union side show that the first two Americans who tried to cross the border in mid-February — one carpenter and one millwright — were turned back by the Canada Border Services Agency.

Officials ruled the pair didn’t qualify under the ICT program. They wrote that the carpenter, a former cattle rancher with a criminal record, “had no education in this field of work and little experience.”

Within a month, however, both men — as well as six others — were legally working in Canada.

For some reason, border officials had changed their minds and determined that all eight possessed the specialized knowledge needed to qualify for the ICT program.

Exactly what qualified as specialized knowledge was broad. The former cattle rancher, for instance, was armed this time with a letter from his employer calling his role “instrumental.”

As for his criminal record, border officials noted approvingly that he “has completed his sentence.”

One of the eight, the court documents show, was a former apprentice roofer and produce clerk, just four years out of high school, who had worked for O&S a mere 18 months.

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Although he had no formal training in the field, he was described as a millwright.

In the month prior to the border agency’s sudden change of heart, O&S had made arrangements with Local 115 to hire a skilled Canadian crane operator.

Court documents say that hiring never took place. Instead, U.S. crane operators were used.

At one level, this is a small-scale dispute.

Local 115 was unsuccessful last year when it tried to prevent a B.C. mine from importing 200 Chinese workers. Local president Wayne Mills says they will push this case through to the bitter end in the hope of getting a different result.

But regardless of the judge’s ultimate decision, the B.C. case points to a fatal flaw in Kenney’s much-publicized get-tough policy:

In the end, he and the rest of Stephen Harper’s government aren’t serious about protecting Canadian jobs and wages.

As one government program designed to undercut domestic wages ratchets down, another is already gearing up.

True, Ottawa understands the politics around jobs. In response to a scandal last year in which the ICT program was used to outsource highly paid information technology jobs from Canada, the government tightened its definition of “specialized knowledge.”

Yet tellingly, this tighter definition doesn’t apply to workers from countries that have free trade agreements with Canada — such as the U.S. and Mexico.

The temporary foreign workers program may have been hobbled. But the war against good wages continues.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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