Blunt talk or faux outrage? The politics of expanding migrant worker programs under Canada’s former Conservative government (2006–2015)

Abstract

This paper combines critical antiracist perspectives with Poulantzas’ and Hall’s concepts of authoritarian statism and populism to examine the diminishment of democratic processes and the intensification of social relations of inequality in citizenship, immigration, and the state that accompanied the controversial expansion of migrant worker programs under Canada’s former Conservative government (2006–2015). It also discusses how the party and former government sought to maintain these problematic structures and their later response to the political fallout caused by their approach. The conclusion discusses this policy realm under the subsequent Liberal government during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords:

• Authoritarian populism
• authoritarian statism
• Conservative Party of Canada
• immigration policy
• migrant workers

Introduction

Let me be very blunt about this. Several years ago, before we took office,

[migrant worker] programs were expanded, and before this government took office and since, those programs have grown in the last decade and a half very dramatically, and largely because I think they existed and the bureaucracy worked to really adapt to the needs of companies.

But what did we see? We saw numerous examples of abuse of this program,

outright abuse. Companies importing workers for the sole purpose of paying

less than the prevailing wage; companies importing workers for the purpose of permanently moving the jobs offshore to other countries; companies bringing

in foreign workforces with the intention of never having them be permanent

and moving the whole workforce back to another country at the end of a job…

We have seen very blatant examples of companies using this in ways that

were not in the interest of Canadians.

That kind of abuse cannot go on.

There must be plans for companies to transition to a permanent workforce.

What I say is if you really need temporary workers permanently, then that means

we need permanent workers who become Canadian. And they have a right to

stay here, and they have a right to bargain with their employer, and they have

a right to be treated fairly, and they have a right not to be sent back to where

they came from the first time they don’t like something.

            ∼Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, January 2014,

            answering questions from “ethnic” media outlets             concerning Canada’s migrant worker programs¹

The juxtaposition between Canadian Conservative Party leaders’ rhetoric formally celebrating immigrants amidst their “ethnic outreach” efforts while promoting a politics and policies of exclusion in the realms of citizenship and immigration is considerable. As seen in the January 2014 quotation above, in a type of open question-and-answer session that he rarely granted reporters, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper sought to quell frustrations from the lived experiences of migrant workers and widespread reports of abuses taking place under programs to journalists whose reporting might be read by what one internal party presentation had previously referred to as “Lots of Ethnic Voters” who “Live Where We Need to Win.”² By this time, the Conservatives’ creative neoconservative authoritarian populist political approach was severely strained by its contradictions as it juggled efforts to satisfy its core white settler colonial base of support, business interests that had greatly enjoyed using the migrant worker programs the Conservatives had expanded, and a political imperative to win or maintain a significant share of support from racialized and ethnicized voters.³

What is perhaps remarkable from a politician who had previously admonished those who would “commit sociology” and whose government stymied attempts at progressive reforms is that Harper’s “very blunt” words demonstrated a strong understanding of many of the problematic long-term structural elements of Canada’s migrant worker programs. He recognized the lack of pathways to permanent residence and citizenship for most migrant workers, artificially suppressed wages, and the social costs experienced by workers whose economic and social insecurity are created by state policies. However, his rhetoric contradicted the reality that his government’s changes to migrant worker programs further degraded the country’s immigration and citizenship model by intensifying relations of inequality in choosing migrant worker precarity and temporariness over permanent immigration and the manner in which the Conservatives had navigated and shifted the balance of forces within state institutions to make and implement them.

This article does not offer a comprehensive overview of Canada’s migrant worker programs, nor all changes implemented under the Conservative government. Either would take several articles. Instead, it employs antiracist and political economy perspectives to examine the further entrenchment and intensification of local and global hierarchies of inequality amid changes to Canada’s migrant worker programs from 2006 to 2015 under Canada’s former Conservative government. The choice to empower and much more greatly support employers in accessing unfree migrant rather than more secure immigrant labour was an integral part of its approach to citizenship and immigration.

The Conservatives’ approach further eroded and impacted at least three key Canadian institutions. These include, first, the erosion of the institution of Canadian citizenship itself by further departing from what Goldring and Landolt have termed Canada’s prior “liberal settlement model” of permanent immigration in favour of temporary migration⁴; second, the abuse and marginalization of parliament and parliamentary procedures to achieve these shifts; and, third, a shifting of the balance of forces within Canadian state institutions to the advantage of employers and to the detriment of migrant workers, while refusing efforts to ameliorate that balance. These shifts were carried out as one aspect of the Conservatives’ creative overall authoritarian populist approach to government that sought to hold power by expanding its political coalition while enacting substantively exclusionary policies.

As long as it was politically feasible, those exalted and politically and economically favoured under the Conservatives included business and employer groups until the Conservatives shifted to a “Canadians first” discourse amidst public and media outrage about the growth and problematic dynamics within these programs.⁵ This contrasted greatly with the treatment of those increasingly marginalized by government policies, including refugee claimants, migrant workers, and new (im)migrants, who faced greater barriers to citizenship, family reunification, and full participation in Canadian society.

This paper will begin by providing theory and context for this discussion, combining critical antiracist perspectives with Poulantzas’ and Hall’s concepts of authoritarian statism and populism to situate the Conservative Party’s approach within Canada’s settler colonial context before, second, examining the means by which the Conservatives expanded, justified, and maintained the use of unfree labour through vastly expanded migrant worker programs, including the marginalization of parliament in this realm. Third, the paper will consider how widespread criticism failed to result in an improved situation for migrant workers. This analysis will be undertaken primarily through policy and discourse analysis of Conservative Party, government, and parliamentary documents and reports as well as secondary literature.

While the overall structures of these programs remain in place, there have been some recent positive shifts in this realm as the current Liberal government seeks to fulfil ambitious immigration targets and faces some pressure to enact more inclusive reforms amid the tragic illness, exploitation, and death disproportionately affecting migrant workers and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.⁶ However, it remains to be seen if such shifts will remain limited and temporary or if the settler colonial Canadian state can be pushed to make larger and more systemic improvements to the governance and treatment of migrant workers in Canada.

