Fed up with the cost of living? Blame bosses and billionaires, not migrants!

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is under fire.

A damning new report from the United Nations recently called it a “breeding ground for modern slavery,” referencing rampant wage theft, underpayment, and physical, emotional, and verbal abuse. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has blasted the program for taking away jobs from Canadians and suppressing wages for all workers. And the mainstream media are chockful of reports about how Canada’s “addiction” to migrant workers is hurting young people, worsening unemployment, and exacerbating the housing crisis. 

In late August, the federal government announced it will drastically cut the number of foreign workers in Canada, in an apparent attempt to address the housing and unemployment crises and combat migrant worker exploitation. But this “solution” lets the real culprits for our economic crises off the hook – and it will do nothing to stop the abuse of the migrant worker underclass in Canada. 

Across the country, many of us are reeling from crushing economic pressures and struggling to make ends meet. The message we keep hearing from certain politicians and the corporate media is that migrants are to blame. But we know the truth. 

These politicians are blaming migrants to divide and distract us, while they hand kickbacks to the very people responsible for the crises we face: the bosses benefiting from cheap labour, the corporate landlords, developers, and speculators making housing unaffordable, and the wealthy CEOs charging us more and more for basic goods.

We won’t take their bait. We need to join together to hold these bosses and billionaires, and the politicians that do their bidding, accountable. 

That’s why we’re taking to the streets to say NO to racist scapegoating and YES to immigrant justice!

From September 12 to 15, 2024, the Migrant Rights Network is organizing actions across the country to hold the real culprits of the cost of living and housing crises accountable and to demand equal rights and status for temporary foreign workers. 

For the last 40 years, the Council of Canadians has been at the forefront of the fight to take power back for the people, wresting it from the grip of corporations and the wealthy. We are proud to stand with the Migrant Rights Network for their national days of action and encourage all our members and supporters to show up in solidarity.

Here’s what you need to know: 

Migrants are not responsible for low wages and unemployment – businesses and governments are

Temporary foreign workers aren’t stealing jobs from Canadians. Corporations – and the government – are the ones suppressing wages, even as the cost of living goes up.

The federal government wants us to believe that fewer foreign workers would mean more jobs for Canadians. But this obscures a basic truth: the businesses that hire these workers are struggling to attract Canadian workers because they pay ultra-low wages. They have lobbied for a cheap, easily exploitable workforce – like temporary foreign workers whose residency in Canada is tied to their job – and the federal government has been caving in to their demands. 

From its inception, the Temporary Foreign Worker program has allowed businesses to “solve” their labour shortage problem without spending more on wages and benefits to recruit Canadian workers. 

But migrants are not to blame for systems that exploit them and create fewer opportunities for everyone else. The real problem is our governments prioritizing the bottom line of businesses instead of fair pay and workers’ rights. Instead of pointing fingers, provincial and federal governments should be raising minimum wages for all and providing foreign workers with safe working conditions and a path to permanent residency. 

Better rights and working conditions for migrant workers is a win for all workers.

Kicking out migrants won’t solve the housing crisis – better housing policy will 

Federal Housing Minister, Sean Fraser, said last month that the government’s clampdown on temporary workers could “potentially reduce the pressure on tens of thousands of housing units across the country.” But the suggestion that removing just 65,000 low-wage workers – the vast majority of whom are not competing for these units – would ease the housing market strain is more than misleading; it’s deeply cynical. 

There is little correlation between housing price increases and immigration. The Canadian population has grown by 3.9 per cent over the last two years but rental prices have soared by 20 per cent. Someone is raising those prices, and it’s not migrants. It’s the people making money hand over fist from these price hikes: landlords and housing speculators. 

