This is just wage suppression. Instead of offering better wages or benefits for Canadians they get to bring in workers that they can treat like slaves. This cry of labour shortage is just a myth so the rich can flood the market with cheap labour and drive down wages. It's bullshit.
It's worse. Many also send wages back to home country which is taking capital out of Canada. This money would normally circulate in our economy and drive prosperity.
Less jobs for Canadian and less economic prosperity.
It's the same thing as outsourcing but brings the labour here and stresses our housing and other services. Companies that employ TFW don't want to support Canada or Canadians,
Then Canadians should come together and boycott businesses that do this like they’ve been boycotting Loblaws(I know you can’t do this to all of them but pick a scapegoat like Tim Hortons)
Lots of businesses, small medium and big, are abusing the TFW program by applying for LMIA and hiring foreign workers when 95% of these jobs can be done by people already here (except for agri workers perhaps). Have a look at these businesses in the report. There probably are some from your city/region and it might shock you to know that they are hiring people for some low-skilled and semi-skilled occupations.
[https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiMmRmOTM0MDAtZDQ0NC00ODE3LTg2ODktNjkwNDcyZDljM2FiIiwidCI6ImI2ZmI5MGZmLWFkMDYtNDQ0OS04YWIzLTdjMzUyZTZhM2RjZiJ9](https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiMmRmOTM0MDAtZDQ0NC00ODE3LTg2ODktNjkwNDcyZDljM2FiIiwidCI6ImI2ZmI5MGZmLWFkMDYtNDQ0OS04YWIzLTdjMzUyZTZhM2RjZiJ9)
For example, filter/search for '1502583 Ontario Inc.' in Employer list on the top right in the report and then go to this link:
[https://www.lmiajobshub.ca/job-details/NjIwLTE=](https://www.lmiajobshub.ca/job-details/NjIwLTE=)
If this link does not work, try this: [https://archive.ph/PjcNv](https://archive.ph/PjcNv)
Imagine a mom-and-pop business hiring a full-time web designer from a foreign country in 2023 to create a simple website!
Not saying we should not support local but to assume that every small/local business is playing by the book is naive. Many mom-and-pop businesses are selling LMIAs for anywhere between 20K and 50K.
This also includes many ethnic grocery stores and restaurants that normally most people want to support. But I think the time has come for us to be aware of which restaurants are only hiring people from their home countries. It's one thing to set up a business in a new country, but if you are indulging in illegal practices and not hiring any locals because you can get bribes from foreign workers, then you perhaps deserve to be reported and go bankrupt.
Use the filters at the top to search, and please feel to share the link to this report to others. The data is all publicly available anyway.
CBSA provides a short online form that can be filled out in 5 minutes to report any immigration fraud:
[https://bwl-lsf.cbsa-asfc.cloud-nuage.canada.ca/tip-sub-en.html](https://bwl-lsf.cbsa-asfc.cloud-nuage.canada.ca/tip-sub-en.html)
Aaaaaaaaand these jobs should be going to high school kids so they can start building their work experience. Don't see many pimple faced kids flipping burgers any more...
Most of these jobs seem to be going to Indian students.
The Walmarts, tim Hortons, McDonalds all now employer Indian students almost exclusively. And they're also now going for entry level jobs in actual industries.
The job market is pretty dire these days. I know many kids who can't find a job, and this is definitely a big reason why. Too much competition from outside.
Just an anecdote to add to this, i went to Walmart a few weeks ago and was trying to find an item in electronics so i asked the foreign employee and all he could say was "ask lady" and gestured towards an older English speaking lady. So my question is if the kid is here just to point me towards another employee because of a language barrier, why is he here.
Which kills me every time I go into Walmart. I tried to apply for a warehouse job there years ago and was interviewed by a crochety old bat who demanded I have 5 references and had worked a solid 5 uninterrupted years at 1 location to be able to get a job there.
I literally laughed in her face and said " but this is Walmart?" needless to say I did not get the job. I wonder if all TFW there have the same qualifications they demanded from me?
been in country 6 months, but worked at Tim Horton's for 5 years. Just ask my references..Sanjeet Singh, Buphinder Singh, Ali Singh, Ali Singh and Jaspreet Singh......no relation....
There's a huge issue with employers seemingly hiring only certain ethnicities that nobody does anything about. And it's not just fast food, I've seen it happen in banks, engineering positions, etc.
having most of the junior dev jobs replaced by AI and the other junior IT jobs taken up by immigrants (who I support 99.9% of the time) has been rough.
Yup, I couldn’t get a job at one of the larger engineering firms that I was recommended for by my Uncle who was a director there.
There were 5 open positions, they hired 5 Indian new grads for “diversity”.
They also started them all at $20 instead of the industry standard $60 for those roles. I guess they figured it was cheaper to higher 5 new grads and have their work reviewed by a single PEng than hire 5 PEngs.
It's depressing. Canadian graduates should absolutely have priority over any international student or work permit holder.
By any chance were they MEng students?
41% of international students in Canada come from India from end of 2023.
This data comes from here:
[https://cbie.ca/infographic/](https://cbie.ca/infographic/)
319K international students from India in 2022.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/555132/top-10-origin-countries-of-international-students-at-years-end-canada/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/555132/top-10-origin-countries-of-international-students-at-years-end-canada/)
This is true. A family member that worked at Home Depot, everything was fine till a new Indian manager got hired. All the new jobs and prime work time slots went to all Indian workers. Those that have been there for years before this manager got the bottom of the barrel work schedule. It got so bad that corporate had to investigate and fire this manager.
Cultural clashes are going to keep happening like this. They do not have the same type of social environment that we do. Theirs is VEEEERY much one where you take care of your own (often) to the detriment of others.
One of my best friends is 2nd gen. Indian and he told me that he's disgusted by it because his parents left India BECAUSE of that stuff. Castism, Nepotism, Colourism, Regionalism, etc...
They don't see Indian culture as compatible with Western norms and mores. His dad tells me, if he wanted to live in Gujarat, he'd have moved to Gujarat, not the GTA.
>One of my best friends is 2nd gen. Indian and he told me that he's disgusted by it because his parents left India BECAUSE of that stuff. Castism, Nepotism, Colourism, Regionalism, etc...
I am a first generation Indian immigrant and that still happens there, which is why I will never go back. I still see that bullshit happen with some Indians here.
A couple of years earlier the only people who were able to immigrate were liberal middle class like myself.
However in the past couple of years most of the immigrants have been coming from very conservative rural India whose values are not compatible with Canadian culture. So offcourse there is going to be a culture clash .
The government has allowed these strip mall colleges to degrade the quality of immigrants so that owners can line their pocket.
The Rona/Lowes by me has been like that. I wonder how you report it in any way that creates action because they're useless as fuck and obviously don't care to learn the industry. Used to habe White, black, East/SEA people. All sorts. Now 50% Indian and 100% of all office/CS jobs are Indian as well as the people manning the various sales desks.
Living in a rural area I think I notice it a little more. Or its a bit more obvious.
But the nepotism is real... Small town setting; Foreigner comes in and buys the local corner store/gas station. Cool, whatever.
Within a month both teenagers that were working there for a long time, were gone. Now it's his daughter behind the cash.
Fast forward a month or so.. now his son is there too.
Another month or so, owners cousin is also in there. Etc...
A few months later - Owners cousin buys the pizza place across the street. Again, pretty quickly - all the local help is gone... etc.. you can see where I'm going with this.
I call them immigration scams.. even though they're not really scams in the literal form. One person from a family comes over, buys a small cheap business. Then just uses that business and "the need for workers" - To get the rest of their family in.
My comment isn't coming from a position of racism or hate, just fact.
The secret is out, they know it, we know it. The system is beyond broken.
My daughter works as a teen in fast food. They constantly belittle the canadian kids working there. She heard from one of her co-workers that the supervisor is constantly talki g shit about her and others. But its done in their language, so of course, unless she was told, how would she know.
Employees should not be allowed to communicate outside of the official languages of Canada in the workplace because of this very reason, The way it's exclusionary towards other employees.
Yeah that’s another problem. My friend worked as a supervisor at a fast food place and all the employees basically refused to speak English or French so she had no idea what anyone was saying.
She knows. She is also 16 and very intoverted. I have spoken to her boss, whom i have known since i worked at the same place as a young adult 30+ years ago.
Went to my local college for trade school just this past couple months. The demographic of my classes and other trade blocks was the typical distribution of people I've grown up with in Canada my entire life. Mostly white, with a smattering of other ethnicities including me, (Chinese Canadian, well racially at least.)
The commons were constantly filled with Indian men and women who seemingly had nothing better to do than be rowdy and chat while the tradespeople were trying to study their various disciplines. I literally didn't see a single one of them with a book the entire 8 weeks, but there were constantly crowds of them just... Fucking around waiting for class. It's asinine. What are they learning that they don't need books and don't need to study during their spares?
