Ezra Levant clashes with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) over the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, arguing it masks a recession by inflating GDP with $115M/year asylum seekers—many from Nigeria, Venezuela, and Kenya—staying 113 days while displacing tourism jobs. He claims TFWs depress wages, citing 7.4% youth unemployment, and accuse employers of exploiting them, despite CFIB’s defense of strict LMIA rules and 94% compliance. While CFIB insists the program fills critical gaps in remote sectors like Jasper, Levant questions systemic abuse, including alleged bribes and TikTok claims of worker exploitation, leaving him skeptical but open to debate. [Automatically generated summary]
I debate the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
They're sending their national director to debate me on temporary foreign workers.
They like them.
I oppose them.
I'll let you be the judge.
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Tonight, I think Canada's economy is really starting to wobble.
It's September 5th, and this is the Esther Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
You know, I think it's getting harder out there.
This morning, I saw flyers being delivered in my neighborhood, and it's not a poor neighborhood.
And these flyers were advertising a restaurant where two people could eat for $20.
That's recession-style marketing.
I don't know if you know this, but we've actually been in a recession for the majority of the past three years.
A recession, to economists, is defined in a technical way where the GDP, the gross domestic product, that's all the goods and services, decline for two quarters in a row, two three-month periods in a row.
So, you know, that's everything that everyone earns and does and builds in the country.
So, if for two 90-day periods that number shrinks, you're in a recession.
But on a per capita basis, Canada has been in recession for actually about 10 quarters now.
There was eight in a row, and then there was a little blip back into a recession.
So, for more than two years, but most of the time, when you hear people talk about the GDP, they mean as a total number measured in billions or trillions for the whole country.
And here's the thing: Trudeau and now Mark Carney have been covering up the per capita recession that we've been in by bringing in literally millions of new migrants, most of them poor, by the way.
So, you and I, and every Canadian, on average, is getting poorer, have been for several years.
But Trudeau and now Carney is bringing in enough foreigners that although we're each getting a smaller slice of the pie, the pie itself grows a tiny bit just because millions of new people are brought in.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
You and I are poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer.
But to hide that statistic, they brought in millions of people so they could say, oh, no, no, the economy is growing.
There's more goods and services.
We are getting richer.
No, we're not.
On an average basis, on a per capita basis, we're all getting poorer.
I think it's a kind of deception.
If we had proper news coverage of the per capita recession of these past few years, I think the last election would have been a little bit different.
And that's the point, isn't it?
The media party is so insistent not to call it a recession on a per capita basis, which is the only one that would interest any individual Canadian.
I mean, what do you care if some other person does better economically?
You're doing worse.
You're personally not doing better, even though the gross economy grows a bit.
The media party has really hid this from Canadians, and it's another reason why they love mass immigration.
It allows them to hide how poorly our economy is doing for individual families.
There are a handful of new immigrants who are wealthy or who make the rest of us wealthy, who are very well educated and provide much-needed high-value goods and services.
I would think of a highly trained surgeon.
But they are in the tiny minority.
Most immigrants to Canada are either family reunification, including elderly grandparents for some reason, who will never contribute economically, but it will immediately get right in line for our free health care and pensions.
And then there's low-skilled migrant labor, every Tim Hortons in the country.
Refugees and Migrants00:02:58
And then there's outright refugees.
And of course, I put that in scare quotes: refugees because they're not real refugees.
There are no direct flights to Canada from any war-torn places in the world.
There just aren't.
Afghanistan or Syria or Somalia.
By the way, the civil war in Syria is over.
Millions of Syrian migrants are actually returning.
According to the UN, more than a million have gone back already from Lebanon and Turkey.
And the UN thinks there'll be another million coming.
Why don't we send our Syrian refugees home now that there is no more danger?
Anyways, anyone from those places had to go through a third country before coming here.
There just is no flight from Mogadishu to Toronto.
And international human rights law says you have to apply for refugee status in the first safe country you touch.
So by definition, none of these people are genuine.
A lot of them have just walked in from the United States.
We have hundreds of thousands of them, including about 5,000, who have now taken over a number of hotels in Niagara Falls, replacing the tourism economy there with a welfare economy paid for by you and me.
Here's some of David Menzies' report from about a month ago.
It is peak summertime tourism season in Niagara Falls, but get a load of this, folks.
At this hotel and several others in the city, there is literally no room at the end.
Oh, sure, the hotel is jam-packed, but not with tourists flush with cash, but rather with refugee claimants.
I can tell you, folks, there are about 16,000 hotel rooms in Niagara Falls, and some 2,000 of those rooms are currently housing about 5,000 asylum seekers.
Naturally, there is quite the cost to that.
Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada released figures last year showing that the federal government spent some $115 million in housing asylum seekers at hotels in Niagara Falls exclusively, and that was just over a period of 12 months.