Nearly 42 per cent of migrant workers in Canada live in poverty – these workers are not causing the housing crisis; they’re the ones living it. Many of these migrants come in through the Temporary Foreign Worker program and predominantly live in employer-controlled housing. They frequently don’t directly rent property, and they certainly aren’t buying any. In fact, they experience some of the most predatory and inhumane housing conditions in Canada. Other migrants, like international students, are accessing rental housing, but many of them often live in precarious housing situations, too. 

All of us would benefit from policies that rein in the exorbitant costs of housing in Canada and allow us to afford to live in dignity – including rent control, an end to real estate speculation, and more public housing. We won’t get more housing by showing migrants the door – we do it by coming together to confront speculators, developers, and the politicians they have in their pockets. 

Reducing the number of migrants won’t end their exploitation – more rights will 

Defending migrant workers doesn’t mean defending the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as it is. It is a fact that there is rampant abuse in the TFW Program.  

The UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery found in his recent report that the program was rife with “underpayment and wage theft, physical, emotional and verbal abuse, excessive work hours, limited breaks, extracontractual work, uncompensated managerial duties, lack of personal protective equipment, including in hazardous conditions, confiscation of documents and arbitrary reductions of working hours” as well as sexual harassment and sexual exploitation and fraud. 

The federal government has created the conditions for this exploitation by tying workers’ ability to stay in Canada to their employment, essentially robbing them of the ability to assert their rights at work.

But instead of reforming the program by implementing greater rights to migrants, the government has been fixated on limiting the number of workers. Worse, it has backtracked on its only meaningful policy to make good on their human rights and thereby protect them from exploitation and precarity: regularization. A regularization program would grant permanent residence to all undocumented people, effectively ending the ability of corporations to keep migrant workers in a form of indentured servitude. 

The Liberals pledged in late 2021 to “explore ways of regularizing status for undocumented workers who are contributing to Canadian communities” but they have yet to deliver on that promise.   

Liberal, Tory – same old (immigration) story

With Poilievre and the Conservatives exploiting public frustrations over housing and living costs to slam Trudeau and the foreign worker program, it’s easy to forget that the two parties have historically shared the same stance on this issue. Both have allowed business interests to drive immigration policy and then blamed immigrants for the problems they were brought in to solve. 

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has existed since 1973, and it has always been driven by the needs of business to fill labour shortages. In 2002, Paul Martin’s Liberals expanded the program to include “low-skill” jobs. Later, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives further incentivized employers to hire temporary foreign workers by expanding the list of occupations that qualified as “low skill,” increasing work visa lengths, and reducing application time. Thanks to these changes, temporary work became “a dominant pathway to entering the country.” 

And while Justin Trudeau tries to appear more moderate on immigration, pledging to allow more undocumented people to stay in the country when it’s rhetorically convenient, he has ramped up the pace of deportations in the past few years, deporting people at a rate not seen since Stephen Harper was in power. 

Both parties increase or decrease immigration rates as the labour market fluctuates, and both dial up or down their anti-immigrant rhetoric based on political expediency. 

With the Conservative’s current lead in polls, it’s hard not to see the Liberals’ latest announcement as a desperate attempt to hop on a racist bandwagon to try and win back voters. While the announced cuts of 65,000 migrant workers will do little to substantively improve living conditions for anyone, the Liberals are surely betting that the gesture will resonate with existing grievances and boost their odds.

We must not let them divide and distract us while they hand kickbacks to corporate interests that brought us here. We need to write a different story together.

Scapegoating migrants is a victory for the bosses and billionaires 

We’ve come a long way from the days of banging pots and pans on our balconies to thank essential workers – many of them migrants – during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back then, we also placed the blame for our social and economic ills squarely on corporate profiteering. Now, those same workers are being unfairly blamed for systemic issues they didn’t cause, while the real culprits – corporations – escape accountability. 

We can’t let this be the story. So long as these bosses, landlords and CEOs blame workers – whether migrant, citizen, unionized, or blue collar – for the hardship that they caused, we all lose. 

They divide and distract us because they know that when we come together, we’re powerful.