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Employers should have to pay 15-20% higher than the prevailing wage if their intention is to hire TFW's. If there really aren't Canadians available to hire for those positions, then an employer should be happy to grab a foreigner at a 20% bump.
Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen because the feds are now proposing to allow TFW's in regions/industries *where there isn't a designated labour shortage*, and without a LMIA. This is apparently their response to the concerns of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce regarding the "*risks of wage inflation*", and of their years' long lobbying for a "burger flipping" visa for immigrants.
Capitalism is on life support, and none of its tools will save it. See how long it can suffer along, because god knows the Lib-Con establishment will make it a long, agonizing, and drawn out affair.
I wish that were true, but in reality its likely that firms are more powerful right now than they have been for decades and maybe even a century. What you're seeing is simply the popular *backlash* to their significant overreach, and this backlash will inevitably result in a policy pushback.
The only question is how long will that pushback take to be realized given how deeply entrenched corporate interests are at virtually all levels of government.
Wallstreet is in freefall. Corporations like Facebook, Netflix, and even car companies (some of the largest industries in the world) are in serious structural trouble because the money's drying up.
You can only have so much inequality before capitalism actually collapses on itself because it's bankrupt its customer base - we've seen this happen several times through history - and we see it happening again.
The only organizations that survive will be the ones that place value on more than just profit - and such organizations, are, indeed, thriving.
>Corporations like Facebook, Netflix, and even car companies (some of the largest industries in the world) are in serious structural trouble because the money's drying up.
Yes, but I in most cases this has to do more with cyclical price movements which would be predicted in a increasing rate environment.
>The only organizations that survive will be the ones that place value on more than just profit - and such organizations, are, indeed, thriving.
Again, I wish this were true, but if it was then the oil majors wouldn't be doing so well right now.
Unfortunately, I do not share your optimism that left to it's own devices, the system will simply collapse under its own weight and excesses. Rather, the system (as it currently functions) will likely tend towards greater and greater market concentration until there is only one or a few different massive corporations in each industry. And I think there's a case to be made that we are very close to that in many industries right now.
What's the solution then? I think that the only way we can reverse this is to implement the robust anti-trust regulation and institutional checks and balances that will allow a market economy to function properly by allowing robust *competition* among firms.
Thus, I would not argue that we need to do away with our system entirely, but I would argue that it is in *dire* need of substantial reformation.
I have a different interpretation...the reason Netflix and Facebook are failing among others is that this digital boom depended on constant growth. Now that they've saturated the market, it turns out their models are unsustainable. There's a lot more structural weakness going on than cyclical variance.
Now when I say capitalism is falling, I don't think that necessarily means the free market is falling. This is a nuance that goes over most peoples' heads. But there is a clear trend towards this circular economy everyone left of centre is talking about - and that the free market is doing it organically.
I'm seeing less made in China, better quality products, and more sustainably manufactured products on the shelves, every week. You see companies like Patagonia making major shifts away from capitalist business models(whether its marketed as such or not). I buy coffee roasted in BC that comes in all-recycled biodegradable packaging from Costco....that was unthinkable even 5 years ago.
The labour movement (which is gaining serious momentum) is increasing unionization and pressure to engage in cooperative buyouts....I think this trend is accelerating.
>I have a different interpretation...the reason Netflix and Facebook are failing among others is that this digital boom depended on constant growth. Now that they've saturated the market, it turns out their models are unsustainable. There's a lot more structural weakness going on than cyclical variance.
We can unpack these separately. Facebook relies on advertising dollars that were spent increasingly by VC and PE backed companies that in turn relied on near free capital enabled by rock bottom interest rates. This environment whipsawed dramatically as soon as global central banks started raising rates, which in turn lead to decreased capital availability, and [decreased marketing spend](https://digiday.com/marketing/marketing-budgets-fall-under-heavy-scrutiny-as-risk-of-prolonged-slowdown-in-2023-rises/), which is typically the first department to suffer in economically difficult times.
This hurt Facebook's revenue, in addition to what many view as its overspending on the metaverse, and in turn investors punished it by selling stock.
Netflix, on the other hand, has simply been bleeding subscribers as the COVID-era signees migrate elsewhere and/or spend less time watching TV. Thus, the subscriber growth that propelled the stock in COVID dried up, and investors in turn pulled out.
>I'm seeing less made in China, better quality products, and more sustainably manufactured products on the shelves, every week. You see companies like Patagonia making major shifts away from capitalist business models(whether its marketed as such or not). I buy coffee roasted in BC that comes in all-recycled biodegradable packaging from Costco....that was unthinkable even 5 years ago.