And if you're wondering where these asylum seekers hail, well, we're talking about countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia.
Refugee claimants stay for an average of 113 days.
The daily cost was $208 per person, with money going toward rooms, meals, services, and security.
And that, by the way, is the first thing you notice, folks, when you go into the hotel lobby.
There are security guards there who simply tell you without giving you the reason why that the hotel is not open to the public and to go next door to the Ramada and check in there.
Can't Make Ends Meet00:15:12
So yeah, I think a lot of people simply can't make ends meet in our economy anymore.
And it's a lot more people than maybe we thought before.
But immigration is still going full guns for the reasons I suggested.
But I think it's starting to wear thin.
Look at some of these headlines just from today.
Youth unemployment is now at levels seen during a recession, report shows.
Well, like I say, we have been in a recession for a few years now.
Here's the StatsCan report, just one of them.
7.1% unemployment, but that hides how bad it is.
That's unemployment.
So 7.1% of people looking for work cannot find it.
But look at this stat.
0.3% of people, that's the reduced, that's the employment number.
That's the labor force.
So 0.3% of people have just stopped even trying in the last month.
So the 7.1% number is just those who are still trying to find work.
But that would actually be 7.4% if we were still counting the people who just given up.
Isn't that funny?
It's not funny at all.
And why would you, and how could you, know this when a million foreigners are being brought in specifically to undermine you and undercut you?
That is especially the purpose of temporary foreign workers.
That just is.
That's, you know, the more candid employers say, yeah, we want low wages.
Duh.
It's a zero-sum game in some ways.
Every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar not left for the business.
I saw some screeching pundit the other day saying it's racist not to want cheap foreign workers, an underclass of indentured servants here.
No, I actually think it's the opposite.
It's racist to have a third world underclass of exploited workers.
But putting race aside, it's cruel to young Canadians of all racial backgrounds too.
Here's that racist calling everyone else racist.
Like, I'm going to be quite frank and honest.
We are the Conservative Party and Pierre Polyev and MP Rempel are treading a very dangerous line of what I'm going to call a dog whistle of racism.
Because if you want to have a conversation about the fact that we have an issue with immigration, we do.
Not because they're immigrants and they're coming in and taking away.
It's because our society and our system hasn't kept up.
We don't have enough housing.
We don't have enough resources put in place to help everybody.
So let's have that conversation.
But to say it's foreign workers that are taking away jobs from Canadians and the solution is youth to me is simplistic.
Yeah, no, and I don't think that's going to work anymore.
I think that has sort of run its course and there's not a lot of patience for the government calling people racist anymore after 10 years of Trudeau doing it.
I mean, it undercuts you when even a man of the insane left, BC Premier David Eby, says we have to stop bringing in our own replacement workers.
Here's the headline.
Today, temporary foreign worker program should be reformed significantly or canceled.
EB, I'll read a bit.
The temporary foreign worker program is not working.
It should be canceled or significantly reformed.
EB said here in British Columbia, we see an unacceptably high level of unemployment among young people, which has been linked both to the international student visa program as well as the temporary foreign worker program.
So it's not one or the other.
It's both.
There's about, what, a million foreign students in Canada?
And most of them go to bogus diploma mills.
They're just here to work and to stay indefinitely.
They've never been deported.
They never will be.
But oligarchs and international corporations like all that, and of course, these diploma mills like all that.
It's a supply and demand question.
You bring in a million foreign workers desperate for jobs.
And I say a million, because that's students and temporary foreign workers.
And they're competing with, I don't know, a million Canadian youth desperate for summer jobs and other jobs.
And you've got to race to the bottom.
That is good news for capitalists.
Supply and demand, the price that capital has to pay for labor goes down.
I know I'm standing like a commie, but this is not capitalism the way that it is.
It is not capitalism to bring in the world's poorest people to level down our own economy.
That's some sort of weird arbitrage going on that disrespects the whole notion of a country, a sovereign country.
I can see why an oligarch with three passports like Mark Carney likes it, but I think a revolt is brewing.
Mark Carney's reheated Trudeau minister, François-Philippe Champagne, the guy who somehow thought it was a good idea to get a personal mortgage from a bank owned by the Communist Party of China, that guy.
Champagne says the real answer is get this, to invent a new economy.
Canada must reinvent economy like it did in 1945, finance minister says.
I often make an analogy between 2025 and 1945.
In 1945, Canada reinvented itself.
And I think this is one of those moments, Champagne said, referring to the post-war industrial and construction movement in Canada.
It's a moment when we have to reinvent the Canadian economy, Champagne said, speaking to reporters at the Liberal Cabinet retreat.
Let me guess.
He's going to use the phrase AI, isn't he?
I bet you he is.
Oh, yes, he does.
Quote, we have done it before.
Look at 1945.
