An overreliance on foreign workers “drives down wages and displaces Canadian workers”. No, that’s not a quote from an op-ed in the National Post or Dominion Review. That was written by Justin Trudeau! Here’s the full quote, from his op-ed published in the Toronto Star in 2014:
“Since taking office, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have transformed the Temporary Foreign Worker Program — which was originally designed to bring in temporary workers on a limited basis when no Canadian could be found — into one that has brought in a large pool of vulnerable workers.
As a result, the number of short-term foreign workers in Canada has more than doubled, from 141,000 in 2005 to 338,000 in 2012. There were nearly as many temporary foreign workers admitted into the country in 2012 as there were permanent residents — 213,573 of the former compared to 257,887.
At this rate, by 2015, temporary worker entries will outnumber permanent resident entries.
This has all happened under the Conservatives’ watch, despite repeated warnings from the Liberal Party and from Canadians across the country about its impact on middle class Canadians: it drives down wages and displaces Canadian workers.”
Perhaps it is ill-advised for politicians to write op-eds at all, since this is a type of writing which usually requires the author to take a strong stance on a hot-button issue of the day. If the winds change, and said politician later flip flops, their words may well come back to haunt them.
As of 2021, there were no fewer than 777,000 foreign workers on Canadian soil. In 2023, the Trudeau government allowed businesses to fill 240,000 jobs with temporary foreign workers. During the first quarter of 2024, employers received approval to hire 28,730 people through the low-wage stream of the temporary foreign worker program – 25% higher than a year earlier. The number of foreign workers accepted through the low-wage stream is accelerating, even as the Canadian unemployment rate stands at 6.4%.
In fact, the Trudeau government has overseen an astronomic rise in temporary residents of all kinds – foreign workers, international students, and asylum seekers. In June, The Globe And Mail reported that the number of temporary residents has swelled to 2.8 million, accounting for nearly 7% of the Canadian population. That’s right: almost 7 out of every 100 people in the country is a temporary resident.
The situation has gotten so bad that Justin Trudeau himself has joined the chorus of voices calling for immigration restriction. At a press conference in early April, he admitted that the number of temporary residents “has grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb”. If Trudeau had just listened to his own advice from 2014, he could have avoided his current quandary.
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