Theory and context

To prevent an analysis from being clouded by narrow bureaucratic categories and platitudes of inclusion, it is important to place analyses of immigration and its politics in Canada in its settler colonial context. In doing so, Thobani has chronicled the historic development and contemporary material and ideological realities of hierarchical relationships between “exalted” white settler colonial subjects and othered and racialized immigrants and Indigenous peoples.⁷ Canada’s Conservative Party represents the more vociferous, neoconservative partisan branch of the country’s ongoing settler colonial project in both state and society. Paying attention to such social dynamics is particularly important for examining Canadian political parties, governments, and their approaches to immigration. Doing so involves considering not only their “outreach efforts” to voters in isolation, but also their substantive policies. This including the treatment of those socially constructed as “migrant workers,” who are subjected to exclusionary policies and discourses where both local and global relations of inequality are engaged in both novel and stable forms.

Perhaps the most immediately relevant example of Canada’s ongoing hierarchies of societal membership occurred shortly after the introduction of official multiculturalism and the 1967 point system that removed official preferences for white immigrants. In 1973, the Canadian Government implemented Canada’s Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program (NIEP), a temporary migrant labour program that expanded on prior racialized workforces of domestic and agricultural workers from the Global South without access to permanent residence and citizenship.⁸ Since those changes were made by the then-Liberal government, patterns of exclusion and differential exclusion have continued to manifest under Liberal, Progressive Conservative, and Conservative governments at the same time that they have sought the political support of increasing numbers of ethnicized and racialized citizens.

Concurrent to its “ethnic outreach” efforts, Canada’s former Conservative government implemented the most significant set of changes to Canada’s immigration system made by any party since the introduction of the point system in 1967. These occurred at a tremendous rate of change, greatly affecting social relations, immigration statuses, and associated freedoms that underpin claims to democracy and democratic legitimacy.⁹

When coupled with antiracist approaches, Poulantzas’ conception of the state as a social relation that reflects a given societal balance of forces in their institutionalized form allows us to think critically about the shifts taking place within state institutions and to begin to grasp their significance.¹⁰ While not done automatically, Jessop notes that such a conceptualization can be extended and applied beyond a narrow conception of class relations to other social relations of inequality, including gender, ethnicity, and race.¹¹ Poulantzas’ insights on the simultaneous strengthening and weakening of the state in terms of its coercive and democratic apparatuses, respectively, are very useful in conceptualizing some of the key shifts in power and social relations during the Conservatives’ time in office. He highlights the relative lack of access to democratic institutions and “growing distance between political democracy and socio-economic democracy” for increasing numbers of people in Western societies through what he refers to as “authoritarian statism.”¹² Such analysis can and must consider all of those people living and working within the Canadian settler colonial state, which can in part be accomplished by paying close attention to trends related to the institution of citizenship.

In order to grasp the neoconservative politics of these shifts, it is also helpful to draw on the work of Stuart Hall, who borrowed from and adjusted Poulantzas’ conception to diagnose a creative neoconservative politics of authoritarian populism. His modification involves remedying what he describes as Poulantzas’ relative neglect of the political/ideological level of struggle and New Right antistate discourses and strategy that combine law-and-order discourses with neoliberal economic and social policies.¹³ Hall’s emphases are useful because ideological struggle and creative politics are also crucial aspects of the Conservatives’ politics, particularly in their approach to the social relations and institutions of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism. In this sense, the Conservatives have sought to both legitimize their political-economic project and to advance their electoral prospects in a country where the support of at least some racialized and ethnicized voters is a prerequisite for winning or retaining power.

While the Conservative government oversaw relative continuity in the total number of immigrants admitted to Canada per year as permanent residents, they also practised a “re-ethnicization” and militarization of Canadian citizenship alongside intensified trends of neoliberalism and exclusionary discourses and policies directed at vulnerable, predominantly racialized, migrants such as refugees in particular.¹⁴ “Reforms” and intensified hierarchizations made when the use of migrant labour was being expanded should be seen as one part of this overall picture because these changes represent a significant hollowing out and diminishment of the institution of Canadian citizenship.

Beyond concerns with parliamentary procedure, as Sharma has argued, “whether one is a citizen, a permanent resident, or a temporary migrant worker is the most important factor in determining if a person will be free or unfree in Canada.”¹⁵ As Satzewich notes, there are a variety of “modes of incorporation” through which newcomers to a social formation can be incorporated into a society and polity in both political and economic terms. These include the right to stay in Canada, to change employers, or to vote and run for office. They have been shaped by racism and societal hierarchies and involve starkly different forms of integration, with significantly different levels of freedom—or unfreedom—in labour, electoral, and overall social contexts.¹⁶ Paying attention to such dynamics allows us to consider the rights being both offered and withheld within a social formation. They can include the right to family and family reunification, the right to permanent rights and citizenship, or to secure a safe existence fleeing conflict, inequality, or exploitation. Those categorized as migrant workers face significant difficulties or are unable to access many of these freedoms, settlement supports, or pension and employment insurance benefits despite paying into those same systems.

This category of new members of Canada’s social formation grew the fastest under the Conservatives government. These workers were not welcomed as full members of Canadian society because the explosion in the size of migrant-worker programs further promoted the employment of unfree and not fully free labour to the benefit of employers and in a manner detrimental to the rights of those constructed as “temporary” and especially as “low-skilled” within that category. In the aggregate, under the Conservatives, relations of unfreedom were greatly increased throughout Canada’s immigration system while social hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class were reinforced and intensified.