Canada turned completely to be this great industrial nation.
We're going to build on that.
We're going to look at new technologies such as AI, he said.
Yeah, that's going to give us a million new jobs.
You know, these people can't even run their own slice of the economy properly.
Massive debt, massive taxes, massive spending.
That's, I'm talking about the public sector.
And all without the excuse of COVID now.
These are the people, federal civil servants, who still aren't coming back to the office to work in the main, but they're going to invent a new economy for everyone else in the country.
I guess so.
I mean, they've blown themselves up with the real economy, namely us selling things of value to the world, including to the U.S. First I gambled on electric vehicle batteries.
I don't know how many tens of billions of dollars they spent on that.
They really think AI is going to do it.
Just keep saying AI over and over again.
But the rest of the world is, you know, it's sort of mean what people are saying about Canada these days, and I'm not rejoicing in it, but it's a little more honest than our own internal critique.
Here is Howard Luttnick, the U.S. Commerce Secretary, talking about how bad Mark Carney is as a negotiator.
And Prime Minister Modi seem to indicate a coalescing of the bricks.
Do you see anywhere in the next month, two months, any type of deal or backing down to a lower rate with India?
I would expect, like you saw it in Canada, right?
Carney got elected with this term elbows up, meaning let's fight with America.
They put on retaliatory tariffs.
They were all bravado.
And what happened?
Their GDP negative 1.6%, unemployment rocketing towards 8%.
And what did Carney just do?
He just finally, finally dropped his retaliatory tariffs.
So I think what happens is it's all bravado because you think it feels good to fight with the biggest client in the world.
But eventually, your businesses are going to say, you've got to stop this and go make your deal with America.
So I think, yes, in a month or two months, I think India is going to be at the table and they're going to say they're sorry and they're going to try to make a deal with Donald Trump.
And it will be on Donald Trump's desk how he wants to deal with Modi.
And we leave that to him.
That's why he's the president.
Yeah, it's true.
Elbows up didn't really work, but neither did this rocket surgeon's ideas.
When thinking of what we've gone through the summer, for my part, I've traveled a lot the country, meeting with different workers and different industries, some affected by the tariffs, others also that are much more in sectors that are going through a lot of growth.
And also, I went two times to Europe, Sweden, Finland, and afterwards in Germany.
And what our government is really focused right now is obviously on the economy.
So we need to protect jobs and we need to create some at the same time.
And we're doing that through three different ways.
The first one, obviously, is defense, because we're increasing our investments in defense.
And while we're doing that for our strong, brave Canadian men and women serving our armed forces, at the same time, we're doing it to create jobs.
And that's why we're working on a defense industrial strategy and want to be using procurement to be able to create jobs in our country.
The other thing that we're working on is obviously to be closer to Europe and closer to certain countries in Asia because we know we're too dependent on the U.S. when it comes to trade.
And that is clearly a focus of what we're doing as a government.
Yeah, about that.
Canada's trade diversification push goes into reverse.
Let me read you a story from the Globe and Mail.
For all the talk in Canada about the need for trade diversification, exports to non-U.S. markets declined for the second month in a row in July.
A stark reminder that the push to reduce the country's exposure to its largest yet unreliable trading partner will be a long process.
Exports to countries other than the U.S. fell 8.6% in July from the month before after a 4.2% drop in June, according to Statistics Canada.
As a result, non-U.S. exports as a share of total Canadian shipments to the world dropped back to where they were in October before the election of President Trump.
In fact, really the only story about diversification in this piece was about the Transmountain pipeline.
That was this grotesque white elephant.
That pipeline was first proposed by a private company called Kinder Morgan, American company that raised all the money themselves and that was working away on a budget of about $6 billion.
They said, oh, we'll do it.
Yeah, $6 billion ought to do it.
Until Trudeau killed the deal by changing the environmental rules.
And so they just absolutely broke all the rules with Kinder Morgan.
And Kinder Morgan was about to sue Canada for probably $10 billion until Trudeau preempted them and just offered them billions and billions and billions just to buy them off.
And Kinder Morgan couldn't believe it.
They took the cash and said, yeah, goodbye, Canada.
And the pipeline, the Liberals took over the pipeline, and the final cost was well over $20 billion.
Only a government could, what, quadruple, quintuple costs on a project that was previously being done by a private company with no government money.
They were using their own money.
Anyways, that pipeline is actually working now, though not at full capacity.
But get this, I'm reading from the story now.
One exception is oil.
Since the expanded Transmountain pipeline began operating in May 2024, the share of Canadian crude going to non-U.S. markets has soared, hitting 7.9% in July, up from an average of just 2.7% in 2023.
Got it.
So it's actually the only thing that's working.
Okay, let's sum up.
Unemployment is up.
People dropping out of the job market, just giving up.
Even a kooky left-wing premier is calling for the end of the foreign workers program.