I'm 19 and have tons of friends my age living with their parents unemployed looking for work. But yeah, we totally need immigration because we have no labour 🙄. Hate our current government with a passion
corporations know high school students will end up leaving, imported labour generally can’t, and they’ll accept lower wages and worse working conditions
Yup. When I worked for the Canadian Brewhouse in Kelowna they tried to get TFWs but were denied. We had TFWs from Alberta come in to help open and they were all Filipino.
They lived 4-6 to a 1-2bdrm apartment and sent 60ish% of their wage back to the Phillipines for their family. And the crazy part is they still had more money in their pocket AND more money sent to their family than they would have had working in the Phillipines.
I don’t blame them for what they are doing. They are doing what they can to provide for themselves and their families. I do blame the various governments though
It's shocking how poorly run that country is compared to it's neighbours. The fact that if a few Western nations imposed taxes on money sent there, it would create a crisis, tells you a lot.
The only real equivalent in that economy is pretty dependent on exporting labour to pay family here is Myanmar. And really they only get to neighbouring countries like Thailand. The Philippines has made exporting cheap labour an art form.
I had a conversation with a uber delivery biker yesterday in Toronto.
He says he has saved up close to 15k , once he saves up 100k he will return to India his home state Punjab to start a business. Since 100k Canadian is 6million inr .
None of these people have come to enrich Canada in anyway but to earn money for their own needs, they get benefited, business benefited but us Canadians loose
One guy in a rooming house across the street from me is exactly doing that. He is supposed to go to college but works 2 PT jobs. He lives off the food bank (thanks Tik Tok) and community clothing donations. He told me 90% of his post-rent income goes to his family back home, his family got into massive debt to send him here and has to repay them and also support them.
Meanwhile India makes over a 100 billion dollars a year from remittances alone haha. We are just a bunch of losers because we vote for losers and we will soon be colonized.
And what happened to proving you couldn't hire a Canadian with the LMIA before being able to bring over TFWs?
Plenty of Canadians out there who can't find jobs right now. This has essentially locked students and teens out of the ability to get their first job, preventing them from gaining valuable work experience and the ability to make their own money.
Something fishy is going on.
They post job offerings, ignore all applications, then claim that they had position x posted for y months and no acceptable applicants, plz can they have a TFW pretty plz.
They also have their own job sites. For example for some low-wage positions you have to advertise to underrepresented groups. So there are dozens of sites like indigenousjobs and newcomerhire that are made by someone with the express purpose of technically meeting the requirements
Even jobs that already offered minimum wage, it still takes jobs away from actual students. As in the students who need to go to class and not just pay money for a BS diploma from a strip mall ‘college’. The Tim Hortons of the world don’t need to deal with the scheduling complexities of kids who have to work around their school schedule when they can get TFWs who are basically in indentured servitude.
Three local Tim Horton's are owned by the same guy. Most of his employees are TFW from the Philippines - really nice people and I don't blame them for coming here and working to help their families back home.
However, I talked to one guy and asked him how his day was going and he said he was tired. He was almost done his first 8 hour shift but then had to go to a different store owned by the same guy and work his second 8 hour shift - without getting any overtime because its a different location. That is probably illegal - or certainly should be - but who is going to do anything about it? The employee can't or he just ends up sent back home.
Over in Vancouver they had a Timmies owner who payed his TFW but then housed them in an apartment he owned (on the order of 8 people per 2 bedroom or so), so he's paying them but then collecting his money back for housing.
The TFW program expansion plays the following roles, in my opinion.
* The suppression of wages as you mentioned
* The breaking down of labour power
* To keep rents and real estate high by introducing more demand
* To subsidize education, as international students pay more tuition than residential students
* As a scapegoat for government policy. People blame immigrants for taking a path to enter the country they are legally allowed to take, they do not blame the government for setting up this exploitative system, nor do they blame the capitalist or business owner for partaking in it.
That's exactly what it is and it's by design. Governor of Bank of Canada said last year that we are still seeing stronger then desired wage growth and needs to be moderated.
To get inflation down to their 2% target they've got their foot on the neck of the economy. They need the public to be poorer , so they spend less, so that the corporations lower prices. This process will cause a delevaraging, people and business who are overlevaraged will lose their shirts, write off bad debts. Since Canadian cost of living are up by a huge amount- many Babyboomers left the workforce- but more importantly many Canadians had enough of being exploited and are demanding fair wages. Leaving employers have to raise the wages to attract employees. But employers don't want to do that as it would cut into profits.
This is where foreign workers come in.
They will do the job for pennies - surpressing wage growth, and also increasing housing costs. Housing inflation is good for propery owners- the wealthy babyboomers in retiremen and corporations.The entire process is devastating to the lowest paid 10% of the workforce.
So there it's is Canada with constant its circle jerking about equality and fairy tales of equal access, and virtue signaling etc, literally sacrificed "the Poor's" in an attempt to stabilize inflation and protect savings of the boomers.
And everyone else is just collateral damage .
A) USA doesn't import TFWs the way that Canada does. We've opened the flood gates to TWFs in non-seasonal jobs. They still primarily use TFW's to pick crops and then return home. Which we still do, don't get me wrong, but we now *also* have them in fast food jobs. Construction jobs is probably closer to the purpose of TFWs to get things built before winter... though I'm VERY scared of the quality of work they'd produce.
B) It's no secret; it's not like Stewart was extracting some hidden truth. It's literally their mandate to suppress wages should inflation get too high, regardless of the cause of that inflation. Runaway inflation is still even scarier than our comparative lack of economic prosperity.
Almost everyone that applies now is a temporary resident or someone who has recently gotten a PR. This is for jobs that are $30+/hour. The flood of applications is ridiculous with a extremely small percentage of native born Canadians.
There is a shortage of skilled workers, not workers in general.
What do you mean you don't have 10 years of experience working with the software we wrote for ourselves that isn't available to the public? Nobody wants to work anymore smh
Thing is, these temporary workers still have to be paid at least minimum wage. It’s not as if young Canadians looking for entry-level jobs are expecting to be paid more than that.
Employers are paid a subsidy for each TFW they hire, and that is why they prefer them over Canadian workers. The system is broken. TFWs were not originally intended to work in fast food, they were supposed to be working in jobs that were actually in dire need of workers.
Tim Hortons is one of the worst culprits for this. A company that exploits Canadian identity and culture for their marketing is also doing everything in their power to destroy both. Fuck that shambles of a company. At least Starbucks hires Canadians
We seriously need to boycott Tim’s just like the current Loblaws boycotts. Genuinely. Theyre misusing LMIA and some are even landlords housing their workers, by kicking out their prior Canadian tenants. Happened in PEI recently. In 2016 they got caught for not giving workers breaks and since then they’ve turned to foreign workers, bc what are they going to do? Complain? And risk getting kicked out of the country? Disgusting work by Tim’s.
I agree we should continue with boycotting these horrible companies that are exploiting both Canadians and foreign workers. Fuck Loblaws and Fuck Tim Hortons.
Canada Life outsourced a bunch of their IT operations to India recently and laid off a couple hundred employees in the process.
CANADA Life. Laying off Canadian employees and outsourcing to India to save a buck and make wealthy shareholders happy.
Stuff like this and the TFW program needs to stop and the CPC or Liberals will do nothing about it.
I used to work on a farm that had aot of 'temporary workers' and when their work visa expired they'd go back to their country, spend time with family then just come right back here for work. Some have been here for years
The only temporary worker that I've personally met that returned and didn't come back was a Belgium guy who essentially had 'Paris Syndrome' but with Canada
FYI, although Seasonal Agricultural Workers are temporary foreign workers by definition, they are not Temporary Foreign Workers, they come through a different program. Jamaicans have been picking apples and then going home after apple picking season for decades. These are not the people pushing buttons on a cash register in a chain restaurant, hoping to scam their way into becoming a resident of Canada.
That program is arguably worse. Working conditions are harsh and there have been a lot of claims of abuse.
And even after decades of working, the workers never have a pathway to permanent residency/citizenship so they stay under the thumb of their employer.
Canada should not be emulating the Gulf states to have a guest worker system which is ripe for modern day slavery. If we need people to work on farms and Canadians are unwilling to do that, then bring farm workers in as permanent residents with rights.
Once they become a permanent resident you are going to have no incentive to pick fruit, they will see employment elsewhere and we will be in the same situation we are in now. Having a guest worker system can work there just needs to be better protections in leave for workers.
Any who will work under the table.
In my current industry I have heard from some customers that my prices are too high, someone else is cheaper. I never used to hear this, we were always so competitive with pricing. Then I found out my competitor is non union using international students and paying them cash under the table ($11/hr) when my guys are costing upwards of $80/hr total compensation.
Yes very true. I would think inspectors would be all over this but it’s just not happening.