Empowering capital and facilitating unfree labour: creating “the most flexible workforce in the world” away from parliamentary oversight

The Conservatives entered office in 2006 after at least a decade-and-a-half-long shift towards neoliberal approaches to immigration policy, including the expansion of the economic class and tightening and shrinking of the family class along with attempts to reduce refugee admissions.¹⁷ The Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) was becoming more accessible to employers because of changes accompanying the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA).¹⁸ Thus, to some extent, these were bipartisan policy orientations shared with prior governments. Simmons, for example, identifies a shared “utilitarian” neoliberal consensus among Canada’s governing parties from the 1990s through 2015.¹⁹ The Conservatives accelerated and intensified such dynamics considerably and saw a shift towards the majority of migrant workers coming to Canada from the Global South.²⁰ This problematic incorporation of racialized workers as precarious migrant labour rather than as permanent residents reflects intensified hierarchies of Canadian citizenship in new and greatly expanded forms.

While unpopular with its base when exposed, the quiet expansion of such programs was not out of place with a neoconservative authoritarian populism that combined distracting moralistic law-and-order discourses with an intensification of neoliberal social relations to the benefit of employers. As Barrass and Shields note, the “hyper-neoliberal” Conservatives under Stephen Harper shifted public discourse from “a language of nation-building” to a “‘just-in-time’ competitive immigration system” in the words of former Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.²¹ Of particular interest here are the forms of governance, discourses, and authoritarian populist notions of community involved in that transformation.

Consistent with an authoritarian statist approach, the Conservatives sought to insulate themselves from democratic insight and to further tilt the balance of forces between capital and labour embodied in the state further in favour of employers in the migration realm. Flecker notes and cites that “forming a minority government in 2006, Prime Minister Harper boasted his intention was ‘to create the best educated, most skilled, and most flexible workforce in the world’ (emphasis added).”²² He demonstrates how the government moved quickly in its first budget to expand the TFWP and would continue to do so in the ensuing years. “With a dozen key words, buried in the 477-page omnibus budget plan of 2007,” the Conservative government “gave the green light” to expand the program, as the government inserted into the omnibus bill language stating that “Employers may recruit workers for any legally recognized occupation from any country” (emphasis added).²³ Effectively, the Canadian labour market was being made a much more global one that reinforced global and local relations of inequality rather than one that welcomed immigrants with secure and permanent status.

This facilitative mindset greatly strengthened the hands of employers relative to workers. Reflecting upon the 2008 Conservatives budget implementation bill, the lack of any caps on its use, and a fast 122 percent increase in employer demand for workers through the program, immigration specialist Jenna Hennebry noted in her parliamentary committee testimony that “Instead of working on the many problems in the program, the money has basically been allocated to assist Service Canada and to assist employers in obtaining foreign workers.”²⁴ She pointed out that such a commitment to serving employers and processing their applications contrasted greatly with a comparatively weak commitment to addressing immigrant application backlogs and other systemic challenges. The sum of Conservatives’ changes, she argued, “encourages a more employer-driven immigration system, putting, as I would say, nation building in the hands of the private sector, not governments and democratically elected officials.”²⁵ However, these early warnings from civil society voices about the nature and effects of these policies were ignored.

While exalted employer groups such as the Canadian Federation for Independent Business and the British Columbia Chamber of Commerce strongly favoured the changes in the 2008 budget implementation bill—a bill that also saw the government spend more than a million dollars to advertise it in the “ethnic media” before it was even passed—members of the legal community expressed concern for the lack of popular input into potential policy changes. In referencing the government’s increased ability to make major changes by ministerial instructions, Canadian Bar Association treasurer Stephen Green argued that “perhaps one of the most dangerous things is the ability of people to lobby the government in power at the time with respect to the manner of developing and issuing instructions.”²⁶ Parliament was being sidestepped in favour of direct Ministerial power as the Conservatives would use their pre-existing and enhanced powers to greatly expand the program through budget bill changes made with little debate rather than doing so through bills with an announced purpose.

As Alboim and Cohl note, the “unprecedented pace and scope of change” that the Conservatives undertook included new ways with which to make changes to the immigration system, including “a dramatic increase in ministerial powers and the use of omnibus legislation.”²⁷ This was a contrast to prior approaches that featured “public consultation, task forces, discussion papers, committee hearings and parliamentary debate,” including public consultations concerning regulations prior to Cabinet approval.²⁸ While such forms of consultation also have limits, and in some ways serve the state most by garnering legitimacy for the policies that governments already intend to pursue, they also offer important spaces of contestation for civil society groups, including workers and allies, to at least make their voices heard and warn about negative impacts. Instead, from early in their term and for as long as they could before generating unbearable public scrutiny, the Conservatives conducted a “silent revolution” with respect to the TFWP. This resulted in its massive expansion of the use of unfree migrant rather than secure immigrant labour.²⁹

Strong state for employer access to workers, weak state for migrant worker protection and a “labour shortage” ideology

Reflecting Poulantzas’ notion of the strengthening–weakening of the state whereby some elements and structures of the state are enhanced and others are weakened or left comparatively underdeveloped, the Conservatives’ expansion of the TFWP devoted a miniscule amount of resources to the oversight of the program concerning working conditions primarily impacting racialized workers, either before or after wide public backlash to the program started in 2009. This dynamic remained despite rampant findings of noncompliance with labour and program regulations among companies, as demonstrated in provincial inspections.³⁰ In sharp contrast to the tens of millions of dollars devoted to expanding employers’ access to the program, few resources went towards enforcing program rules or labour standards that would benefit migrant workers despite frequent cases of abuse; the number of temporary work permits issued under the Conservatives nearly doubled from 2006 to 2013.³¹ This represents a stark contrast with the resources allocated by the Conservatives to the realms of border security, for deportations against asylum seekers, and to fight the asserted problem of citizenship fraud.³²

In addition to the human rights and labour exploitation endemic to such restricted forms of societal membership, particularly controversial government regulations in 2012 allowed employers to pay those constructed as “foreign workers” five percent less than domestic workers in high-skill positions, and 15 percent less in lower-skilled occupations compared to local labour markets—changes that the government would later be forced to reverse.³³ The government also made a commitment to make the program respond rapidly to employers’ concerns about asserted labour shortages, to expand the online application system for such workers, and to produce guides on how to use the system easily.³⁴