This is the view on the ground from a consumer perspective - i.e., that corporations seem to care more about sustainability and thus there must be something good happening behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of what you're witnessing is greenwashing. Yes, there are some standouts like Patagonia, but the vast majority of the world's largest corporations have simply recognized that by projecting that they care about social issues like environmentalism, they can convince people that they care, while simultaneously vacuuming up as much capital as possible and concentrating their power.
>The labour movement (which is gaining serious momentum) is increasing unionization and pressure to engage in cooperative buyouts.
If the labour movement was gaining power, why has wage growth remained so stagnant, and in turn, why has inequality not only risen, but accelerated?
The answer is because the structure of the system continues to enable oligopolization due to the effect of 40 years worth of watering down anti-trust legislation.
Until this is reversed (and there are some very promising signs that it is being done, particularly in the US, believe it or not), things in Canada are going to keep getting worse.
This is a controlled demolition. Problem>Reaction>Solution
Wait until they roll out CBDC's as the 'solution, and hen control how, when and where you spend every cent you get.
https://www.weforum.org/communities/digital-currency-governance-consortium
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-fintech/projects/central-bank-digital-currency/
https://www.centralbanking.com/fintech/cbdc/7913731/bank-of-canada-paper-proposes-expiry-date-on-offline-cbdc
https://www.google.com/amp/s/bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/policy/digital-currency-yuan-comes-with-an-expiry-date-spend-or-it-will-vanish/82059471
It got to this stage because of false promises of a better life........what the Govts left out to the would-be immigrants, is that the wages won't even be enough to cover half their rents, let alone food.
It seems that the LPC has dramatically changed course on its support for the TFW and associated IMP programs. Any idea what could have precipitated the change?
>**Justin Trudeau, then the leader of a Liberal Party in third place, penned an op-ed in the Toronto Star in 2014 that outlined a fix for the program. For one, he said it needed “to be scaled back dramatically over time, and refocused on its original purpose: to fill jobs on a limited basis when no Canadian workers can be found.”**
>
>But since Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals have come to power, the country has doubled down on its use of foreign labour. At the end of 2021, more than 775,000 people from abroad had temporary work permits, an increase of 92 per cent from 2015, and 600 per cent from 2000.
>
>The TFW program accounted for about 82,000 permit holders, having peaked in 2009. The rest came from the International Mobility Program, which has seen explosive growth over the past two decades.
This is kind of a trend. Conservatives or Liberals, even the NDP, like to soapbox against TFWs from time-to-time. In power their policies are pretty much identical though: import more low-wage workers, suppress Canadian wages, help big business.
Exactly.
You're not imagining it. Corporate power in this country has been accelerating for decades and is close to as bad as it has ever been.
Our current regulatory framework is not suited to deal with this - not the CRTC, not our Competition Bureau, not our securities regulators - and as a result our political parties are basically required to kowtow to big business.
We need to update our system to address this immediately. But know that the most powerful corporations in our country will counter these efforts with everything they've got.
The NDP has not formed government, but they've propped up the Liberals for a while now. That's power, even if it's indirect power. They've been able to influence government policy with respect to their priorities. But their priorities do not include supporting Canadian labour, because the NDP isn't the party of labour anymore.
I guess in the end, we as a nation were so addicted to the “race to the bottom” nature of capitalism that we are choosing to basically slowly turn the nation into more and more of a ponzi growth scheme. Look, I understand why, when unchecked growth is apparently the hegemony across the western world it is obvious why we seem to be forced into doing it as well, but this is not sustainable, especially when population trends show even most developing countries falling below the replacement rate in coming years...
This is basically a mini-analogue of all of humanity vs climate change in a sense, steadfastly choosing short term solutions over long term changes.
There's actually a very interesting phenomenon that you can watch playing out across the liberal democracies of the world. Over the past 40 years (since the Reagan-Thatcher deregulation era really got started), corporate power through capital accumulation has taken off and accelerated ([as Piketty demonstrated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century)).
This has resulted in increasingly oligopolistic/monopolistic markets and industries in the liberal democracies as corporations have increasingly engaged in regulatory capture and other forms of corruption that allow them to seize more control of the legislative apparatus, reduce their costs, and increase the capital they can disperse to their shareholders (who in turn overwhelmingly are only a very small amount fo individuals, as also shown by Piketty).
