Toronto: The Canadian government said companies should raise wages to encourage more Canadians to apply for unfilled jobs, saying the freeze it imposed this week on restaurants hiring temporary foreign workers is a wake-up call for all employers.
The moratorium is on foreign hires in food-service businesses only. It follows media reports that McDonald’s Corp restaurants turned away qualified Canadians while using Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program to fill job openings. Jason Kenney, the employment and social development minister, said he was distressed that wages in Canada have barely kept pace with inflation since the global economic downturn. “It’s about raising wage rates. It’s about increasing salaries. It’s about increasing investments in training,” he said at a news conference. “We expect to see employers not just in that sector, but in every sector, doing better.”
The Temporary Foreign Worker Programme was designed to let employers go outside the country for new hires when unable to find locals to do the job.
“Our government has been clear,” Kenney said in a statement late Thursday in announcing the freeze. “Canadians must have the first chance at available jobs.”
He said the Conservative government is considering unspecified reforms of the programme to make sure employers recruit and train Canadians for jobs.
Canada blacklisted three McDonald’s restaurants from the programme in early April, and the company ended up suspending all applications for temporary foreign worker permits this week while a third party conducted an audit. Tim Hortons Inc, which operates more than 3,500 doughnut and coffee shops in Canada, would not immediately comment on the impact of the mortorium on its operations, but it said that temporary foreign workers account about 5 percent of its 90,000-strong Canadian workforce.
The government is no longer processing new applications from food-service businesses and would stop restaurants from hiring foreign temporary workers even if it has already approved applications, Kenney said.
The minister gave no indication that he supported a complete shutdown of the practice of bringing in low-skilled workers, saying only that the moratorium in food services would last until his department completes a general review. An easing of the programme’s restrictions on hiring foreign workers over the past decade has contributed higher unemployment in some sectors in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, according to a report released by the C D Howe Institute this week.
Low-skill workers, such as those in the hospitality and service industries, have been hit particularly hard, Dominique Gross, the study’s author, said. “The local workers were penalized by the fact that it was much easier to hire temporary foreign workers,” said Gross, a professor of public policy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Reuters
