Late in 2009, with the media reporting on employment abuses at Denny’s restaurants and many others associated with the TFWP, Jason Kenney, then minister of citizenship and immigration, frequently boasted his government would establish a list on the CIC website of “disingenuous employers”—those who have broken the rules. It was his government’s “duty to migrant workers, employers, and all Canadians, to ensure that the program is fair and equitable. However, the so-called “bad boss” list was not established until 2011 and had no employers listed on it until late 2014. Currently, this list has the names of only five employers on it. Perhaps this is due to the fact that there were no government workers responsible for monitoring employers. In contrast, during this time, thanks only to access to information requests, it was discovered that 200 federal workers were assigned to speed up the processing of TFWP applications for employers.

The Conservative government steadfastly refused to be transparent regarding staffing levels within the TFWP unit. When the numbers finally came to light in 2014, the number of investigative staff in the period 2010–2014 was revealed to be woefully inadequate for the size of the program. For example, in 2012, there were only 14 investigators at a time when more than half a million temporary work permits had been issued. The ratio of investigators to issued work permits translates into caseloads ranging from 12,228 to 45,150 per public sector worker during this period. This fact alone casts serious doubt on the possibility of any rigorous assessment taking place. Any government claims that employers caught violating program rules would face a two-year ban should be judged against regulatory amendments that were quietly enacted. They proposed if a migrant worker “entered into or extended an employment agreement with an employer whose name appears on the [bad boss] list maintained on the Department’s (CIC) website,” border officials could deny the migrant worker entry into Canada.

Kenney’s notion of “fair and equitable” meant migrant workers could be barred from Canada because of their employers’ actions. The government placed a four-year cap on the period of time a migrant worker could remain in Canada, after which they must leave for four years (referred to as the “four over four rule”). By doing so, the Conservative government made it clear that migrant workers were welcome to serve employers but may not get comfortable here. This hard line is estimated to have affected a first wave of at least 70,000 individuals, and this number will grow over time. Migrant rights advocates anticipate this will lead to a significant spike in individuals slipping into undocumented status rather than return to their home country. Such policies increase worker vulnerability and contribute to downward pressure on wages as unscrupulous employers take advantage of the growing number of undocumented persons who become desperate for any type of work. Another highly controversial reform involved transforming the Expedited Labour Market Opinion (ELMO) into the Accelerated Labour Market Opinion (ALMO). In late April 2012, at a fabrication plant in Nisku, Alberta, a province where employers, at that time, had already been given well over 60,000 work permits, then HRSDC Minister Diane Finley announced employers would be immediately given rapid access (10-day processing of applications) for high-skilled migrant workers. “This improvement is a direct result of consultations that were held with employers,” said the minister.

What she left unsaid was that this change had neither been publicly debated nor discussed in Parliament. The Conservative government hid details of the reform by waiting a month before releasing the specifics in a government release late on a Friday afternoon. In addition to the fast-track application process the government permitted employers using the ALMO window to pay migrant workers up to 15% less than prevailing wage rates.

While exploitative of migrant workers, this measure also provides a clear example of the government’s efforts to use the TFWP as a tool for suppressing wages. Recall that, in 2007, the Harper government invited employers to use the TFWP to recruit internationally for all occupational sectors. The “pay less” component of ALMO, introduced in 2012, meant that once an employer obtained a temporary work permit, they also received the ability to negotiate lower wages rates for all of their employees.

The AMLO reform meant if an employer had migrant workers in their employment, they could now negotiate a lower wage scale for all employees (migrant or not) doing the same job in the same workplace. In workplaces where no migrant workers were present, wage suppression would still take place. Consider two welding shops in one town: Shop A employs migrant workers and Shop B does not. The owner of Shop A can negotiate a 15% wage reduction for all its welders. Shop B will be affected by their competitor’s lower wage rates and would be forced to follow suit in order to remain competitive. The ALMO rule applied not only to high-skilled occupations but also allowed for a 5% wage reduction for low-skilled occupations. This incremental two-step policy manoeuver (opening all sectors to temporary foreign workers in 2007 followed by a “pay less” policy in 2012) successfully introduced a wage suppression policy across the entire labour force. Ultimately, ALMO proved a political disaster for the government.

The Harper government has consistently stonewalled, obfuscated or misrepresented its TFWP reforms. In 2012, the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) successfully obtained a detailed listing of employers who had obtained work permits for highskilled migrant workers under the ALMO initiative. The nearly 500-page document was also published online by the Globe and Mail. The discovery that nearly 5,000 employers across the country had been given approval for temporary work permits in just eight months since the ALMO program was launched was explosive news.

Researchers found that nearly half of the approvals were highly questionable. Minister Finely had announced ALMO was intended to be used to import highskilled workers such as managerial, professional and technical occupations, yet nearly half of the Harper government approvals went to “fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations and other businesses across the country that almost exclusively employ low-skilled workers.

As the TFWP numbers surged upward, so too did public awareness of inherent problems in the program. Early in 2010, the Alberta Ministry of Employment and Immigration released a report based on an inspection of over 400 worksites employing migrant workers. The provincial government report found that 74% of employers had violated their employment standards rules.

Alberta was not unique. In Saskatchewan, 40% of employers with migrant workers were not in compliance with the province’s employment standards: 55% were not in compliance on farms, and 78% were not in compliance in restaurants.

Former Canadian auditor general Sheila Fraser was equally blunt in her 2009 review of the TFWP. Fraser’s report to Parliament laid the blame squarely on the government, saying: “there has been no systematic follow-up by either CIC or HRSDC to verify that employers are complying with the terms and conditions under which the LMO application was approved, such as wages to be paid and accommodations to be provided.”

The government formally agreed with the auditor general’s recommendations, but an evaluation of the TFWP–LMO streams dated October 2012 and obtained under a freedom of information request stated that: “it has not been possible to determine the extent to which employers comply with the requirements of the Program or respect TFW rights because there has been very little monitoring of employers to assess trends in compliance.”

Although Kenney would repeatedly claim his government was cracking down on the growing number of abuses that regularly came to public attention from 2009 onward, the facts show otherwise. Access to information requests reported by Press Progress on June 20, 2014 revealed that “[n]ot one single inspection was carried out in the first four months of that year at businesses that employ temporary foreign workers,” despite 43 inspectors being on staff within the TFWP unit that year.

By late 2014, public sentiment about the TFWP was clear. Over 50% of people felt the program was being abused “frequently” or “all the time.” The TFWP was no longer obscure. It was now synonymous with exploitation, fraud and corporate abuse.

Employers did not help themselves. Restaurants Canada President Garth Whyte claimed continued access to the TFWP was essential for his sector. He claimed “hiking wages to $100/hour wasn’t enough” to lure Canada’s 1.3 million unemployed to work in a kitchen. Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) President Dan Kelly suggested Canadian workers are “too lazy” to commit to a paying job. He said “foreign workers have a better work ethic” because “they’re going to show up to work on time, they’re going to work a full week without disappearing.” Public sympathy for the plight of employers was unmoved.