America is laughing at Mark Carney, and frankly, so is the rest of the world.
And to think Carney sold himself in Canada as a businessman who knows how things work.
Really?
No sign of that yet.
But you know who is even worse at their jobs than the Liberal government?
The regime media, whose main job is to fluff up Carney and his disasters.
Yeah, we've been in a recession for years, but the media won't tell you that, will they?
They'll just call you racist for complaining.
Stay with us.
ahead including a debate on temporary foreign workers well unemployment is heading in the wrong direction especially for young people especially for young men which brings into focus the question of the temporary foreign workers program and the use of its widespread I'm a skeptic.
I'm a critic.
I disagree with it.
I agree with the approach taken by Pierre Polyev to wind that program down.
But others have a different point of view, including our next guest.
Her name is Christina Santini.
She's the Director of National Affairs for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
And we're going to have a good discussion now.
I know the CFIB stands up for its members who are employers of independent business, and I can understand where they're coming from.
But let's have a good, hearty conversation with Christina.
Welcome to the program.
Thanks very much for being here.
Thanks for having me on.
Now, I understand the reason historically for the temporary foreign workers program.
I think the classic example is a farmer who has a very tight period of time.
He needs to harvest a crop, and he needs an intense amount of labor for a short period that he may not be able to find in the region.
So, I mean, I've seen it.
I know someone in the Calgary area who would bring in Mexican workers for a period to help harvest his berries.
And it sort of made sense because could he really find enough manpower for that brief period of time?
But I think that the program has changed.
And now there really is no job that a temporary foreign worker cannot have in this country, so it appears.
The number of temporary foreign workers has skyrocketed.
And I believe it's deleterious to Canadian citizens, especially young Canadian citizens who want to get in on the job market.
So that's my take.
Christina, can you tell me if I've got a fact wrong, if any of my arguments you think aren't up to snuff?
Do you disagree with what I've said?
Give me the point of view of your members and of your organization, because I really feel strongly about this, but obviously you guys have a different opinion.
So we have members across the country and across all sectors, and some of them, very few, just like in the Canadian economy, very few of them do resort to the temporary foreign workers program.
What we need to give credence to the program, though, is that it is designed to sort of open the tap and close the tap.
And so to reflect local labor market needs.
And it is the immigration program that reflects local labor market needs the most.
There's all the hoops that employers who do turn to it have to jump through.
So the question that could be raised is more: are those hoops truly doing what they need to be done?
Are they working well?
For example, you know, employers have to demonstrate that they've actively recruited.
And what we're hearing from employers who've had to turn to those programs is we tried to recruit locally.
They're not applying for the positions we've had.
They're not showing genuine interest or coming to the interviews.
And so that's part of the issues that they have is if they're turning to the temporary foreign worker program, it's because they haven't had any luck or any opportunity to find Canadian labor and they would rather hire Canadian.
LMIA's Impact on Wages00:14:38
But those Canadians just aren't lining up for the jobs on offer as they are on offer.
You know, I want to put a different point of view to you.
I think that because everyone is doing it, I mean, you can't go to a fast food restaurant or a drive-thru or a lot of retail companies without there being a temporary foreign worker.
And so it's sort of like a mutual, mutually assured destruction.
Everyone's doing it, so everyone has to do it.
It's like an arms race, if I may.
So, I mean, I know a franchisee who has several Tim Hortons.
And he tells me, I mean, this was a while ago, he told me this, that he just simply couldn't compete without it.
And what he meant was he couldn't compete with the other drive-thrus.
He couldn't compete with the other restaurants because everyone's doing it.
And it's sort of like an arms race.
If McDonald's is doing it, then Tim Hortons has to.
And if Tim Sorton is doing it, McDonald's has to.
I understand that if one of them tried to break from this way of doing things, they couldn't get the employees.
But what if we phased out the temporary foreign worker program altogether?
So the only people who could apply to work for Tim Hortons were Canadians.
And yeah, I think it probably would mean that the salaries would go up a little bit.
And I got to say, I don't think that's a terrible thing for young people to get an extra buck or two an hour, especially if every competitor is doing it too.
So it wouldn't just be my buddy from Tim Hortons who's on the short end of the stick because he's competitors to McDonald's.
Like, isn't it that everyone's doing it, so everyone has to do it?
And if we took it away, then everyone could stop doing it?
You have to take into consideration the scope of the TFWP.
Not everyone is doing it.
That is a myth.
It is barely 1% of our total labor force.
So no, not everyone is doing it.
The person that may be serving you may not necessarily be a TFWP.
They may be an international student.
They may be a recent immigrant to Canada.
So don't presume based on certain attributes that the person serving you is necessarily TFWP.
With regards to, and that's one of the key things, is everyone is hating the TFWP when it's actually a fraction.