Instead of having policies and discourses that encouraged societal integration and belonging, facile nationalism and Canadian “common sense” would play a significant role in the Conservatives’ authoritarian populist approach to these programs. In 2007, the Harper government’s first Immigration Minister, Monte Solberg, invoked nostalgia for the coffee giant company Tim Hortons at the same time as raising alarm over unfilled positions when he joked that “‘Help Wanted’ signs are everywhere. When it starts to affect our ability to go to Tim Hortons and get a double-double, it ceases to be a laughing matter.”³⁵

This approach also saw then-Minister Jason Kenney engaging in a joint twitter “chat” with his exalted allies in the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), one of the most vociferous proponents of the TFWP and critics of the work ethic of Canadian workers with respect to low paid positions.³⁶ In their joint August 2013 chat, the CFIB pressed for greater access to labour through the program while complaining about labour shortages, whose existence multiple studies would question.³⁷

The changes put forth by the Conservatives were not based on independent statistical evidence of labour shortages, but rather a labour-shortage ideology and discourse on the part of the government and employer associations that would be strongly criticized and subsequently debunked.³⁸ Later in its mandate, the Conservative government faced further criticism from civil society groups as well as contestation from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) about these assertions of labour shortages because of the over-reliance on volatile data from the online classified website Kijiji. The PBO stated that the problematic inclusion of this unreliable data set could fully account for the government’s asserted increase in job vacancies.³⁹ Reflective of the true winners of its political approach, the Conservative government had been working with business allies both to create alarm about overstated labour shortages, and to promote problematic social relations to resolve them.

This growth in the TFWP represented a significant shift of power from labour to capital within Canada, and developments in this policy field reflected the realities of the Conservative political project and who benefitted from it. The Conservatives’ coalition did not include just its neoconservative base, but also businesses that agitated for, and could exploit the expansion of the program. Such shifts in policy reinforced and strengthened the power of capital relative to labour of all types—a type of power that is already strong in both a direct and structural sense—the generally preferred type of power shift under neoconservative governance.⁴⁰ As Polanco has argued, we can use the concept of “Precarious Labour Migration Regime” to describe the global and local dimensions of these inequalities. For even in instances where there were potential pathways to permanent residence, the Conservatives further tilted employer-employee relations towards employers and saw them empowered “with a figurative carrot (permanent residence) to be highly selective during recruitment, and motivate subject consent to poor working conditions and a precarious employment contract.”⁴¹

As part of this strategy, an increasing number of people came to live in Canada with (im)migration statuses that offered less than a secure existence, despite contributing to Canada in homes, workplaces, and communities. In some categories—where workers experience the least amount of security because of difficult working conditions and language barriers—the number of people categorized as “temporary foreign workers” increased exponentially. As seen in Table 1, growth was particularly strong in purported “low-skill” categories with no access to permanent residency, featuring racialized migrant workers from the Global South.⁴²

Table 1. Data on temporary migrant workers in Canada, 2006–2012.⁴³

Temporary migrant workers	2006	2012	% change 2012 versus 2006
Present on Canadian Soil, Dec. 1	160,743	338,221	110.4
Present Dec 1, “Low skill pilot program”	2,277	30,267	1229.2
Present at some point during year	255,231	491,157	92.4
Entries into Canada	138,450	213,573	54.3

Source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Facts and Figures,” 2012.

Data from 2006 and 2012 are cited first for more ready historical comparison and to include a more inclusive definition of “temporary foreign worker” than subsequent government data that removes hundreds of thousands of workers from the category.

After facing intense scrutiny and controversies, the government changed its calculation and presentation data on migrant workers in 2014, making it harder to provide program-wide totals. Many workers with temporary work permits are now listed under the newer umbrella category of “International Mobility Program,” which was carved out of the officially titled and controversial “Temporary Foreign Worker Program.”⁴⁴ Flecker argues that the new presentation of figures entails “sleight of hand and categorical nuance” to permit the government to “disingenuously sidestep the very real criticism of the size of the program.”⁴⁵ Faraday notes that, first, the changes greatly complicate comparisons over time; second, they underestimate yearly totals by shifting their base to a less busy period in the calendar year; and, third, they point out that there are vulnerable workers under both broad government categories of migration.⁴⁶ Those vulnerabilities include closed work permits and restrictions for some and the power held by employers to promote, or hinder, a pathway to permanent residence.⁴⁷ Mertins-Kirkwood points out that employment under the “International Mobility Program label created in June 2014,” which had been “deliberately and systematically expanded” under the Harper government, more than tripled from 2006 from 86,000 to 260,000, part of an overall increase of migrant labour in Canada doubling from one to two percent of the overall workforce in Canada from when the Harper Conservatives were first elected in 2006 to 2015.⁴⁸

Despite its problems, the newly presented data also demonstrate significant overall growth in the use of migrant labour in Canada. It demonstrates the peak use of the TFWP in 2013 in terms of permit holders on December 31 of each year (Table 2), although the carved out and recategorized International Mobility Program (Table 3) continued to grow at a considerable pace, including after the Conservatives left office.

Table 2. Temporary Foreign Worker Program work permit holders with a valid permit on December 31, 2005 to 2017.⁴⁹

2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
55,059	80,052	113,239	115,938	95,813	87,734	91,875	107,920	95,535	60,077	51,035	46,286

Source: IRCC Facts and Figures 2017.

Table 3. International Mobility Program work permit holders with a valid permit on December 31 by program, 2008–2017.

2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
115,729	139,928	158,993	186,669	207,902	235,155	255,233	249,255	287,314	321,743

Source: IRCC Facts and Figures 2017.

