Properly deployed, the TFWP and Express Entry program should be good for Canadian business and the Canadian economy.
The CBA’s Immigration Law Section took the opportunity offered by the federal government’s decision to review the TFWP to recommend improvements to both it and the Express Entry system.
“In recent years, the CBA Section has identified concerns with both the TFWP and EE,” the submission says, referring to letters and submissions dating back to 2009. “The CBA Section has concluded that aspects of these programs present significant barriers to Canadian workforce development and prosperity.”
As well as summarizing past concerns and offering recommendations for improvement, the most recent submission also references a report prepared by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce titled Immigration for a Competitive Canada: Why Highly Skilled International Talent is at Risk, which identifies many of the same issues.
“The actual design of the system has had negative effects across high-value growth sectors, from high-tech to financial services to academic research,” the Chamber’s report says. “Policy approaches that were born of suspicion, negativity and reprisal were applied to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and them similarly and in appropriately applied to Express Entry. For all the good work of government officials, the programs are falling short of their goals and creating inefficiencies within departments.”
Both groups point to the 2014 overhaul of the TFW program, undertaken in a highly politically charged atmosphere, as problematic. In the words of the CBA submission, “it introduced procedural and policy impediments that deterred the entry of temporary foreign workers altogether.”
“Proposed employer penalties risk unnecessarily stigmatizing those who employ TFWs,” the CBA said in a October 2014 letter to the director of the TFW program, which will perhaps have the unintended effect of encouraging businesses to take certain parts of their business offshore.
“This in turn will cause further losses for the Canadian labour market, including loss of tax revenues and loss of employment opportunities for Canadian citizens and permanent residents. It may also deter businesses from investing in Canada.”
A balance needs to be struck, it is apparent, between punishing those who would abuse the program and encouraging those who would benefit from it to use it.
For the system to work to the benefit of foreign workers and their would-be employers, its requirements need to be clear and predictable, responsive to labour market demands, and technologically up-to-date. The processing environment needs to focus on high service standards with “friendly and effective communication” by officers who are trained in the legislation and case law and whose discretion isn’t fettered “by treating guidelines as mandatory obligations rather than useful benchmarks for interpreting regulatory requirements.”
The CBA makes a total of 29 recommendations for improvements to the TFWP and EE programs, 17 of which focus directly on issues of compliance, consistency and transparency, an indication of the frustration immigration law practitioners and employers have with the system as it exists.