And remember, it's the most targeted programs to local labor market needs.
It is a fraction of all immigrants that are being let in.
Most of the immigrants are coming in under the student program or under the international mobility program.
So it's sort of a distraction game.
It's a smoke and mirrors game.
So that is one thing that I'd like to call attention to.
The other element is that it presumes that Canadian workers are there for those jobs.
And ESDC's own evaluation has articulated that it is not a question of wages.
And even our members, when we previously surveyed them, 80% had tried to raise wages, and only 15% stated that it helped them recruit locally.
It's not the factor of success.
What is difficult about the positions being filled is that they are often in rural and remote areas.
They are not atypical work schedule.
So evenings, weekends, early morning shifts at like 5 a.m.
Not necessarily jobs Canadians are lining up for.
And they're often very physically demanding, and we have a highly educated workforce.
Again, you know, the key question we need to ask ourselves is: are Canadians actually wanting to have the positions that are being filled?
And if so, why aren't they already applying for it?
And it's not a question of wage.
The other element about wage, and this needs to be noted very closely, is businesses are government.
They don't have deep pockets and the ability to go on into deficits exponentially.
They're not big multinationals that have also deep pockets because they can raise financing very quickly or they can be creative with losses.
They have small margins, small levels of capitalization, increasing wages to the extent that may be required to actually attract domestic labor and stable domestic labor is something that will end up affecting consumers.
You said a lot of things there.
One of them I think is probably spot on where you say I may be confusing the foreign national at my drive-through for a temporary foreign worker when in fact they might be an international student here on that kind of visa.
And I take your point, But if that is true, and I think it very well could be.
In fact, I know a particular student who is working and he's foreign, so there's really no difference.
That's a foreign national as well.
And I think that just like, and I think, in fact, in some ways, there's even more abuses there.
I forget the exact stat for the number of international students in Canada.
I think it's over a million now.
And it's such a staggering number.
And if those folks are in the workforce as well, you don't just have the official temporary foreign workers competing against Canadians.
You now have all those foreign students.
So I think you're pointing out another problem.
I don't think it takes away in my mind from the fact that the temporary foreign workers program itself is also a problem.
But I just think that I think back to how it was when I was a kid.
And yeah, all those crappy jobs were the jobs kids wanted.
That was the first job the first rung on the ladder of life.
And I think to other countries where I've been where they have very modest immigration, and it is their nationals who have those entry-level jobs.
And there's a dignity to it, and everyone understands it.
I think that it's a little too easy for employers to say no one wants these jobs.
We can't get Canadians off their couches to do this.
I think it's too easy to say that.
And again, it's because there's just so many foreign workers here.
I don't know.
I don't think you've convinced me that temporary foreign workers are a good thing.
You've just added to my stress by reminding me that foreign students can work here too.
If I may, I mean, this is about the temporary foreign worker program.
And that's one of the things that I would like to circle back to.
Namely, and one of the points we haven't touched on yet is the fact that they complement each other, right?
And it is something that's being lost in this debate.
So oftentimes we're saying, and you've referenced they're taking Canadians' jobs and they're taking Canadian youth's job.
The reality and some of the things we're hearing from our members is they enable them to keep Canadian jobs.
We actually have surveyed our members and small business owners who have used the TFWP over the past two years.
And we've asked them, you know, has this enabled you to keep your doors open and to hire Canadians?
56% of them said yes.
We asked them with the recent restraints because, you know, the Liberal government did introduce restraints to the TFWP.
Those are working its way through the system.
They're applying to new LMIAs.
So previously approved LMIAs, they've already been vetted under the old systems, but the new ones.
And so that's the whole thing about how many work permits were approved.
It will take time for the Liberal policies to really see results because it's applying to new LMIAs.
So going back to that element, we do know that 90% of them feel like they won't be able to retain their current workers.
And about one in five fear that if they can't retain their existing workforce, and we're not necessarily talking about just recruiting, we're talking about retaining the people they already have, they may have to close.
And so in closing, because remember, foreign workers can only represent between 10 and 30% of the workforce of a specific employer, you're also talking about more job losses.
You're talking about Canadians potentially losing their jobs.
So we need to consider that in the whole element.
And that's why there's a need for an LMIA assessment.
That is why that process, which doesn't exist under the international mobility program, the LMIA process is important and there's value to it because the employer has to demonstrate there's going to be a positive impact to the labor market.
Government employees are supposed to be going through and saying, is this actually going to help keep jobs or retain jobs in Canada?
And have they done everything they can to recruit?
By scrapping the TFWP, you're not even allowing employers to make that case.
Just for our viewers, LMIA, if I'm not mistaken, that's labor market impact assessment.
It sure feels like they're gaming that system.
I recently found an online database that's searchable by map and by geography.
There's thousands and thousands of these temporary foreign worker job help-wanted basically ads.