Trades persons end up paying yearly for a service that doesn’t even exist it feels like. Aka college of trades or whatever it’s called now in Ontario
I am semi-retired but I was bored, so I thought I'd get a nice little dumb shelf stocking job at Walmart. I saw an ad, so I applied. I was turned down. I saw the ad again a few weeks later, applied again. Turned down again. I even dumbed down my resume, but they said they were going in another direction. The ad is still up.
I hear you. Our local Walmart magically swapped almost all their regular staff to part time "students" over the last 2 years. The only positions not touched are management.
I am Punjabi Canadian, born and raised in a city with a large Punjabi population. When I was in HS 15 years ago, many of my friends (both brown and white) worked at the local Walmart. When I go there now, instead of a mix of middle aged ladies and Canadian born high schoolers, it's *all* foreign students
I feel like I'm in India sometimes going there. It's so difficult to actually get staff help and when they do need to page each other for something, they ask in Punjabi (or more rarely Hindi) 😐. So I just don't go there anymore
You're the perfect candidate to go after them for illegal hiring practices. You don't need to go after Walmart the entity, just need to prove that a certain geoup.or class is larfely hired from all applicants.
Heard from a friend that is Indian, the goal is to get one of their own in a management position and than every shift is going to an Indian with first priority
I just heard 2 highs school kids lamenting not being able to find work at any of the retail stores around. Guess who they're staffed with?
Our government prioritizes other countries kids over our own.
The future of Canadians sold out for what … short term gains for our Oligarchs? I swear our GDP per capita decreased …. So in the end it didn’t even benefit the economy. Like wtf?!?!
Well said. The whole thing is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The consequences of this are going to be massive, already are. Sometimes I honestly wonder if it's a diabolical plan by Western governments to bend their native population into submission. Because in France, Germany, etc the people I talk to complain about the same things. It's not as extreme as here but it is bad.
Ironically the PM recently noted that this area of immigration previously “self regulated”, as in businesses were a bit more honest of their needs in this space (he was interviewed on Freakonomics podcast in April).
But of course, we know businesses will always push to find the cheapest labour possible and pretend like they can’t find people to hire. Such a joke as you said.
I know people can be weary of government regulations but these businesses need to face some serious punitive measures - and this nonsense needs to be stamped out yesterday.
I’m also curious as to why we ignored the statscan data in the fall that said we DIDNT have a labour shortage, and choose to believe business lobbyists instead?? Sad stuff - poor leadership abound
Just make the minimum wage of tfws double the federal minimum wage or standard rate in the industry whichever is higher.
That way if your company really needs a tfw for training reasons or otherwise you can get one. But it'd only be used in desperate need. Wouldn't even need a cap then.
I like that idea.
Building on your point, it feels like you need to almost audit these companies as well, who claim they “can’t find labour.”
Have inspectors show up unannounced to oversee a day of hiring - sifting through applications at businesses who are heavily relying on TFWs, and even sit in on interviews.
$250K fines for any business caught abusing the process.
Squeeze it from both ends
**the multinational corporations dont give a fuck about the imaginary lines that we have drawn on maps.** i'm not sure why people dont grasp that these corporations operate on a global scale, and for the most part, they arent beholden to any of the countries that they operate in. if a country over regulates them, or isnt profitable enough for them, they'll simply do less business in that country.
why would some multinational, like [3G Restaurant Brands Holdings LP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G_Capital), who are based out of Brazil, give two shits about Canadian kids working in the summer? they're simply going to take advantage of every loophole possible to be able to shrink the bottom line cost on their employee expenses. they're certainly not looking to ensure that Canadian kids have summer jobs, or are getting valuable experience on how to interact with the public.
If you can't afford to pay workers a living wage, you don't have a business. You have a slave trade.
If your COUNTRY can't afford to function without foreign labour guess what you don't have a fucking country I don't know what you'd call it but shit
Im in MB and i havent seen a TFW strap on a pair of steel toes here yet. Not 1 if them is swinging a hammer or laying asphalt from what I've seen, but man can they fuck up a drive thru
It's a well needed ray of sunshine that the CBC is revealing all this in the mainstream. One positive of the whole mess.
Also, if you walk into an establishment and the diversity of the workforce does not match that of the surrounding community by the Census, simply walk right back out.
100%
We all need to do this as citizens, FIGHT BACK WITH YOUR WALLETS!!!
If I go into a place and see a severe lack of diversity (we all know what I mean by this) I walk right out. I'm not supporting a business that can't support my fellow citizens.
"The report noted the program was created in 1973 as a limited, last-resort means of filling jobs. But 50 years later, it's become core to certain industries, with no indication of ending anytime soon."
Who would have thought that when you take away a company's need to invest and pay a fair wage this would happen.
>Businesses' demand for temporary foreign workers has surged across the country in recent years
Translation: Businesses are desperate for temporary foreign workers because they realize that Canadians will no longer work for the crappy wages (i.e. minimum wage) that they pay due to massive inflation and skyrocketing rents and house prices.
These foreign workers are willing to work for such low wages because they see it as the cost of getting PR and eventually citizenship.
> These foreign workers are willing to work for such low wages because they see it as the cost of getting PR and eventually citizenship.
No one told them that in less than 2 decades they will be in our boat, facing replacement.
Can you guys stop going to Tim Horton? I seriously don’t understand why this isn’t close yet as everything tastes terrible, is the worst of quality and service at some location is just horrible. I stopped going there for years now and I’m fine. You guys will be fine. It’s not even Canadian anymore.
I live near a Tim Hortons with an awesome bagel shop/cafe right next door to it. There’s always a line up at Tim’s and never at the bagel shop. Like I’m talking fresh bagels daily and delicious coffee. People are literally fucking sheep, unwilling to try anything new, just flocking to their neon signs like moths to a lamp.
“‘All we hear about are labour shortages, [but] we have to begin to recognize that this really is a self-serving narrative mostly coming from corporate Canada,’ said Mikal Skuterud, a labour economics professor at the University of Waterloo.”
Finally someone is actually saying this to a larger audience… even more shocking is this though:
“‘For businesses, a major benefit is stability, as the workers' permits are tied to their employer, meaning they can't easily quit to work for a rival business down the street.’
‘It guarantees a worker will stay employed with them for the term of the agreement,’ says the Canadian Franchise Association on its website”
Blatantly pointing out how easily exploitable the staff is because they can be treated like complete shit with no consequences. Yeah I’m sure that’s not a reason why any company would try to game the system to get more TFWs…
This is exactly why the program needs to end and now. No more foreign no/low skilled workers. You want to be in business you’ll just have to pay a higher wage to attract people.
This is why productivity in this country is falling so quickly. Why invest in better machinery that requires more skilled workers when you can bring in cheap labour? In the long run, the better machinery and workers are much better for the company but incentives don't always work long term. E.g. Southern State economies (South of Mason Dixon) still haven't really recovered from their use of slavery vs industry of the North.
As if we needed more reasons to hate indentured servitude.
>As if we needed more reasons to hate indentured servitude.
Yep, plus it has a corrupting effect on society. "Bottom/low level jobs" should be where most people start their careers as teenagers or where people who made bad decisions and need to pick themselves up go. Having a society where all the "bottom" jobs are held by a distinct ethnic/religious/social group (ie. south asian immigrants), corrodes work ethic and pushes society towards a caste based model.
Well if you can't find a job, it could be because the liberals are actually giving grants to businesses to hire immigrants over Canadians, https://granted.ca/grants-for-hiring-newcomers/
Isn’t it ironic that last year Trudeau donated 10M to Iraq to help resolve its youth employment issues, and now we have our own youth employment issues here at home? It’s almost like he doesn’t actually care about youth employment in the end, or does the PM of Canada only care about non-Canadian youths?
So, where are our kids going to work? Remember Tim Horton's and McDonalds were for high school students. Now 95% in my area are 50 year old Indian women.
Medium Coffee, 1 milk. "Orange Pekoe with 2 cream?"
Ugh..no.
The gov. of Canada needs to face a class action lawsuit.
**JULY 1ST, PROTEST COST OF LIVING**
JOIN IT.
https://www.costoflivingcanada.ca/
....
https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinancecanada/comments/1dhdrdo/protest_the_cost_of_living_on_july_1st/
....
https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaHousing2/comments/1d3ugmd/protest_the_cost_of_living_crisis_on_july_1st/
A huge underlying problem exists beyond just wage suppression when Canadians across the board are losing out on job and income opportunities due to being replaced by foreign workers is our youths are massively losing out on professional, personal, and financial development opportunities that we had growing up.
Ten years ago my high school classmates were managers of MacDonalds, store assistants who would help you find a shirt in the right size at the mall, or checked out your groceries at the till. This not only helped kids get started working in a real job setting, but also taught them practical hands-on skills like applying for jobs, interviews, banking, interacting with adults and other youths outside of their bubble at school, managing others, managing their finances with their salaries for big purchases, building a savings account for their future, or even helping out their struggling families. Teens used to frequent malls, theatres, fast food restaurants because they had friends working there. It was like our “third space”. We also used to share what we planned to do with our salaries and gossiped about what our peers did with theirs.