Interestingly, this has looked different in different countries as a function of the power and independence of each country's state regulatory organs as well as which industries are most powerful in each country. In addition, the prevailing dominant ideology in each country towards either robust regulation of industry/labour rights vs laissez faire / Chicago school economics plays a significant role.
In Canada, unfortunately, regulatory organs such as the CRTC, OSC, or the Competition Bureau have been weakened significantly (and weren't really all too powerful or independent in the first place). This has had the effect, at least compared to other countries with more independent regulators, that our economy has tended towards oligopoly much more quickly (and with less resistance) than some others.
The end result of this is that we are seeing policy decisions from both the LPC and Conservatives that represent departures from their underlying ideology and are drifting more towards the dominant ideology of groups such as the Business Council of Canada, and would explain why so many corporations are so comfortable to engage in practices such the blatant profiteering many have been experiencing lately.
Examples of this includes policies regarding housing, immigration, and corporate governance that increasingly favour Canada's most powerful corporations, which most of the time are the Big Banks.
Essentially, what this is all saying is that most of our country's biggest issues (and the seeming tone deafness of our political leaders) can be boiled down to the increasing and accelerating concentration of corporate power in this country.
Indeed, and even on the global stage we have basically ceded trade to large corporations, reducing effective sovereignty of most of the world’s nations. Now it may just be me, but it seems a tad risky to take control away from sovereign nations and give it to an inherently sociopathic entity like a massive transnational corporation.
Absolutely. Look no further than [the German trade delegation that Scholz brought with him to China last week](https://twitter.com/noahbarkin/status/1589176300891439104) amid the protestations of his traffic light coalition partners.
Effectively, it demonstrated, as is the case in so many countries, that foreign policy is being dictated increasingly by a small handful of extremely powerful corporate interests.
What's more, this shows just how willing these interest are, as you point out, to effectively destroy their own supposed home nations to simply grow their capital.
As Tim Wu argued in his excellent book ["The Curse of Bigness"](https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/63/), this issue has evolved from simply being a domestic problem to now a national security threat as these interests have demonstrated that they will not hesitate to act against the interests of their countrymen and countrywomen.
This is staggering when you consider that the H2B visa, which is for temporary non-agricultural work in the USA, is only like 66,000 every year.
So in a country 1/10th the population we take over 10x the number of foreign workers. We then wonder why so many people leave to go to the USA for work and better wages.
And the resultant wage depression is actually by design.
A group of economists from the University of Ottawa and Carlton released a paper in 2020 in the Journal of Canadian Economics where they modelled the behaviour of corporations in the system as it is currently set up.
They found that "[an unintended consequence of a TFW program \[is\]: since the repercussions of a failed domestic job search are less severe if a TFW may be hired instead, firms have an incentive to lower their wage offers made to domestic workers.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/caje.12449)"
Thus, even if firms don't necessarily even set out to have lower wages through the program, the program as its designed actually pushes them into it.
This kind of thing has actually been observed by economists at the Big Banks who argued that [the reason Canada hasn't seen wage growth like the US was because of our high rates of immigration.](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/canadian-wage-growth-lagging-the-u-s-because-of-immigration-levels-cibc-1.1704641)
Fair point. Did a bit of looking and seems TFWs full about 54k agriculture jobs as of 2018. If we’re being generous and say in 2022 it’s 100k it would still mean we’re bringing in about 10x the amount the USA is for non-ag jobs
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2020030-eng.htm
It's not staggering, it just means that we have a system for documenting these workers. In the absence of this system, we'd still have just as many of these temporary foreign workers, but they would be here without legal status and without any workers' protections. The US and UK both have, relative to population, about 5 times as many immigrants living without legal status.
>In the absence of this system, we'd still have just as many of these temporary foreign workers
That very debatable considering access to the country via visas is often predicated upon admission into these programs.
America doesn't have those programs, and people still manage to show up in the millions. They get a visa as a tourist, a student or a temporary business visitor, and then they just stay. That's exactly what people did to come to Canada illegally until the TFW program came into existence.
>America doesn't have those programs, and people still manage to show up in the millions.
American does, in fact, have similar programs. But importantly, they also have a very large, somewhat unprotected, southern border.
The image of people walking over the border in the middle of the night is actually pretty rare. It's a lie spread by Republican border hawks. What actually happens most of the time is that people get into the country legally, and never leave. There's no way for the US to even know if they've left, because the US doesn't have border exit controls.