And so many of them are like just like I just started going through them and seeing the different jobs there.
And they were urban jobs, often in restaurants or retail.
I actually saw one job that was for a psychiatrist that paid up to $400,000.
It was very confusing to me because on the one hand, you had like that job.
And on the other hand, you had jobs basically undercutting minimum wage, those starter jobs that teenagers would take.
But the main thing I took away from that was how promiscuous this all was.
This wasn't a rare thing.
This wasn't a temporary solution, like I mentioned, the berry farmer who needed help.
It feels like it's a permanent, new, general approach to employment in this country.
And even if the arguments you make are true, and I'm skeptical, you have a permanent underclass that is pushing down wages.
Even Premier Eby, the communist Premier of British Columbia, has acknowledged that this is depressing employment opportunities for British Columbians.
I think even if your employers that you represent are right that they need it, I would say, well, of course they're right because it's in their interest to reduce wages.
I just think that we have a permanent underclass now of exploited foreign workers.
And that's maybe in the interest of an employer to pay a few bucks an hour less, but I just don't think that socially and culturally and economically it helps anyone else.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm starting to sound like a communist myself.
So the language you're using actually seems to contribute to them being perceived as an underclass because that would not be the language that many of the small business owners would employ.
They are an integral part of the whole supply chain of making sure that we get the services and the goods that we can appreciate.
And we need to value as Canadian society anyone and everyone from the cashier and the coffee barista, coffee barista, all the way through to the civil engineer and the physicians that we see.
So I do think that within Canada, we need to revisit how we perceive different roles.
And maybe it would open up Canadian youth's willingness to proceed in career in trades vis-à-vis seeking education in STEM, et cetera, because we do tend to stigmatize those lower-wage jobs and we shouldn't.
And the fact that TFWs or immigrants occupy this job shouldn't at any point stigmatize any occupation.
Someone is working regardless of where they're working.
That's great.
They are contributing to Canadian society.
So that's first and foremost.
Again, the argument of prevailing wage is based on a lot of myths and doesn't recognize to the extent the government's tried to counter that in recent years.
For example, there's a prevailing wage requirement when you're hiring someone through the temporary foreign worker program.
Again, that is the program that Podieva is saying he wants to get rid of.
And there are so many requirements in that program that actually tries to mitigate all these myths that people are saying that it's taking Canadian jobs.
Well, Canadians would have had the chance to apply.
They would have had a chance to see the conditions as they are being presented to the foreign workers.
They have to pay the prevailing minimum wage.
That is, sorry, prevailing wage, not the minimum wage, prevailing wage.
What is that?
That's the median wage for the occupation of the region, which is often higher than the minimum wage.
That is what they need to advertise if they want to have access to the LMIA, and that's what they need to pay.
And then afterwards, once you've, you know, done all those jumps through those hoops, if you do happen to have a foreign worker that comes, because many LMIAs are approved and never actually have a foreign worker come into the country because the work permit is not approved or the LMIA expires before identifying the right talent.
If you do have them come, you are subject to the employer compliance regime.
So not only do they have provincial or federal labor codes, they have the Canadian government, ESDC and IRCC that can come in and inspect and ensure that you meet the terms.
How often does that happen?
It seems to me our entire immigration process has moved away from any sort of enforcement.
Deportation orders are no longer even a thing.
There are no in-person meetings now for migrants to our country.
Is it how often, can you cite a number?
How often is a temporary foreign worker investigated and found against?
Like, is it even one in a thousand?
Like, it seems to me that abuse is the name of the game.
I see little TikTok videos of foreign nationals teaching fellow foreign nationals how to game the system on everything from LMIAs to how to use food banks instead of paying for groceries.
Like I feel like the whole world is looking at Canada and thinking, those guys are chumps.
Don't go to America.
They'll kick you out.
Canadians Grapple with Foreign Workers00:10:50
I think that we are the soft touch.
Trudeau fired that starter pistol with his tweet in January 2016.
Let me challenge you a little bit there.
You say that this is regulated and inspected.
I'm very skeptical about that.
Like, would even one in a thousand of these be overturned?
So let's foremost address some of your comments you made about the TikTok videos and things like that.
And even earlier on about offers and wondering if they were unscrupulous.
There are likely some unscrupulous actors there.
And even small business owners would want to see the tap turned off on them.
And we're not, what we're saying is, while you're turning the tap off on them, note that there is still a genuine need.
And, you know, for those individuals that are compliant with the law, that access to the program should be maintained.
But go after those few unscrupulous individuals, right?
Go after those that are clearly abusing the system, potentially entering into human trafficking and not acting according to the law.
Those individuals shouldn't be tainting the whole program or tainting Canada's reputation, which is of great concern, at the expense of the others.
So we need to, the government does need to enforce the rules that are in place because they are there.