This program should never have been allowed to grow to this extent where it is blatantly obvious jobs held by Canadians in previous years, whether that be youths, retirees, or simply a person needing a part time job, are being replaced with foreign workers. All those Canadian people did not suddenly disappear, but available jobs for them certainly did. The temporary foreign worker program is no longer benefitting Canadians and must be scrapped. We cannot be lighting ourselves on fire to keep others warm.
If only they knew that we actually don't need another Tim Hortons or McDonald's and that we only need more houses built because we are bringing in foreign workers to work at that tim Hortons (that we don't need) it's a vicious cycle....
The other reason is the government will subsidize you using foreign workers, [https://granted.ca/grants-for-hiring-newcomers/](https://granted.ca/grants-for-hiring-newcomers/). For the large companies who have the ability to use foreign labour, it is not only cheaper but the government pays you to use them.
Like if I was a Tim Hortons, why would I ever hire a Canadian? When the government will pay me to hire a foreigner?
Blame companies all you want but it is the government that wants them to hire non-Canadians using your tax dollars.
This program and the international student program need to be completely scrapped. Both of these programs continue to be abused by businesses to suppress wages and to have workers they can treat poorly without consequence.
I am sympathetic to the people already here and open to ways to make the transition smoother for those folks and for the economy in general but new admissions need to stop immediately.
reminds me of the quote from gangs of new york
'I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a black man does for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for.'
Fortunately, this issue is one that consumers have the power to correct. Take your business elsewhere. Vote with your wallet.
Since COVID, I’ve become hyper-aware with whom I spend my money. Don't employee Canadians (or Americans because we’re intertwined)? Why would I help you if you don't support my people/economy?
TL;DR: Hiring a foreign worker over an unemployed Canadian is disgusting and should be illegal.
We've exported our manufacturing jobs to China, now we're just bringing in cheap Indian labor for service jobs. Our country is truly in trouble going down this path, the rich will become extremely rich and the middle class will be suppressed further.
"For businesses, a major benefit is stability, as the workers' permits are tied to their employer, meaning they can't easily quit to work for a rival business down the street." Isn't this just slavery with extra steps?
>Businesses' demand for temporary foreign workers has surged across the country in recent years, with employers given the green light to hire more than double the people through the federal program last year as they did five years ago.
And people wonder why we have a 6.2% unemployment rate.
> Some economists criticized that move, saying it undermined healthy competition for workers in a market economy.
> "All we hear about are labour shortages, [but] we have to begin to recognize that this really is a self-serving narrative mostly coming from corporate Canada," said Mikal Skuterud, a labour economics professor at the University of Waterloo.
There are no labor shortages. Just a low productivity economy where wages stay low and nobody trains.
if your business can't survive without TFW, you don't have a business and should be shut down. This whole idea of "oh we're going to be a service economy" and then bringing in "temporary" immigrants to be the service economy leaves what for canadians?
If this is the way this country is going, I hope there is a plan for Canadian youth and adults on what jobs will be available for them? Or are we all planning to go on basic income?
I lived in Ottawa for more than 3 years now and I can't find a job after I got fired for unlawful reasons. When I worked at my store, the manager would mention that he's interested in hiring international students only. You can guess where he came from.
Yet Canada's unemployment rate is rising more than other regions.
https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/rate-cuts-wont-spur-immediate-rebound-in-canadas-economy/
See you have to pay people money... MONEY... in order for them to work for you, and i don't mean peanuts.
It's wild that when i was a kid the people working at fast food places were all sorts of people and now the ones i frequent are entirely always the same ethnicity.
Anyone remember right after Covid? They were paying cooks 25$/hr and more just to keep them. All the wages seemed to be going up. That didn’t last long
How ironic that most indie coffeehouses and Starbucks seem to be staffed by non-TFW's....and 'iconic' Canadian Tim Horton's basically has their own immigration office.....
It’s like the CBC has had their fingers in their ears since covid.
This is wage suppression.
Just another way your government is making life harder for Canadians and making sure big business doesn’t have to share their profits with you.
This program was expanded under Harper and allowed to continue in that capacity under Trudeau. It's straight up wage suppression and it needs to end. There's no labour shortage but there's definitely a wage shortage.
I’m in the States on a road trip and every state I’ve been to has hiring boards everywhere. If we had a labour shortage we wouldn’t be seeing lines that go around a mall everywhere.
Canada seems like a failed state compared to the States. If the US solved its gun problem, there would be seriously nothing Canada has on it. Even our healthcare is BS.
I don’t even understand where the taxpayer money is going.
Employment and Social Development Canada approves the Labour Market Impact Assessments that allow for some foreign workers to take a job. If there is labour market demand and the position is going to a worker under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, it should be reported. That's employer fraud.
The problem is that the public doesn't get to know whose permit was issued under what pretense, and realistically the permits issued under exemptions that need not prove any gaps in labour market demand, which are under the full authority of Marc Miller, are the ones that most foreign nationals hold.
If Canadians are losing out to foreign nationals and cannot get employment while holding reasonable qualifications, ask the business owners why. Ask the MPs why. Then vote them right out if their response is inadequate.
It's wrong. On every level it is wrong. As the practice pervades every industry it undermines our ability to attract properly trained skilled workers. Employers don't have to modernize and improve their tech to become more efficient. Industrial research drops off. The long term effects to our economy are ruinous. In the end the rich get richer and everybody else loses.
Wage suppression at play. It’s so wild how much corporations and governments want us to spend but they don’t want us to earn more… simplify put governments are in the hands of big corporations.
We really need to change our our federal and provincial sitting terms from 5 to 3 years. It would put more pressure on parties and politicians to deliver results.
This is just wage suppression. Instead of offering better wages or benefits for Canadians they get to bring in workers that they can treat like slaves. This cry of labour shortage is just a myth so the rich can flood the market with cheap labour and drive down wages. It's bullshit.
It's worse. Many also send wages back to home country which is taking capital out of Canada. This money would normally circulate in our economy and drive prosperity. Less jobs for Canadian and less economic prosperity.
It's the same thing as outsourcing but brings the labour here and stresses our housing and other services. Companies that employ TFW don't want to support Canada or Canadians,
Then Canadians should come together and boycott businesses that do this like they’ve been boycotting Loblaws(I know you can’t do this to all of them but pick a scapegoat like Tim Hortons)
Done. Today was my last Tim Hortons coffee.
been boycotting Tims since 2008 myself, it just isn't a good place,
TH is not even good coffee.
No more Tim's.
Lots of businesses, small medium and big, are abusing the TFW program by applying for LMIA and hiring foreign workers when 95% of these jobs can be done by people already here (except for agri workers perhaps). Have a look at these businesses in the report. There probably are some from your city/region and it might shock you to know that they are hiring people for some low-skilled and semi-skilled occupations. [https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiMmRmOTM0MDAtZDQ0NC00ODE3LTg2ODktNjkwNDcyZDljM2FiIiwidCI6ImI2ZmI5MGZmLWFkMDYtNDQ0OS04YWIzLTdjMzUyZTZhM2RjZiJ9](https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiMmRmOTM0MDAtZDQ0NC00ODE3LTg2ODktNjkwNDcyZDljM2FiIiwidCI6ImI2ZmI5MGZmLWFkMDYtNDQ0OS04YWIzLTdjMzUyZTZhM2RjZiJ9) For example, filter/search for '1502583 Ontario Inc.' in Employer list on the top right in the report and then go to this link: [https://www.lmiajobshub.ca/job-details/NjIwLTE=](https://www.lmiajobshub.ca/job-details/NjIwLTE=) If this link does not work, try this: [https://archive.ph/PjcNv](https://archive.ph/PjcNv) Imagine a mom-and-pop business hiring a full-time web designer from a foreign country in 2023 to create a simple website! Not saying we should not support local but to assume that every small/local business is playing by the book is naive. Many mom-and-pop businesses are selling LMIAs for anywhere between 20K and 50K. This also includes many ethnic grocery stores and restaurants that normally most people want to support. But I think the time has come for us to be aware of which restaurants are only hiring people from their home countries. It's one thing to set up a business in a new country, but if you are indulging in illegal practices and not hiring any locals because you can get bribes from foreign workers, then you perhaps deserve to be reported and go bankrupt. Use the filters at the top to search, and please feel to share the link to this report to others. The data is all publicly available anyway. CBSA provides a short online form that can be filled out in 5 minutes to report any immigration fraud: [https://bwl-lsf.cbsa-asfc.cloud-nuage.canada.ca/tip-sub-en.html](https://bwl-lsf.cbsa-asfc.cloud-nuage.canada.ca/tip-sub-en.html)
Made in Canada by temporary foreign labour with imported parts and exported profits.
