Dozie Anyaegbunam
Should Canada scrap the temporary foreign worker program?
Should Canada scrap the temporary foreign worker program?
Photo: Unsplash
The Topline
- Canada has cut temporary foreign worker (TFW) arrivals by nearly 60 per cent over the past two years, with the federal cap dropping from 184,008 permits in 2023 to a planned 50,000 by 2027.
- The Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) allows Canadian employers to hire TFWs from outside the country to fill temporary jobs when no Canadian or permanent resident is available
- Most TFWs work in lower-wage sectors like agriculture, food service, and accommodation.
- Ottawa says the goal is to bring the temporary resident share below 5 per cent of Canada's population by the end of 2027, which “will help ease pressures on our housing, services and infrastructure.”
- Critics say TFWs are essential to solving a current labour shortage.
- In April 2026, the federal government raised the rural TFWP cap from 10 to 15 per cent of a business's workforce to “support rural employers.”
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Switch sides,
back and forth
It’s easy for employers to abuse
The TFWP was supposed to be a last resort for Canadian employers. Somewhere along the way, it became a preferred option.
A common critique of the program is that it invites abuse.
Most TFW permits are “closed” which ties the worker to a single job and employer. A worker who reports unsafe conditions, wage theft, or harassment might lose the right to stay in Canada if their employer cancels their permit.
In the most recent fiscal year, 10 per cent of inspected employers were found non-compliant following inspections. Federal penalties more than doubled to $4.88 million.
One fish processor was fined $1 million and banned for 10 years for failing to provide fair wages and a workplace free of abuse.
That’s one reason why a 2024 parliamentary committee on citizenship and immigration recommended scrapping the closed work permit system entirely.
B.C. Premier David Eby has been one of the loudest provincial voices on this. "I am not a fan of the temporary foreign worker program," Eby said in March 2026.
"It ties workers to a single employer, raising the possibility of abuse and exploitation. It does not provide a pathway to citizenship," added Eby.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has also called for the program to be permanently abolished, replaced only by a separate stream for hard-to-fill agricultural jobs.
The youth unemployment rate further strengthens their case. It reached 14.7 per cent in September 2025, the worst September since 2010 (excluding the pandemic).
The federal Conservatives point to Tim Hortons growing its TFW use over 1,100 per cent in four years, arguing that entry-level jobs that once gave teenagers their first paycheque are now being filled by a federal program that bypasses the local labour market.
When Canada last tightened access to the TFWP in 2014, domestic workers in TFW-reliant occupations saw wage gains of three to six per cent, according to a peer-reviewed study published in October 2025 in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
By cutting the number of TFWs again, Canadians could once again stand to gain something similar.
It started with good intentions, but the TFWP pushes employable Canadian youth to the back of the line, suppresses domestic wage growth, and produced a record fine of one million dollars in a single year.
It’s overdue for a correction.
Without them, businesses shut down
The TFWP is highly divisive at the moment. Nearly half of Canadians want the program scrapped entirely. But Canadians should remember: TFWs hold up parts of the economy we can’t do without.
The argument that TFWs are displacing Canadian workers falls apart when you look at it closely in the sectors most often cited in the political debate.
In 2024, 36 per cent of positions held by TFWs were primarily in agriculture, with nearly 40 per cent of those roles located in rural areas. At the same time, the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council projects a labour gap exceeding 120,000 workers — one that is expected to continue widening through 2029.
In food service, two-fifths of workers are young Canadians, according to Restaurants Canada, and only three per cent are TFWs.
Restaurants in many rural towns are running below capacity, not because customers aren't there, but because there aren't enough staff.
“If you're trying to hire someone in rural Saskatchewan to come to work in your quick-service restaurant, it's unlikely that the unemployed kid from Toronto is going to move cross-country,” Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, told CBC News.
Hiring TFWs isn't a shortcut around Canadian workers. Federal rules require employers to advertise open roles first, demonstrate no Canadians are available, and pay at or above the government-set median wage for the role and region.
And yet, TFWs continue to be crucial for some businesses in small towns to operate.
The mayor of Sechelt, a small town on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, wrote that a reduction in TFWs would be “catastrophic for a community with zero unemployment and no local labour pool to replace them.”
There’s a 20-year trend that can’t be ignored. Between 2001 and 2021, Statistics Canada found that immigrant workers and TFWs absorbed jobs Canadian-born workers were leaving behind.
Immigrant workers picked up 213,000 lower-skilled positions and TFWs another 139,000, while Canadian-born employment in those roles fell by 860,000.
“This suggests that immigrant workers and TFWs have backfilled Canadian-born workers transitioning away from lower-skilled occupations,” notes Statistics Canada.
In other words: Canada's domestic workforce has been moving up the skills ladder for two decades, while immigration fills the rungs they leave empty.
An aging population, slowing fertility and other policy decisions have led to immigration being a driver of Canadian labour force growth.
But cutting temporary inflows without scaling permanent pathways at the same pace leaves a hole nobody seems to be filling.
And we'll find that out the slow and painful way, whether it's empty fields, shuttered restaurants or deliveries that don't show up.
By then, the politics will have moved on. The shortage won't.