And that's ultimately the key thing is that they do have the rules there.
Now, to what extent are they enforcing them?
I admit I don't have off the top of my head the number of inspections they undertook in 2024, but I do know the compliance rate was over 94%.
So that is something to keep in mind is the vast majority of small business owners, they are being compliant.
They are paying what they're saying they're going to pay.
They are treating their employees.
We've gotten comments from members saying, like, especially farms and in agricultural sectors, they often have seen the same workers come back to their farms for over a decade.
And they say, if I was mistreating my employee, that employee would not be coming back every single year.
I treat them like they're family members.
I make sure they've got good housing, that they're fed, that they've got social activities, and that they're treated respectfully in the workplace.
So that's the other thing we need to consider is if these foreign workers are coming back on a recruiting basis, particularly for seasonal, you are talking about that being an indicator of the fact that not that badly treated.
That doesn't mean there aren't bad actors.
But you need to recognize there are also some very good actors in the system.
You know, I was reading a tweet by a Sikh Canadian who was saying that some companies who use the temporary foreign workers program, the workers actually pay the company kind of a bribe or a shakedown or a commission.
They pay to get the job, that it's sort of a fake job, and the whole thing is a sham, just a way to immigrate to Canada.
And I mean, use the example of the farm workers who return every year.
And that's actually my favorite example.
I knew a berry farmer in southern Alberta who did that from Mexico.
And that seems legit, as opposed to, I mean, I haven't been able to chase down this rumor by this Canadian, this Sikh Canadian fellow, who was saying that he is aware of temporary foreign workers who essentially bribed their way into Canada by actually paying the company to hire them.
And it's a sham, just like these diploma mills are shams for international students.
I guess I'll have to do some more investigating myself because I do not believe it's as compliant as you say.
Let me make a final comment, and then I'm going to invite you to sum up your case because I'd like to stop for a second and say thanks to you for coming on because I know I'm peppering you with some objections and questions.
And I think you're doing a pretty good job of making the case for your company, your organization, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
And you're doing a good job for them.
I mean, it is in the interests of business people to reduce labor costs.
I just don't know if the broader social consequences are being borne.
I mean, I think that they're hurting the most vulnerable, namely young people.
Let me just make one last comment and then I'll throw it to you to close up our little mini debate.
And you said that we don't want to stigmatize those entry-level jobs.
And I agree completely.
I don't think I look down on those entry jobs at all.
In fact, I look back quite fondly at my own life when I had them.
And when I'm in places in the world where they do not have mass immigration, I'm blown away by indigenous people.
Like I was in Switzerland or I was in Romania, places where immigration is much more modest.
And to see native Swiss or native Romanians doing work that we have marginalized, we have marginalized it by saying we're going to bring in foreign workers.
I don't think I stigmatize low-skilled jobs at all or entry-level jobs at all.
In fact, I sort of think, oh, there's someone working their way up.
It's when we say, oh, no one wants this crappy job.
No one wants this midnight shift.
No one wants to be a janitor.
Find someone.
Oh, some foreigner will do it.
That's the stigmatization.
I'm in these other countries where they actually hire their own local people and maybe the cost of living is a little higher.
But I tell you one thing, they're cohesive socially.
They absolutely respect those blue-collar workers.
In my view, when you bring in a foreign underclass, whether it's to pick cotton 250 years ago or to mop up toilets today, I think that's what's stigmatized when you say these jobs are too crappy for our own citizens.
So, I think that foreign workers actually, that project stigmatizes the working class, not the other way around.
That's my final thought.
Let me let you finish things up because you've been doing a great job on behalf of the CFIB.
So, thank you for giving me some final comments with regards to labor costs.
As I referenced, ultimately, small business owners that do resort to the TFWP, they resort to it at the last step.
It's a last resort.
They have tried to find local labor and they haven't been successful too.
It's not about keeping labor costs down.
There are a lot of costs and responsibilities associated with the TFWP.
And those that I am talking about, or those I'm representing, are those that are looking to and striving to be compliant with the program.
We're not talking about the unscrupulous word.
Unfortunately, a lot of this political debacle is putting everyone together.
There are some with genuine needs.
And what we are hearing is without the foreign labor to turn over the beds or to be in the kitchen, they'd have to close rooms.
They would have to shut down store or reduce store hours or just close down their business operations.
And so, the question we then need to understand is the Canadian labor, we've been saying for ages, and we know there are certain sectors that have had or are likely to have persisting labor shortages.
But we haven't developed a plan or recognized that we would need labor in all sorts of jobs.
Whenever there are workforce development plans being rolled out, they're being rolled out and targeted at like clean energy, tech sector, whatever is new and sexy on the agenda at that moment in time.
But there is little consideration being given as to what type of plans or linkages that we provide to help individuals or to get Canadians to apply to jobs who may not necessarily be in the geographical area, but within Canada across the country at all skill levels or types of jobs.