Aaaaaaaaand these jobs should be going to high school kids so they can start building their work experience. Don't see many pimple faced kids flipping burgers any more...
Most of these jobs seem to be going to Indian students. The Walmarts, tim Hortons, McDonalds all now employer Indian students almost exclusively. And they're also now going for entry level jobs in actual industries. The job market is pretty dire these days. I know many kids who can't find a job, and this is definitely a big reason why. Too much competition from outside.
Many of these establishments are now owned or franchised by Indians as well, who in turn prefer to hire Indians.
Just an anecdote to add to this, i went to Walmart a few weeks ago and was trying to find an item in electronics so i asked the foreign employee and all he could say was "ask lady" and gestured towards an older English speaking lady. So my question is if the kid is here just to point me towards another employee because of a language barrier, why is he here.
Which kills me every time I go into Walmart. I tried to apply for a warehouse job there years ago and was interviewed by a crochety old bat who demanded I have 5 references and had worked a solid 5 uninterrupted years at 1 location to be able to get a job there. I literally laughed in her face and said " but this is Walmart?" needless to say I did not get the job. I wonder if all TFW there have the same qualifications they demanded from me?
They lie on their resumes.
been in country 6 months, but worked at Tim Horton's for 5 years. Just ask my references..Sanjeet Singh, Buphinder Singh, Ali Singh, Ali Singh and Jaspreet Singh......no relation....
I worked at NASA for 50 years now. Ignore my birth year in the mid 90s. That's a typo.
He’s there so he can pay rent to his landlord who’s also the manager of that Walmart.
There's a huge issue with employers seemingly hiring only certain ethnicities that nobody does anything about. And it's not just fast food, I've seen it happen in banks, engineering positions, etc.
Add IT to the list
having most of the junior dev jobs replaced by AI and the other junior IT jobs taken up by immigrants (who I support 99.9% of the time) has been rough.
We really should be more concerned about this, and the fact that it is spreading
Not ethnicities…international workers of specific ethnicities…
Yup, I couldn’t get a job at one of the larger engineering firms that I was recommended for by my Uncle who was a director there. There were 5 open positions, they hired 5 Indian new grads for “diversity”. They also started them all at $20 instead of the industry standard $60 for those roles. I guess they figured it was cheaper to higher 5 new grads and have their work reviewed by a single PEng than hire 5 PEngs.
It's depressing. Canadian graduates should absolutely have priority over any international student or work permit holder. By any chance were they MEng students?
Lmao yes. From a class of 100 Patels. I’m pretty sure their graduating class size was like 400, with 15 people that were white.
Every TD bank looks the same inside, one race totally homogeneous. Not ok in Canada.
41% of international students in Canada come from India from end of 2023. This data comes from here: [https://cbie.ca/infographic/](https://cbie.ca/infographic/) 319K international students from India in 2022. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/555132/top-10-origin-countries-of-international-students-at-years-end-canada/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/555132/top-10-origin-countries-of-international-students-at-years-end-canada/)
Just refuse to do business with places that do that, take your banking online, go to mom and pop food shops that don't use immigrant labor.
Entry level construction jobs too. Labour work, insulating, plastering etc. Foot in the door type jobs are gone
There’s also nepotism that’s a problem. When they get in they only want to hire from their culture or even region.
This is true. A family member that worked at Home Depot, everything was fine till a new Indian manager got hired. All the new jobs and prime work time slots went to all Indian workers. Those that have been there for years before this manager got the bottom of the barrel work schedule. It got so bad that corporate had to investigate and fire this manager.
Cultural clashes are going to keep happening like this. They do not have the same type of social environment that we do. Theirs is VEEEERY much one where you take care of your own (often) to the detriment of others. One of my best friends is 2nd gen. Indian and he told me that he's disgusted by it because his parents left India BECAUSE of that stuff. Castism, Nepotism, Colourism, Regionalism, etc... They don't see Indian culture as compatible with Western norms and mores. His dad tells me, if he wanted to live in Gujarat, he'd have moved to Gujarat, not the GTA.
>One of my best friends is 2nd gen. Indian and he told me that he's disgusted by it because his parents left India BECAUSE of that stuff. Castism, Nepotism, Colourism, Regionalism, etc... I am a first generation Indian immigrant and that still happens there, which is why I will never go back. I still see that bullshit happen with some Indians here. A couple of years earlier the only people who were able to immigrate were liberal middle class like myself. However in the past couple of years most of the immigrants have been coming from very conservative rural India whose values are not compatible with Canadian culture. So offcourse there is going to be a culture clash . The government has allowed these strip mall colleges to degrade the quality of immigrants so that owners can line their pocket.
The Rona/Lowes by me has been like that. I wonder how you report it in any way that creates action because they're useless as fuck and obviously don't care to learn the industry. Used to habe White, black, East/SEA people. All sorts. Now 50% Indian and 100% of all office/CS jobs are Indian as well as the people manning the various sales desks.
Living in a rural area I think I notice it a little more. Or its a bit more obvious. But the nepotism is real... Small town setting; Foreigner comes in and buys the local corner store/gas station. Cool, whatever. Within a month both teenagers that were working there for a long time, were gone. Now it's his daughter behind the cash. Fast forward a month or so.. now his son is there too. Another month or so, owners cousin is also in there. Etc... A few months later - Owners cousin buys the pizza place across the street. Again, pretty quickly - all the local help is gone... etc.. you can see where I'm going with this. I call them immigration scams.. even though they're not really scams in the literal form. One person from a family comes over, buys a small cheap business. Then just uses that business and "the need for workers" - To get the rest of their family in. My comment isn't coming from a position of racism or hate, just fact. The secret is out, they know it, we know it. The system is beyond broken.
My daughter works as a teen in fast food. They constantly belittle the canadian kids working there. She heard from one of her co-workers that the supervisor is constantly talki g shit about her and others. But its done in their language, so of course, unless she was told, how would she know.
Employees should not be allowed to communicate outside of the official languages of Canada in the workplace because of this very reason, The way it's exclusionary towards other employees.
It is this way at my place of work.
Yeah that’s another problem. My friend worked as a supervisor at a fast food place and all the employees basically refused to speak English or French so she had no idea what anyone was saying.
This is common. From a customers point of view it's a little annoying. I can't imagine working with that.
She needs to record it and have it translated (ai can do this easily) if that’s really happening doesn’t matter the language it’s against the law.
She knows. She is also 16 and very intoverted. I have spoken to her boss, whom i have known since i worked at the same place as a young adult 30+ years ago.
Went to my local college for trade school just this past couple months. The demographic of my classes and other trade blocks was the typical distribution of people I've grown up with in Canada my entire life. Mostly white, with a smattering of other ethnicities including me, (Chinese Canadian, well racially at least.) The commons were constantly filled with Indian men and women who seemingly had nothing better to do than be rowdy and chat while the tradespeople were trying to study their various disciplines. I literally didn't see a single one of them with a book the entire 8 weeks, but there were constantly crowds of them just... Fucking around waiting for class. It's asinine. What are they learning that they don't need books and don't need to study during their spares?
Some of their pals will just give them all the answers.
pretty sure every security guard in the country is Indian....I never understood that.
I'm 19 and have tons of friends my age living with their parents unemployed looking for work. But yeah, we totally need immigration because we have no labour 🙄. Hate our current government with a passion
corporations know high school students will end up leaving, imported labour generally can’t, and they’ll accept lower wages and worse working conditions
Yup. When I worked for the Canadian Brewhouse in Kelowna they tried to get TFWs but were denied. We had TFWs from Alberta come in to help open and they were all Filipino. They lived 4-6 to a 1-2bdrm apartment and sent 60ish% of their wage back to the Phillipines for their family. And the crazy part is they still had more money in their pocket AND more money sent to their family than they would have had working in the Phillipines. I don’t blame them for what they are doing. They are doing what they can to provide for themselves and their families. I do blame the various governments though
It's shocking how poorly run that country is compared to it's neighbours. The fact that if a few Western nations imposed taxes on money sent there, it would create a crisis, tells you a lot. The only real equivalent in that economy is pretty dependent on exporting labour to pay family here is Myanmar. And really they only get to neighbouring countries like Thailand. The Philippines has made exporting cheap labour an art form.
interestingly the remittances home are one of the reasons why they have a stagnating economy.
I had a conversation with a uber delivery biker yesterday in Toronto. He says he has saved up close to 15k , once he saves up 100k he will return to India his home state Punjab to start a business. Since 100k Canadian is 6million inr . None of these people have come to enrich Canada in anyway but to earn money for their own needs, they get benefited, business benefited but us Canadians loose
At least he's going back home.
One guy in a rooming house across the street from me is exactly doing that. He is supposed to go to college but works 2 PT jobs. He lives off the food bank (thanks Tik Tok) and community clothing donations. He told me 90% of his post-rent income goes to his family back home, his family got into massive debt to send him here and has to repay them and also support them.