While the Conservatives increased pathways of “two-step” migration, where some migrant workers would transition to permanent residence, there was nowhere near a proportionate increase under the Conservatives in the number of permanent residents each year. Per Polanco, above, that feature itself could be employed as a disciplinary tool towards workers. As long as they could do so before facing widespread backlash, the Conservatives sought to protect employers’ power over and access to migrant workers.

Maintaining hierarchies while defending the prerogatives of “reasonable firms”

Reflecting antidemocratic trends consistent with authoritarian statism and populism earlier identified, as Banack has argued,⁵⁰ for the Conservatives and their brand of neoconservative populism, parliament itself was seen as a place at risk of allowing “special interests” to subvert their market-based view of democracy. Canadians were seen more as consumers than as citizens, while migrant workers and their allies were cast as illegitimate actors. Conservatives, he notes, combat this asserted threat ideologically and in governing style by adopting a technocratic, neoliberal version of democracy allowing them to subvert parliamentary institutions and grant themselves the discretion to act directly on behalf of Canadians without being hindered by procedures that could slow or limit them. Civil society voices must not be allowed to subvert their ability to govern nor interfere with markets.⁵¹ The Conservatives, and they alone, represent “the people” in their worldview. And as informed observers would note, the process of making citizenship, immigration, and refugee policy would witness “disturbing examples of constructive criticism being dismissed, discounted and undermined as coming from a ‘special interest group’ or unworthy commentator.”⁵² In the case of addressing the TFWP, demands for more socially just policies were dismissed with rhetoric that deferred to employers and sought to maintain these intensified global hierarchies of citizenship.

In 2009, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration issued a major report and recommendations on Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers during the Conservative minority parliament.⁵³ As have been recurring themes in parliamentary reports concerning migrant workers, the report addressed many elements of unfreedom that migrant workers face. The all-party committee recommended significant structural changes to the program with ramifications for the institution of Canadian citizenship, including providing all migrant workers with pathways to permanent residence (recommendations three and six). It also recommended the institution of an advisory board and a means for stakeholders to provide input into the program, including identifying labour market shortages in a more credible manner than basing them solely on employer input (recommendations two and nine to twelve). The report also called for workers to be able to be accompanied by immediate family members while they work in Canada, and it was argued that they should receive open work permits in order to avoid family separation. The goals of such reforms would be to put workers in purportedly “low skill” positions on a more even footing with those in “high skill” occupations and reduce some of the clearest factors leading to migrant worker exploitation and insecurity. Overall, the reforms were designed to make workers more economically and socially free and secure and to have a pathway to the economic and political freedoms professed to be inherent in liberal capitalist democracies.

However, Conservative members of the committee’s dissenting report and the government’s official response either rejected these and other recommendations or avoided dealing with them substantively.⁵⁴ The government itself additionally—and seemingly pre-emptively—ruled out the prospect of regularizing the status of Canada’s undocumented population, despite the committee having not identified a consensus to call for a regularization campaign nor having made such a recommendation.⁵⁵ The Conservatives pre-empted even the emergence of such a demand. Instead, they essentially ignored the recommendations for reforms, re-emphasized their differentiation between “low-” and “high-” skilled workers in justifying the former’s lack of opportunities to become permanent residents, and pointed favourably to the meagre pathways to permanent residency that then existed through then-small Canadian Experience Program and Provincial Nominee Programs. The government defended the existing governance and approach to its program, arguing that “efficient partnerships and consultation channels already exist” in rejecting calls for more meaningful civil society input into the program that might at least partially address the imbalances between employers, migrant workers, and their allies. Instead, Ministers would closely guard the powers that had been further distanced from parliament and placed in their hands through omnibus budget bills.

The neoliberal ideology at play in facilitating business access to primarily racialized workers from abroad and a lack of interest in progressive civil society participation and input into the program were more overtly expressed by Conservative committee member Rick Dykstra, then-Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. In his dissenting report, he argued that there should be no “disincentives” to firms using the program through higher fees because “a tax is a tax, even when it’s mislabelled a fee.” Nor should nongovernmental organizations concerned with labour rights be granted “special status” to help educate workers about their rights. Overall, the greatest concern of the Conservative Party seemed to be to avoid “creat[ing] roles for the government which we do not believe that it would fulfil effectively, hinder the ability of reasonable firms to conduct their business, [and/or] empower an undefined set of groups …”⁵⁶ Rather than bring in positive structural reforms to better protect migrant workers, the government continued to facilitate access to unfree workers in precarious positions. The party’s pro-employer agenda would continue in this realm, and the government proceeded to continue to grow the program until public anger grew to the unmanageable proportions that would drive then-Prime Minister Harper’s comments cited at the beginning of this article. Indicative of government inaction in terms of enforcement of labour rules and punishing abuses by firms, the “Ineligible Employers” list of companies found to have misused the TFWP or mistreated their workers announced by the government in 2009 and only implemented in 2011 did not contain a single name for several years, until late 2014.⁵⁷

However, the backlash to some of their measures saw the need for discursive shifts and flexibility in their authoritarian populist project, which had favoured and featured friendly relations with employers. Unfortunately, most of the “integrity” measures they implemented to respond to this backlash ended up being on the backs of migrants rather than employers and obscured rather than clarified the realities of the social relations being advanced. Some limited pathways to permanent residence were opened to those entering in the “highly skilled” categories in place of those who could arrive directly as permanent residents in the economic class category, but there was nowhere near an overall matching commitment of effort to permit those coming to Canada as workers to become permanent residents and, ultimately, citizens. In fact, as multiple authors have observed, citizenship became more difficult and expensive to obtain under the Conservatives, making full societal membership more difficult to achieve while the Conservatives used the realm of citizenship policy to promote a neoconservative national identity.⁵⁸

Misleading “Canadians first” and outreach rhetoric amidst the backlash to the Conservatives’ expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program

