The Federal Government announced changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program on June 20th.
The revamping of the program was done with the intention of protecting jobs for Canadian workers and curtailing abuse of the program. Reports in the past couple months highlighted cases in Alberta and B.C. where temporary foreign workers were allegedly not paid overtime and were subjected to other abusive labor practices.
According to Elliot Sims with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in Manitoba, hotel, restaurant and retail businesses outside Winnipeg will no longer be able to access the TFW Program. One of the changes announced last Friday prohibits access to the program where there’s a higher than 6 per cent unemployment rate, which impacts most rural areas. Without temporary foreign workers some of these operations may have to reduce hours or, in worst-case scenarios, close their businesses. That will put more Canadians out of work than the TFW Program would.
Employers still wishing to access the program will have more hoops to jump through, as well as a price tag that has quadrupled. It will require much more paperwork and red-tape for employers, as they’ll have to provide documentation on all the interviews conducted with potential Canadian employees and reasons why they weren’t successful in obtaining the position for which they were interviewed.
Records show that since 2012 around 55-hundred temporary foreign workers have been employed in Manitoba. Three thousand were hired in Winnipeg, around 230 in Brandon and the remaining 23-hundred to work in rural Manitoba communities.