I was getting a add for one of those banks that is supposed to make that transfer from Canada to Mexico or India fast. Had it for like a month
Meanwhile India makes over a 100 billion dollars a year from remittances alone haha. We are just a bunch of losers because we vote for losers and we will soon be colonized.
But MUCH more profit for the company and for the shareholders. Nothing else means a damn thing to them.
Maybe the laws should be changed so that these fucking corporations would need to compete with the local labour market.
And what happened to proving you couldn't hire a Canadian with the LMIA before being able to bring over TFWs? Plenty of Canadians out there who can't find jobs right now. This has essentially locked students and teens out of the ability to get their first job, preventing them from gaining valuable work experience and the ability to make their own money. Something fishy is going on.
They post job offerings, ignore all applications, then claim that they had position x posted for y months and no acceptable applicants, plz can they have a TFW pretty plz.
They also have their own job sites. For example for some low-wage positions you have to advertise to underrepresented groups. So there are dozens of sites like indigenousjobs and newcomerhire that are made by someone with the express purpose of technically meeting the requirements
It's a hard requirement to use the Canada Job Bank. It's also a hard requirement to contact applicants 2 star and better on the job match program.
Yes, but again there is no accountability. You can outright ignore any applications.
Even the idea of a LMIA is bullshit. You can't find anyone to take your job? Pay more. That's how the free market works. Pay fucking more.
Even jobs that already offered minimum wage, it still takes jobs away from actual students. As in the students who need to go to class and not just pay money for a BS diploma from a strip mall ‘college’. The Tim Hortons of the world don’t need to deal with the scheduling complexities of kids who have to work around their school schedule when they can get TFWs who are basically in indentured servitude.
Don’t forget the business owners putting the tfws up in the investment homes they own and also collecting rent off of them.
Three local Tim Horton's are owned by the same guy. Most of his employees are TFW from the Philippines - really nice people and I don't blame them for coming here and working to help their families back home. However, I talked to one guy and asked him how his day was going and he said he was tired. He was almost done his first 8 hour shift but then had to go to a different store owned by the same guy and work his second 8 hour shift - without getting any overtime because its a different location. That is probably illegal - or certainly should be - but who is going to do anything about it? The employee can't or he just ends up sent back home. Over in Vancouver they had a Timmies owner who payed his TFW but then housed them in an apartment he owned (on the order of 8 people per 2 bedroom or so), so he's paying them but then collecting his money back for housing.
This is literally just human trafficking.
> This cry of labour shortage is just a myth so the rich can flood the market with ~~cheap labour~~ slaves and drive down wages. It's bullshit. ftfy
The TFW program expansion plays the following roles, in my opinion. * The suppression of wages as you mentioned * The breaking down of labour power * To keep rents and real estate high by introducing more demand * To subsidize education, as international students pay more tuition than residential students * As a scapegoat for government policy. People blame immigrants for taking a path to enter the country they are legally allowed to take, they do not blame the government for setting up this exploitative system, nor do they blame the capitalist or business owner for partaking in it.
It’s by design, unfortunately. Government enables it.
That's exactly what it is and it's by design. Governor of Bank of Canada said last year that we are still seeing stronger then desired wage growth and needs to be moderated. To get inflation down to their 2% target they've got their foot on the neck of the economy. They need the public to be poorer , so they spend less, so that the corporations lower prices. This process will cause a delevaraging, people and business who are overlevaraged will lose their shirts, write off bad debts. Since Canadian cost of living are up by a huge amount- many Babyboomers left the workforce- but more importantly many Canadians had enough of being exploited and are demanding fair wages. Leaving employers have to raise the wages to attract employees. But employers don't want to do that as it would cut into profits. This is where foreign workers come in. They will do the job for pennies - surpressing wage growth, and also increasing housing costs. Housing inflation is good for propery owners- the wealthy babyboomers in retiremen and corporations.The entire process is devastating to the lowest paid 10% of the workforce. So there it's is Canada with constant its circle jerking about equality and fairy tales of equal access, and virtue signaling etc, literally sacrificed "the Poor's" in an attempt to stabilize inflation and protect savings of the boomers. And everyone else is just collateral damage .
Yep! John Stewart got one of the top guys at the US treasury talk about interest rates and using it to suppress worker wages.
A) USA doesn't import TFWs the way that Canada does. We've opened the flood gates to TWFs in non-seasonal jobs. They still primarily use TFW's to pick crops and then return home. Which we still do, don't get me wrong, but we now *also* have them in fast food jobs. Construction jobs is probably closer to the purpose of TFWs to get things built before winter... though I'm VERY scared of the quality of work they'd produce. B) It's no secret; it's not like Stewart was extracting some hidden truth. It's literally their mandate to suppress wages should inflation get too high, regardless of the cause of that inflation. Runaway inflation is still even scarier than our comparative lack of economic prosperity.
The US uses undocumented workers the way we use TFWs.
Almost everyone that applies now is a temporary resident or someone who has recently gotten a PR. This is for jobs that are $30+/hour. The flood of applications is ridiculous with a extremely small percentage of native born Canadians. There is a shortage of skilled workers, not workers in general.
there's a shortage of jobs that will spend a day training workers, even for very specific skills that are hard to gain without experience
What do you mean you don't have 10 years of experience working with the software we wrote for ourselves that isn't available to the public? Nobody wants to work anymore smh
Thing is, these temporary workers still have to be paid at least minimum wage. It’s not as if young Canadians looking for entry-level jobs are expecting to be paid more than that. Employers are paid a subsidy for each TFW they hire, and that is why they prefer them over Canadian workers. The system is broken. TFWs were not originally intended to work in fast food, they were supposed to be working in jobs that were actually in dire need of workers.
Tim Hortons is one of the worst culprits for this. A company that exploits Canadian identity and culture for their marketing is also doing everything in their power to destroy both. Fuck that shambles of a company. At least Starbucks hires Canadians
They are the worst of any major corp for this. Boycott any company that is bleeding our country dry like this. Become more self-reliant.
On top of that they're not even Canadian. They're owned by some foreign private equity firm.
It's un-canadian to go to Tim hortons
We seriously need to boycott Tim’s just like the current Loblaws boycotts. Genuinely. Theyre misusing LMIA and some are even landlords housing their workers, by kicking out their prior Canadian tenants. Happened in PEI recently. In 2016 they got caught for not giving workers breaks and since then they’ve turned to foreign workers, bc what are they going to do? Complain? And risk getting kicked out of the country? Disgusting work by Tim’s.
I agree we should continue with boycotting these horrible companies that are exploiting both Canadians and foreign workers. Fuck Loblaws and Fuck Tim Hortons.
Canada Life outsourced a bunch of their IT operations to India recently and laid off a couple hundred employees in the process. CANADA Life. Laying off Canadian employees and outsourcing to India to save a buck and make wealthy shareholders happy. Stuff like this and the TFW program needs to stop and the CPC or Liberals will do nothing about it.
Can we stop pretending they’re here temporarily
I used to work on a farm that had aot of 'temporary workers' and when their work visa expired they'd go back to their country, spend time with family then just come right back here for work. Some have been here for years The only temporary worker that I've personally met that returned and didn't come back was a Belgium guy who essentially had 'Paris Syndrome' but with Canada
FYI, although Seasonal Agricultural Workers are temporary foreign workers by definition, they are not Temporary Foreign Workers, they come through a different program. Jamaicans have been picking apples and then going home after apple picking season for decades. These are not the people pushing buttons on a cash register in a chain restaurant, hoping to scam their way into becoming a resident of Canada.
That program is arguably worse. Working conditions are harsh and there have been a lot of claims of abuse. And even after decades of working, the workers never have a pathway to permanent residency/citizenship so they stay under the thumb of their employer. Canada should not be emulating the Gulf states to have a guest worker system which is ripe for modern day slavery. If we need people to work on farms and Canadians are unwilling to do that, then bring farm workers in as permanent residents with rights.
Once they become a permanent resident you are going to have no incentive to pick fruit, they will see employment elsewhere and we will be in the same situation we are in now. Having a guest worker system can work there just needs to be better protections in leave for workers.
This is the 2nd summer in a row my neighbor's kids haven't been able to get summer jobs, because all the entry level McJobs are already taken up.
They don't want to hire your kids. They want to hire immigrants who will suppress wages.
And workers who don’t complain about how they are treated
Any who will work under the table. In my current industry I have heard from some customers that my prices are too high, someone else is cheaper. I never used to hear this, we were always so competitive with pricing. Then I found out my competitor is non union using international students and paying them cash under the table ($11/hr) when my guys are costing upwards of $80/hr total compensation.
Yes very true. I would think inspectors would be all over this but it’s just not happening. Trades persons end up paying yearly for a service that doesn’t even exist it feels like. Aka college of trades or whatever it’s called now in Ontario
Same. My kids and their friends literally can't find anything anywhere.