The Conservatives continued to grow the TFWP and implement employer-friendly reforms until widespread opposition grew as a result of several years of resistance and activism from migrant workers, unions, and their allies.⁵⁹ These actors published several reports based on observations, interviews, and access to information requests, and alerted the media to abuses within the program and to practices designed to replace Canadian workers with migrant workers who could be paid less. Some of the dynamics of this outrage were troubling, however. As Hari notes, in 2014 as more migrant workers became employed in the food service sector than in all other categories of employment, the role of racialized migrant workers in that realm became the focus of alarmist public and media scrutiny, prompting the Conservatives to issue a moratorium on hiring migrant workers in that industry from April until June of 2014.⁶⁰

Pollsters and conservative columnists recognized that such controversies posed a significant threat to the “Tory Brand” of being capable economic managers focussed on jobs and employment with policies that benefit the middle class.⁶¹ Thus, as the Conservatives’ support for expanding the program became public amid controversies such as Royal Bank workers having to train their own replacements, and the company HD Mining requiring Mandarin as a language of work in British Columbia—cases that were clearly designed to undercut the employment prospects of Canadian workers and to convert to a lower paid, more exploitable workforce—the party had to shift its populism on the fly.⁶² But it did not do so with an approach designed to facilitate access to permanent residence and citizenship for its migrant labour force.

As Nerenberg has noted, the Conservatives had a “double message” concerning this policy field. On the one hand, the Prime Minister and Minister Kenney reassured Canadians that the Conservative government did not seek to depress wages, while, on the other hand, its own “hand picked” Red Tape Reduction Commission recommended—and the Human Resource Ministry followed— in making it easier to hire such workers from abroad on temporary status.⁶³ As quoted earlier, Prime Minister Harper had the audacity to blame the explosion in the number of migrant workers in precarious status and abuse of the program at the feet of the federal bureaucracy, despite his own governments’ legislation and regulations that helped lead to the growth of the program’s use.

Demonstrating the flexibility of Right authoritarian populism—or perhaps the hypocrisies of Conservative efforts to juggle its neoliberal contradictions—in the face of a backlash for having grown the program considerably with little oversight, the Conservatives pivoted to obscuring the data surrounding the program by recategorizing migrant labour streams and presenting themselves and their rushed reforms as defending Canadian workers against what they suddenly proclaimed to be abusers of the TFWP.⁶⁴

The government argued in its announced changes entitled “Putting Canadians First” that:

The TFWP is no longer being used as it was intended to be used—as a last and limited resort to allow employers to bring foreign workers to Canada on a temporary basis to fill jobs for which qualified Canadians are not available. Reforms are needed to end the growing practice of employers building their business model on access to the TFWP.⁶⁵

Contrary to Harper’s rhetoric meant to portray himself as a defender of migrant workers and immigrants, however, his government had facilitated the ease with which employers could bring in workers from abroad, failed to protect them, and disadvantaged many migrant workers with their reforms.

In changes made in 2011 and in subsequent changes, such as the passing and implementation of a “four-in, four-out” rule, many migrant workers had their time working in Canada capped at four years rather than gaining access to permanent residence and full citizenship, or their demand for the “right to have rights” met.⁶⁶ This change, along with work permits limited to one year, were likely to increase Canada’s population of undocumented migrant workers for whom the Conservatives had precluded regularization by increasing their chances of falling out of status during those four years, and to do the same to those who would not want to leave Canada after investing years of their lives and significant financial resources to come, work, and become part of communities. It was expected that those first affected by the since-reversed four-in/four-out rule numbered in the range of 70,000 people and would have grown over time.⁶⁷ For most migrant workers, there was no door to joining the “Canadian family” to which the Conservatives frequently referred in their citizenship discourses, and there was seemingly a growing list of othered target groups to be excluded.

As Faraday has described, the one program for “low skill” workers that did have a reliable path to permanent residency and citizenship, the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), saw that path eroded by the Conservatives through Ministerial instruction rather than more accountable regulations or legislation⁶⁸ amid a discourse “reminiscent of the discourse of ‘bogus refugees’ and ‘bogus marriages,’” by then-Human Resources Minister Jason Kenney. He asserted “that the Filipino community was abusing the LCP as a family reunification strategy and that most Filipino caregivers were in fact working for family members,” contrary to existing academic research.⁶⁹

In the 2015 election, the Conservatives campaigned on “Canada-first” rhetoric, even claiming that one of their accomplishments was “Reforming the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to prevent abuses, and ensure that Canadians always get the first chance at available jobs,” but glossing over the fact they had generated many of the conditions requiring repair.⁷⁰ However, Conservative populist discourses of acting in the interests of “ordinary people” foundered against the reality of suiting the needs of business at the expense of labour and other human rights for many workers.⁷¹ As Shields and Türegün note in a prominent research summary related to settlement and integration covering the years 2009–2013, “While being transformed into a mainstay of the labour force, migrant workers have extremely limited options for permanent residence and thus citizenship. The result might be the breakdown of the traditional migration-citizenship nexus and the fraying of immigration as a nation-building project.” ⁷²

Conclusion

The Conservative decade in citizenship and immigration witnessed a remarkable decline in democratic procedures and an increase in unequal social relations during their “moment of authoritarian populism.”⁷³ Many of these changes intensified social inequalities by changing the categories and dynamics through which new members of society were admitted, which disproportionately impacted racialized migrants from the Global South. While maintaining total numbers of annual permanent immigrants to Canada that were similar to the numbers of annual permanent immigrants who came to Canada while the Liberals were in power, there were major qualitative and quantitative changes within these totals and to the overall politics of citizenship and immigration. Most of these reforms ignored migrant workers and their allies’ demands for a more secure status in Canadian society. These trends were driven by the strong mix of neoconservative and neoliberal impulses present in the new Conservative Party that favoured employers—their preferred exalted subjects—and showed little regard for the well-being of migrant workers or parliamentary democracy. The prerogatives of “reasonable firms” were to be protected.

