Temporary Foreign Worker Program Archives - Immigration Lawyer Vancouver, Canada | Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre
 

HomeTagTemporary Foreign Worker Program Archives - Immigration Lawyer Vancouver, Canada | Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre

Effective November 8, 2024 it will cost Canadian employers 20% more to hire foreign workers under Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program’s (TFWP) High-Wage Stream. The latest announcement made on October 21, 2024 by the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages, the Honourable Randy Boissonnault, is intended to further drive down overall temporary immigration levels in Canada.

On August 6, 2024, the Honourable Randy Boissonnault, Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages issued a statement in which he publicly mused about the possibility of reducing the number of foreign workers in Canada by prohibiting employers from certain parts of Canada from hiring low-wage workers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). Less than three weeks later, on August 20, 2024, the Minister took the first such step by approving a temporary pause prohibiting employers located in the Montreal economic region from employing workers earning less than $27.47 per hour through the TFWP. Only six days later, on August 26, the Minister further announced another series of policy changes that will make it more difficult for Canadian employers to hire low-wage temporary foreign workers across Canada. What is driving these changes and what should employers be prepared for?

For many years, if not decades, Canada has had a love-hate relationship with our foreign worker program. We routinely swing back and forth from facilitating foreign workers to come to Canada to fill labour shortages to restricting the ability of employers to bring temporary labour to the country.  At present, we seem to be, once again, at the restrictive and limiting swing of the pendulum.  Employers need to know what they are facing in this ever-changing and compliance based environment that is the current norm.

The spring and summer have been busy ones for Jason Kenney, Minister for Employment and Social Development. In early April he announced the first businesses ever to have been blacklisted for breaching the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. The media blitzkreig that followed lead within days to the complete shut down of the program for anyone in the food and beverage industry. A few weeks later an entirely new Temporary Foreign Worker Program was introduced changing the rules of the game completely and severely limiting the foreign worker program. The changes to Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) are significant and all employers who have a need for foreign labour need to know the new rules of the game.

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