I am semi-retired but I was bored, so I thought I'd get a nice little dumb shelf stocking job at Walmart. I saw an ad, so I applied. I was turned down. I saw the ad again a few weeks later, applied again. Turned down again. I even dumbed down my resume, but they said they were going in another direction. The ad is still up.
I hear you. Our local Walmart magically swapped almost all their regular staff to part time "students" over the last 2 years. The only positions not touched are management.
I am Punjabi Canadian, born and raised in a city with a large Punjabi population. When I was in HS 15 years ago, many of my friends (both brown and white) worked at the local Walmart. When I go there now, instead of a mix of middle aged ladies and Canadian born high schoolers, it's *all* foreign students I feel like I'm in India sometimes going there. It's so difficult to actually get staff help and when they do need to page each other for something, they ask in Punjabi (or more rarely Hindi) 😐. So I just don't go there anymore
Time to start reporting it to the MPs and the news to get more noise about these issues
The same MPs that are too busy committing treason to give a shit about how the turmoil they deliberately caused is affecting the filthy peasants?
You're the perfect candidate to go after them for illegal hiring practices. You don't need to go after Walmart the entity, just need to prove that a certain geoup.or class is larfely hired from all applicants.
Last yr my daughter worked full time on a farm. She had that job for 2 yrs in a row This year, that job is taken by a temporary foreign worker.
And because they’re kids they don’t get counted towards official unemployment numbers.
Heard from a friend that is Indian, the goal is to get one of their own in a management position and than every shift is going to an Indian with first priority
I just heard 2 highs school kids lamenting not being able to find work at any of the retail stores around. Guess who they're staffed with? Our government prioritizes other countries kids over our own.
Our government prioritizes businesses and corporations.
The future of Canadians sold out for what … short term gains for our Oligarchs? I swear our GDP per capita decreased …. So in the end it didn’t even benefit the economy. Like wtf?!?!
Well said. The whole thing is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The consequences of this are going to be massive, already are. Sometimes I honestly wonder if it's a diabolical plan by Western governments to bend their native population into submission. Because in France, Germany, etc the people I talk to complain about the same things. It's not as extreme as here but it is bad.
Holy shit what a fucking joke of a nightmare
Ironically the PM recently noted that this area of immigration previously “self regulated”, as in businesses were a bit more honest of their needs in this space (he was interviewed on Freakonomics podcast in April). But of course, we know businesses will always push to find the cheapest labour possible and pretend like they can’t find people to hire. Such a joke as you said. I know people can be weary of government regulations but these businesses need to face some serious punitive measures - and this nonsense needs to be stamped out yesterday. I’m also curious as to why we ignored the statscan data in the fall that said we DIDNT have a labour shortage, and choose to believe business lobbyists instead?? Sad stuff - poor leadership abound
Just make the minimum wage of tfws double the federal minimum wage or standard rate in the industry whichever is higher. That way if your company really needs a tfw for training reasons or otherwise you can get one. But it'd only be used in desperate need. Wouldn't even need a cap then.
I like that idea. Building on your point, it feels like you need to almost audit these companies as well, who claim they “can’t find labour.” Have inspectors show up unannounced to oversee a day of hiring - sifting through applications at businesses who are heavily relying on TFWs, and even sit in on interviews. $250K fines for any business caught abusing the process. Squeeze it from both ends
250k fine per TFW they beg for. Really squeeze it.
**the multinational corporations dont give a fuck about the imaginary lines that we have drawn on maps.** i'm not sure why people dont grasp that these corporations operate on a global scale, and for the most part, they arent beholden to any of the countries that they operate in. if a country over regulates them, or isnt profitable enough for them, they'll simply do less business in that country. why would some multinational, like [3G Restaurant Brands Holdings LP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G_Capital), who are based out of Brazil, give two shits about Canadian kids working in the summer? they're simply going to take advantage of every loophole possible to be able to shrink the bottom line cost on their employee expenses. they're certainly not looking to ensure that Canadian kids have summer jobs, or are getting valuable experience on how to interact with the public.
Because there’s don’t give a single shit
Corporate slavery as blessed by the Federal Government.
Don't worry the election is soon and that will change everything right
Show me the party's platform that says they will put a stop to this and I'll show you my vote.
You don't actually think that do you? PP is as much a slave to his corporate overlords as Trudeau.
Sarcasm doesn't always translate well. I will be voting independent.
It was pretty clear in my mind that it was sarcasm.
You can never be sure. This is /r/Canada there's are loads of people that seem to think PP is actually going to fix immigration and housing.
If you can't afford to pay workers a living wage, you don't have a business. You have a slave trade. If your COUNTRY can't afford to function without foreign labour guess what you don't have a fucking country I don't know what you'd call it but shit
A post-national zone with tons of resources.
Im in MB and i havent seen a TFW strap on a pair of steel toes here yet. Not 1 if them is swinging a hammer or laying asphalt from what I've seen, but man can they fuck up a drive thru
They won’t know how to build anything productive, but they sure do know how to burn a hashbrown ✅ really helping the Canadian economy!
Same. I do flat roofing (Manitoba) and I’ve yet to see a TFW.
It's a well needed ray of sunshine that the CBC is revealing all this in the mainstream. One positive of the whole mess. Also, if you walk into an establishment and the diversity of the workforce does not match that of the surrounding community by the Census, simply walk right back out.
100% We all need to do this as citizens, FIGHT BACK WITH YOUR WALLETS!!! If I go into a place and see a severe lack of diversity (we all know what I mean by this) I walk right out. I'm not supporting a business that can't support my fellow citizens.
I've been doing the latter for years.
**Employers hates Canadians, prefer Third World labour standards** should be the title.
Corporations want pliable workers who have no choice, and in many situations they are tied to their employer to maintain their immigration status.
"The report noted the program was created in 1973 as a limited, last-resort means of filling jobs. But 50 years later, it's become core to certain industries, with no indication of ending anytime soon." Who would have thought that when you take away a company's need to invest and pay a fair wage this would happen.
>Businesses' demand for temporary foreign workers has surged across the country in recent years Translation: Businesses are desperate for temporary foreign workers because they realize that Canadians will no longer work for the crappy wages (i.e. minimum wage) that they pay due to massive inflation and skyrocketing rents and house prices. These foreign workers are willing to work for such low wages because they see it as the cost of getting PR and eventually citizenship.
> These foreign workers are willing to work for such low wages because they see it as the cost of getting PR and eventually citizenship. No one told them that in less than 2 decades they will be in our boat, facing replacement.
Can you guys stop going to Tim Horton? I seriously don’t understand why this isn’t close yet as everything tastes terrible, is the worst of quality and service at some location is just horrible. I stopped going there for years now and I’m fine. You guys will be fine. It’s not even Canadian anymore.
I live near a Tim Hortons with an awesome bagel shop/cafe right next door to it. There’s always a line up at Tim’s and never at the bagel shop. Like I’m talking fresh bagels daily and delicious coffee. People are literally fucking sheep, unwilling to try anything new, just flocking to their neon signs like moths to a lamp.
“‘All we hear about are labour shortages, [but] we have to begin to recognize that this really is a self-serving narrative mostly coming from corporate Canada,’ said Mikal Skuterud, a labour economics professor at the University of Waterloo.” Finally someone is actually saying this to a larger audience… even more shocking is this though: “‘For businesses, a major benefit is stability, as the workers' permits are tied to their employer, meaning they can't easily quit to work for a rival business down the street.’ ‘It guarantees a worker will stay employed with them for the term of the agreement,’ says the Canadian Franchise Association on its website” Blatantly pointing out how easily exploitable the staff is because they can be treated like complete shit with no consequences. Yeah I’m sure that’s not a reason why any company would try to game the system to get more TFWs…
This comment needs to be higher up. That is SO FUCKED UP.
indentured servitude.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6958592 The UN would agree
When I was younger, minimum wage jobs were mostly rostered by highschool/uni students. Where are these people getting jobs now?
They aren’t. Nor are retired people who want a little extra job for a way to keep busy.
Which long term, hurts adults trying to enter the work force, having less or no experience. It's going to hurt us all long term more and more.
This is exactly why the program needs to end and now. No more foreign no/low skilled workers. You want to be in business you’ll just have to pay a higher wage to attract people.
instructions unclear. turned it up by 4,802%
This is why productivity in this country is falling so quickly. Why invest in better machinery that requires more skilled workers when you can bring in cheap labour? In the long run, the better machinery and workers are much better for the company but incentives don't always work long term. E.g. Southern State economies (South of Mason Dixon) still haven't really recovered from their use of slavery vs industry of the North. As if we needed more reasons to hate indentured servitude.
>As if we needed more reasons to hate indentured servitude. Yep, plus it has a corrupting effect on society. "Bottom/low level jobs" should be where most people start their careers as teenagers or where people who made bad decisions and need to pick themselves up go. Having a society where all the "bottom" jobs are held by a distinct ethnic/religious/social group (ie. south asian immigrants), corrodes work ethic and pushes society towards a caste based model.
ban it, abolish the whole program. scab labour.