In contrast to then-Prime Minister Harper’s rhetoric, the vastly increased numbers of migrant workers present in Canada with no or unlikely pathways to citizenship and a voice in parliamentary institutions were, along with refugee claimants, among the ultimate outsiders to their political project. Thousands were to be forced to leave Canada despite years of contributing to society under the Conservatives’ “four-in, four-out” rule as the government reacted to the backlash against its migrant worker policies. For those offered a pathway to permanent residence, “two-step” immigration frequently replaced, rather than was made additional to, spots of permanent residence upon arrival. Employment freedoms and political rights were made more difficult to obtain and relations of unfreedom in both realms were intensified. Late in the government’s term, when faced with political backlash to the social relations of inequality they had promoted, the Conservatives resorted to a nativist discourse of “Canadians first” and engaged in misleading rhetoric about their record and policy developments concerning migrant workers, including in their 2015 election platform.

But while greatly expanded, the dynamics of Canada’s migrant worker programs and the human rights concerns they raise were far from entirely new. A prior Liberal government began making shifts towards temporariness that the Conservatives intensified significantly, and Canada’s settler colonial history is rife with examples of differential exclusion that are echoed today.⁷⁴ While the Liberals did eliminate the “four-in, four-out” rule after returning to office in 2015, troubling structures of the country’s migrant worker programs remain in place.⁷⁵ During the COVID-19 pandemic, a June 2020 report by the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change indicates that migrant workers in agriculture in particular have been the victims of “Unheeded Warnings.” A lack of permanent residence has made it “impossible” for such workers to assert their rights and has made them subject to wage theft and suffering from a lack of safe accommodations as “[i]ntimidation, surveillance, threats and racism have greatly increased.”⁷⁶ An Ontario government coroner’s report into several migrant worker deaths in the agricultural sector echoes some of these findings.⁷⁷

Amidst evolving and contested discourses about who is “essential,” federal Liberal government challenges in achieving ambitious immigration targets, and promises to “build back better,” there have been some recent positive policy shifts in terms of some migrant workers and international student graduates gaining access to permanent residence. It remains to be seen, however, whether these will remain short term and limited pathways or if the door will open to wider, more permanent changes. After lowering the required score under the Canadian Experience Class in its Express Entry immigrant selection system to a record low for a single draw in February 2021, the government announced in April a five-month temporary pathway to permanent residence for more than 90,000 essential workers and university graduates.⁷⁸ These go well beyond a tiny pilot project, begun in June 2020, to grant up to 2,750 agrifood workers per year and their families access to permanent residence.⁷⁹ However, each of these programs include language and educational requirements too stringent for many migrant workers long established in Canada.

While recognizing the program as “an important step forward” from earlier measures that excluded nearly all “low skill” workers, the Migrant Rights Network has levied significant criticisms at the 90,000 plus temporary pathway. This includes a report based on more than 3,000 survey responses that echo many of the longstanding barriers of “two-step” and “no-step” immigration pathways in Canada. These include language tests that are prohibitively expensive and difficult to access and pass for many prospective applicants, as well as arbitrary or punitive requirements in terms of occupational eligibility, dates of education, employment status, and high application fees. The Network is also concerned with the program’s short-term nature, that it falls well short of the number of migrants with precarious status in the country, and that it does not offer a pathway to secure immigration status for those who are undocumented.⁸⁰ Because of these barriers, thousands of program spots may go unfilled.

Thus although this article focuses on the former Conservative government, in examining immigration policy in Canada one must also keep the cross-partisan realities of settler colonial inequalities, including tiered and non-access to citizenship and labour market freedoms and protections at the forefront of analysis. As evidenced by recent nationwide calls both virtually and in person for full immigration status for all during the pandemic, migrant workers will continue to push for more inclusive institutions and visions of citizenship and democracy.⁸¹ It is up to their allies to stand up and push with them.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dennis Pilon, Laura Pin, and the SPE reviewers and editor for their valuable feedback. Any remaining weaknesses, of course, remain my sole responsibility. I also wish to express my gratitude to my former professor, Leo Panitch, a founding member of this journal. Rest in power, Leo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Carlaw

John Carlaw is a postdoctoral Research Fellow under the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration Program at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Notes

1 Stephen Harper quoted in O’Neil, “Stephen Harper Takes Aim at Temporary Foreign Worker Program”; Press Progress, “Is Harper Really Talking Tough on Temporary Foreign Workers?” Press Progress describes the setting as a “roundtable discussion with local ethnic media in Vancouver.” I employ the term “migrant worker programs” most frequently because the Harper Conservatives eventually split up the prior “Temporary Foreigner Worker Program,” and to avoid the othering connotations of the term “foreign worker” except when referring to the specific program name. This choice was sparked in part by Hari’s use of the term “Temporary Migrant Worker” as opposed to “Temporary Foreign Workers” (TFWs), itself a choice inspired by earlier scholars. Hari, “Putting ‘Canadians First,’” 13, Note 1.

2 Nejatian, “‘Breaking Through—Building the Conservative Brand in Cultural Communities’ (Letter and Presentation).”

3 Laycock and Weldon, “Right-Wing Populism, Conservative Governance, and Multiculturalism in Canada,” 66–7. Here, Laycock and Weldon note that striking such a balance involves a “complex combination” of populist appeals to make their dominant orientation of “neoliberal conservatism…that draws on both conservative and classical liberal ideas about liberty, equality, and a natural market order, and on social conservative ideas about a naturally Christian and patriarchal social order” more palatable.

4 Goldring and Landolt, “The Impact of Precarious Legal Status.”

5 Hari, “Putting ‘Canadians First.’”

6 Faraday, “COVID-19’s Impact on Migrant Workers.”

7 Thobani, Exalted Subjects.

8 Sharma, Home Economics, 91.

9 Forcier and Dufour, “Immigration, Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism”; Alboim and Cohl, “Shaping the Future.”

10 Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 129.

11 Jessop, “The State and State-Building,” 113–14.

12 Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 158.

13 “Authoritarian Populism,” 117–18.