So, you know, would a youth from the Toronto area consider potentially working in hospitality services and turning beds in Jasper?
Those are some of the questions that we need to consider as a society: what can we be done to create those, do to create those bridges.
And until the Canadian workforce is there and is applying for those jobs and is willing to take those jobs, and like you said, we do take away that stigma.
The TFWP is needed.
Otherwise, what is happening is you're taking away what was supposed to be a band-aid without having healed the wound, without having found the solution.
What I'm hearing when Podriev is saying, scrap the program, they're basically saying we're going to pull the rug from everyone and you'll have to make do otherwise.
And they presume that there's going to be a labor to backfill.
They presume that where the jobs are is where the people are.
They presume that people will be right away willing to take a job in occupation they may have not previously been at, and that may not necessarily align with their education level.
That's a lot of presumptions.
And I think it gets to that much later on.
And as I referenced, even an ESDC evaluation of the program or of Canadian society overall identified that the main reasons Canadians aren't taking the jobs on offer that are being posted under the TFWP is not wage.
It's actually the location.
It is actually the working conditions.
And it is actually the labor intensiveness of the job.
So those are some of the things to keep in mind as well is, you know, are Canadians going to be taking shifts that are overnight?
Are Canadians going to be taking shifts that are in the weekends that may not have traditional daycare services available?
And then the last piece, and sorry, I will just do this thing, is they compliment Canadian labor because just think about it.
Even how many Canadians might try to bring in a live-in caregiver to help with their senior parents or how many might bring in a nanny to take care of their kids when daycare isn't necessarily accessible or is long waiting lists in various regions across Canada.
They are the chef that enables the front of the house to operate.
They are the ones that clean up the rooms that enable there to be rooms that are open to host events for the event planners that are Canadians, the hostess that are Canadians, and et cetera.
So we can't forget that there is a complimentary element.
Right now, the Canadian labor is not in those positions.
We're applying for those positions that are being sought to be filled through the TFWP.
Christina, you said an awful lot of things there, and I'm tempted to rebut or challenge some of them, but I did promise you to have the last word.
And it's because I'm grateful to you for coming on the show because we are skeptical of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
And I don't think you've convinced me to change my mind, but you've certainly allowed our viewers to hear a full broadcast of the other side of the story.
Assassinations and Ostriches00:03:09
And I'm grateful to you, and I appreciate the CFIB.
And we've had excellent discussions with your colleague, Dan, before.
So thank you for coming on.
Agree to disagree with most of it, but hopefully we'll have a chance to talk more about it because I don't think this issue is going away, especially as Canada's economy continues to stall, as unemployment grows.
I think there's going to be more and more questions about it.
Christina Santini, National Director, Director of National Affairs for the CFIB, great to meet you.
Thanks for being here today.
Great to meet you.
Thank you.
All right.
Stay with us.
your letters to me next hey welcome back Your letters to me.
On the ostriches, Freedom Barbie says, this is sickening.
One of the worst things that is happening.
Sad and pathetic government.
Yeah, I didn't know so many people in the world cared about the ostriches, but I don't think it's just that they're interesting birds.
I think it's the cruelty, the slavish following of rules, the nonsensical, non-scientific basis for the rules.
And I think that so many of us just live through that same public health BS under COVID.
And now we're seeing that that's sort of the maintaining norm that they're going after the ostriches.
Ostriches are strange creatures.
I think they're sort of dinosaurs, actually.
If you look at their lineage, it goes back eons.
I don't find them the most cuddly of critters, but their life and the idea that hundreds of these birds would be killed because of some foolish regulation, I think that's really caught the imagination of a lot of people.
And I think that our friend Dre is having fun covering it.
I mean, it's hard work, of course, and she's in an RB because the closest hotel, you heard her say it, is hours away.
On Mark Carney and his accomplishments, someone called Young America says, oh, but he has.
It's just nothing you nor Canada would actually want.
Better than Germany, AFD, sheesh.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that.
AFD is alternative for Deutschland.
It's sort of the reform party, the Conservative Party, the anti-immigration party in Germany, and it's really been rising in the polls.
But this crazy thing is happening, and I haven't had a chance to look into it.
Six or seven leading politicians for AFT have died in a row in recent months.
Like it, I suppose it could be just raw chance, but there's been such a wave of assassinations around the world.
Two attempted assassinations on Donald Trump, one that came within an inch of killing him.
Yair Bolsonaro stabbed while he was campaigning in the previous election.
There are assassinations of conservative political leaders around the world.
And I have no evidence that that's what's going on with AFD, but I also know it is not normal to have six or seven people die, all from the same party, all in the same spot of time.
It's just very creepy, isn't it?
Well, that's our show for the day.
Until tomorrow, actually until Monday, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.