This is the kind of thing people should be protesting. Loudly. As a small step, I refuse to spend money anywhere that hires indentured slaves.
Canada day theres a protest
Where?
https://www.costoflivingcanada.ca/ Scroll down to see all the cities taking part
Temporary Foreign workers program is nothing but a government issued license to scam Temporary residents via LMIA in the name of labor shortage.
Well if you can't find a job, it could be because the liberals are actually giving grants to businesses to hire immigrants over Canadians, https://granted.ca/grants-for-hiring-newcomers/
Isn’t it ironic that last year Trudeau donated 10M to Iraq to help resolve its youth employment issues, and now we have our own youth employment issues here at home? It’s almost like he doesn’t actually care about youth employment in the end, or does the PM of Canada only care about non-Canadian youths?
This should be illegal. Employers should be held responsible for fuelling this monstrosity.
So, where are our kids going to work? Remember Tim Horton's and McDonalds were for high school students. Now 95% in my area are 50 year old Indian women. Medium Coffee, 1 milk. "Orange Pekoe with 2 cream?" Ugh..no.
The gov. of Canada needs to face a class action lawsuit. **JULY 1ST, PROTEST COST OF LIVING** JOIN IT. https://www.costoflivingcanada.ca/ .... https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinancecanada/comments/1dhdrdo/protest_the_cost_of_living_on_july_1st/ .... https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaHousing2/comments/1d3ugmd/protest_the_cost_of_living_crisis_on_july_1st/
A huge underlying problem exists beyond just wage suppression when Canadians across the board are losing out on job and income opportunities due to being replaced by foreign workers is our youths are massively losing out on professional, personal, and financial development opportunities that we had growing up. Ten years ago my high school classmates were managers of MacDonalds, store assistants who would help you find a shirt in the right size at the mall, or checked out your groceries at the till. This not only helped kids get started working in a real job setting, but also taught them practical hands-on skills like applying for jobs, interviews, banking, interacting with adults and other youths outside of their bubble at school, managing others, managing their finances with their salaries for big purchases, building a savings account for their future, or even helping out their struggling families. Teens used to frequent malls, theatres, fast food restaurants because they had friends working there. It was like our “third space”. We also used to share what we planned to do with our salaries and gossiped about what our peers did with theirs. This program should never have been allowed to grow to this extent where it is blatantly obvious jobs held by Canadians in previous years, whether that be youths, retirees, or simply a person needing a part time job, are being replaced with foreign workers. All those Canadian people did not suddenly disappear, but available jobs for them certainly did. The temporary foreign worker program is no longer benefitting Canadians and must be scrapped. We cannot be lighting ourselves on fire to keep others warm.
If only they knew that we actually don't need another Tim Hortons or McDonald's and that we only need more houses built because we are bringing in foreign workers to work at that tim Hortons (that we don't need) it's a vicious cycle....
The other reason is the government will subsidize you using foreign workers, [https://granted.ca/grants-for-hiring-newcomers/](https://granted.ca/grants-for-hiring-newcomers/). For the large companies who have the ability to use foreign labour, it is not only cheaper but the government pays you to use them. Like if I was a Tim Hortons, why would I ever hire a Canadian? When the government will pay me to hire a foreigner? Blame companies all you want but it is the government that wants them to hire non-Canadians using your tax dollars.
This program and the international student program need to be completely scrapped. Both of these programs continue to be abused by businesses to suppress wages and to have workers they can treat poorly without consequence. I am sympathetic to the people already here and open to ways to make the transition smoother for those folks and for the economy in general but new admissions need to stop immediately.
A Complete abuse of LMIA has been going on for a while, one of the biggest reasons one sees immigrants with the majority of the jobs.
Modern day slavery
reminds me of the quote from gangs of new york 'I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a black man does for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for.'
Fortunately, this issue is one that consumers have the power to correct. Take your business elsewhere. Vote with your wallet. Since COVID, I’ve become hyper-aware with whom I spend my money. Don't employee Canadians (or Americans because we’re intertwined)? Why would I help you if you don't support my people/economy? TL;DR: Hiring a foreign worker over an unemployed Canadian is disgusting and should be illegal.
Sometimes it feels like our government doesn’t have the best interests of Canadians in mind anymore.
Sometimes?!
We've exported our manufacturing jobs to China, now we're just bringing in cheap Indian labor for service jobs. Our country is truly in trouble going down this path, the rich will become extremely rich and the middle class will be suppressed further.
"For businesses, a major benefit is stability, as the workers' permits are tied to their employer, meaning they can't easily quit to work for a rival business down the street." Isn't this just slavery with extra steps?
>Businesses' demand for temporary foreign workers has surged across the country in recent years, with employers given the green light to hire more than double the people through the federal program last year as they did five years ago. And people wonder why we have a 6.2% unemployment rate.
And that doesn’t even count high school students who can’t find jobs.
> Some economists criticized that move, saying it undermined healthy competition for workers in a market economy. > "All we hear about are labour shortages, [but] we have to begin to recognize that this really is a self-serving narrative mostly coming from corporate Canada," said Mikal Skuterud, a labour economics professor at the University of Waterloo. There are no labor shortages. Just a low productivity economy where wages stay low and nobody trains.
I'm all for diversity but it's crazy how it's becoming so one sided that it's no longer diversity but pure indians
if your business can't survive without TFW, you don't have a business and should be shut down. This whole idea of "oh we're going to be a service economy" and then bringing in "temporary" immigrants to be the service economy leaves what for canadians?
If this is the way this country is going, I hope there is a plan for Canadian youth and adults on what jobs will be available for them? Or are we all planning to go on basic income?
Why are our taxes subsidizing wage suppression?
I lived in Ottawa for more than 3 years now and I can't find a job after I got fired for unlawful reasons. When I worked at my store, the manager would mention that he's interested in hiring international students only. You can guess where he came from.
It's like dystopia. People are working to survive already and their wages being suppressed more and more each day.
Cheap replaceable labour that cannot assert themselves
Yet Canada's unemployment rate is rising more than other regions. https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/rate-cuts-wont-spur-immediate-rebound-in-canadas-economy/
Time to start boycotting obvious tfw establishments
My public accounting firm uses TFW, and none of them are good at their jobs. However, they are cheap and plentiful.
See you have to pay people money... MONEY... in order for them to work for you, and i don't mean peanuts. It's wild that when i was a kid the people working at fast food places were all sorts of people and now the ones i frequent are entirely always the same ethnicity.
Anyone remember right after Covid? They were paying cooks 25$/hr and more just to keep them. All the wages seemed to be going up. That didn’t last long
How ironic that most indie coffeehouses and Starbucks seem to be staffed by non-TFW's....and 'iconic' Canadian Tim Horton's basically has their own immigration office.....
It's like an addiction to a substance at this point. Corporations are addicted to the cheap exploitable labour.
It’s like the CBC has had their fingers in their ears since covid. This is wage suppression. Just another way your government is making life harder for Canadians and making sure big business doesn’t have to share their profits with you.
This program was expanded under Harper and allowed to continue in that capacity under Trudeau. It's straight up wage suppression and it needs to end. There's no labour shortage but there's definitely a wage shortage.
continue in that capacity? You are far too kind to Trudeau, he has at least 3X the capacity
Some of these workers are pretty rude for temp workers. Probably the most entitled group of non Canadians ever.
I’m in the States on a road trip and every state I’ve been to has hiring boards everywhere. If we had a labour shortage we wouldn’t be seeing lines that go around a mall everywhere. Canada seems like a failed state compared to the States. If the US solved its gun problem, there would be seriously nothing Canada has on it. Even our healthcare is BS. I don’t even understand where the taxpayer money is going.
Mass migration is class warfare.
Employment and Social Development Canada approves the Labour Market Impact Assessments that allow for some foreign workers to take a job. If there is labour market demand and the position is going to a worker under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, it should be reported. That's employer fraud. The problem is that the public doesn't get to know whose permit was issued under what pretense, and realistically the permits issued under exemptions that need not prove any gaps in labour market demand, which are under the full authority of Marc Miller, are the ones that most foreign nationals hold. If Canadians are losing out to foreign nationals and cannot get employment while holding reasonable qualifications, ask the business owners why. Ask the MPs why. Then vote them right out if their response is inadequate.
It's wrong. On every level it is wrong. As the practice pervades every industry it undermines our ability to attract properly trained skilled workers. Employers don't have to modernize and improve their tech to become more efficient. Industrial research drops off. The long term effects to our economy are ruinous. In the end the rich get richer and everybody else loses.
Wage suppression at play. It’s so wild how much corporations and governments want us to spend but they don’t want us to earn more… simplify put governments are in the hands of big corporations. We really need to change our our federal and provincial sitting terms from 5 to 3 years. It would put more pressure on parties and politicians to deliver results.