14 Winter, “Becoming Canadian”; Winter, “(Im)Possible Citizens”; Carlaw, “A Party for New Canadians?”; Atak, Hudson, and Nakache, “Making Canada’s Refugee System Faster and Fairer.”

15 Sharma, Home Economics, 142.

16 Satzewich, Racism and the Incorporation of Foreign Labour, 38–9.

17 Arat-Koç, “Neo-Liberalism, State Restructuring and Immigration.”

18 Foster, “Making Temporary Permanent,” 25–6.

19 Simmons, “Value Conflict in Turbulent Times,” 300.

20 Foster, “Making Temporary Permanent,” 26–9.

21 Barras and Shields, “Immigration in an Age of Austerity,” 200.

22 Flecker, “Welcome!” 130.

23 Flecker, “Welcome!” 130, emphasis added.

24 Berthiaume, “Afghan Aid Levels Lower than Bosnia, East Timor.”

25 Berthiaume, “Afghan Aid Levels.”

26 Berthiaume, “Immigration Bill Under Dual Microscopes.”

27 Alboim and Cohl, “Shaping the Future,” iv.

28 Alboim and Cohl, “Shaping the Future,” 9.

29 Flecker, “Welcome!”

30 Flecker, “Welcome!” 136.

31 Flecker illustrates these points, noting that “In Budget 2007, the Conservative government allocated $50.5 million to support the TFWP. A former director of the TFWP unit revealed that less than two percent of this money was earmarked for compliance measures. This meagre percentage was allocated to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to provide security clearance processing of temporary workers—not to monitor or enforce labour standards. No budget funds were allocated to ensure the veracity of employment contracts. In fact, no formal monitoring of employers using the TFWP occurred until 2009. Even then, these initiatives were voluntary and limited to employers who consented after their work permits had been issued.” Flecker, 130–31.

32 Alboim and Cohl, “Shaping the Future,” 65–6; Faraday, “Canada’s Choice,” 27–8.

33 Flecker, “Welcome!” 136.

34 Flecker, “Welcome!” 130.

35 Flecker, “Welcome!” 129.

36 Goar, “Small Business Sector Accuses Canadian Job Seekers of Being Unreliable.”

37 Canadian Press, “Surveys Show Falling Job Vacancies in Canada during Q2”; CBC News, “CFIB Calls for More Foreign Workers in Twitter Chat with Minister”; Alberta Federation of Labour, “Kenney Teams up with CFIB.”

38 Alberta Federation of Labour, “Kenney Teams up with CFIB”; Collins, “Gov’t to Skilled Immigrants in Backlog: Re-Apply.”

39 Curry and Grant, “How Kijiji’s Data Threw off Ottawa’s Math.”

40 Gill and Law, “The Power of Capital.”

41 Polanco, “Consent Behind the Counter,” 1342.

42 Hennebry, “Gaining Perspective,” Hennebry, “Permanently Temporary?” 5.

43 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Canada Facts and Figures”

44 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Facts and Figures 2013—Immigration Overview,” 6.

45 Flecker, “Welcome!” 139.

46 Faraday, “Canada’s Choice,” 14–6.

47 Chartrand and Vosko, “Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker and International Mobility Programs,” 100–103.

48 “The Hidden Growth of Canada’s Migrant Workforce,” 150–56.

49 IRCC, “Facts and Figures 2017.”

50 As Banack (2015) has argued.

51 Banack, “Government for the People,” 98–100.

52 Alboim and Cohl, “Shaping the Future,” 68.

53 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, “Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers: Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (David Tilson, MP, Chair).”

54 Government of Canada, “Government of Canada Response to the Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration: Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers”; Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, “Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers: Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (David Tilson, MP, Chair),” 75–6.

55 Government of Canada, “Government of Canada Response to the Report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration: Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers.”

56 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, “Temporary Foreign Workers and Non-Status Workers,” 75–6.

57 Government of Canada, “Ineligible Employers”; Flecker, “Welcome!” 134.

58 Winter, “Becoming Canadian”; Griffith, “Updated Citizenship Statistics”; Carlaw, “A Party for New Canadians?”

59 Flecker, “Welcome!” 144.

60 Hari, “Putting ‘Canadians First,’” 192.

61 Shane, “Temporary Foreign Workers Storm Threatens Tory Brand.”

62 Nuttall, “Mandarin Need Cited”; Mehta, “RBC Tackles Accusations.”

63 Nerenberg, “RBC and the Harper Government’s Double Message on ‘Guest Workers.’”

64 Stanford, “Temporary Foreign Workers Threatened the Conservative Coalition”; Giovannetti and Curry, “Restaurants Warn of Closures.”

65 Employment and Social Development Canada, “Overhauling the Temporary Foreign Worker Program,” 10.

66 Tungohan, “Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada”; Perry, “Barely Legal.”

67 Flecker, “Welcome!” 134, 140.

68 Faraday, “Canada's Choice,” 34–8.

69 Faraday, “Canada's Choice,” 57.

70 Conservative Party of Canada, “Protect Our Economy,” 33.

71 Nakache and Kinoshita, “The Canadian Temporary Worker Program.”

72 Shields and Türegün, “Settlement and Integration Research Synthesis 2009–2013. A CERIS Report Submitted to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Ottawa,” 15–6.

73 Hall, “Gramsci and Us,” 20.

74 Faraday, “COVID-19’s Impact.”

75 CBC News, “Liberals Scrap ‘4-in, 4-out’ Rule.”

76 Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, “Unheeded Warnings.”; Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, “Press Release.”

77 Jhirad, “Deputy Chief Coroner’s Review.”

78 IRCC, “New Pathway to Permanent Residency.”; Thevenot et al., “Express Entry.”

79 Thevenot, “Canada Launches Agri-Food Immigration Pilot.”

80 Migrant Rights Network, “Exclusion Disappointment Chaos & Exploitation.”

81 Canadian Press, “Migrant Workers Hold Virtual Rally.”; Wright, “Migrant Workers in Canada.”