Unemployment has been steadily rising for more than a year, as the Bank of Canada’s anti-inflation campaign weighs down the private sector.Meanwhile, the federal government is busy approving record numbers of permits under the low-wage stream of the temporary foreign worker program from companies claiming that they are unable to find Canadians to fill vacancies.
The government also doubled the period for which labour market impact assessments were valid to 18 months from nine months. Those assessments are the basis for obtaining a permit for workers, and are supposed to show that no Canadian citizens or permanent residents could fill the positions. That’s moronic: a 6-per-cent unemployment rate is a clear indicator that there is not a labour shortage at all, never mind a severe one. Sure, it’s possible that a business might still have problems filling vacancies, even with relatively high unemployment.
The effect of all of those changes was to dramatically weaken the link between labour market conditions and the low-wage temporary foreign worker program, even as the number of workers permitted to enter Canada soared.