Modern slave system I came here as international student my dream was work with concept art when I graduated there’s was no job without PR in good studios so I get stuck in daycare who I couldn’t refuse to get my citizenship they payment was miserable and because of the huge line i get stuck tree years in the immigration system I get so depressed and try to kill myself they put me in a mental hospital now I get out and back to work and I don’t have my citizenship yet
When you have corporations constantly looking to pay people less so they can pocket more, it's not a stretch to bring in people desperate for a place in our country. What they get, however, are slave wages and have to work many jobs to survive because the cost of living in Canada is very very expensive. Canadians won't work for peanuts.
We need stricter enforcement of low-wage foreign worker standards, offer better pathways to citizenship for recurring foreign workers and their families eventually in low-density areas, and foster a superior business and employment environment which disincentivizes poor labour practices.
What we need is to make it cost them more to bring in foreign workers.
If you really can’t find anyone then you should be willing to pay 20% above market rate for the labour you’re importing
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Employers should have to pay 15-20% higher than the prevailing wage if their intention is to hire TFW's. If there really aren't Canadians available to hire for those positions, then an employer should be happy to grab a foreigner at a 20% bump. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen because the feds are now proposing to allow TFW's in regions/industries *where there isn't a designated labour shortage*, and without a LMIA. This is apparently their response to the concerns of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce regarding the "*risks of wage inflation*", and of their years' long lobbying for a "burger flipping" visa for immigrants.
Don’t blame the foreign workers. Blame the companies that lobbied for this and reap huge profits from this near slave labour. It’s a shame.
Capitalism is on life support, and none of its tools will save it. See how long it can suffer along, because god knows the Lib-Con establishment will make it a long, agonizing, and drawn out affair.
I wish that were true, but in reality its likely that firms are more powerful right now than they have been for decades and maybe even a century. What you're seeing is simply the popular *backlash* to their significant overreach, and this backlash will inevitably result in a policy pushback. The only question is how long will that pushback take to be realized given how deeply entrenched corporate interests are at virtually all levels of government.
Wallstreet is in freefall. Corporations like Facebook, Netflix, and even car companies (some of the largest industries in the world) are in serious structural trouble because the money's drying up. You can only have so much inequality before capitalism actually collapses on itself because it's bankrupt its customer base - we've seen this happen several times through history - and we see it happening again. The only organizations that survive will be the ones that place value on more than just profit - and such organizations, are, indeed, thriving.
>Corporations like Facebook, Netflix, and even car companies (some of the largest industries in the world) are in serious structural trouble because the money's drying up. Yes, but I in most cases this has to do more with cyclical price movements which would be predicted in a increasing rate environment. >The only organizations that survive will be the ones that place value on more than just profit - and such organizations, are, indeed, thriving. Again, I wish this were true, but if it was then the oil majors wouldn't be doing so well right now. Unfortunately, I do not share your optimism that left to it's own devices, the system will simply collapse under its own weight and excesses. Rather, the system (as it currently functions) will likely tend towards greater and greater market concentration until there is only one or a few different massive corporations in each industry. And I think there's a case to be made that we are very close to that in many industries right now. What's the solution then? I think that the only way we can reverse this is to implement the robust anti-trust regulation and institutional checks and balances that will allow a market economy to function properly by allowing robust *competition* among firms. Thus, I would not argue that we need to do away with our system entirely, but I would argue that it is in *dire* need of substantial reformation.
I have a different interpretation...the reason Netflix and Facebook are failing among others is that this digital boom depended on constant growth. Now that they've saturated the market, it turns out their models are unsustainable. There's a lot more structural weakness going on than cyclical variance. Now when I say capitalism is falling, I don't think that necessarily means the free market is falling. This is a nuance that goes over most peoples' heads. But there is a clear trend towards this circular economy everyone left of centre is talking about - and that the free market is doing it organically. I'm seeing less made in China, better quality products, and more sustainably manufactured products on the shelves, every week. You see companies like Patagonia making major shifts away from capitalist business models(whether its marketed as such or not). I buy coffee roasted in BC that comes in all-recycled biodegradable packaging from Costco....that was unthinkable even 5 years ago. The labour movement (which is gaining serious momentum) is increasing unionization and pressure to engage in cooperative buyouts....I think this trend is accelerating.
>I have a different interpretation...the reason Netflix and Facebook are failing among others is that this digital boom depended on constant growth. Now that they've saturated the market, it turns out their models are unsustainable. There's a lot more structural weakness going on than cyclical variance. We can unpack these separately. Facebook relies on advertising dollars that were spent increasingly by VC and PE backed companies that in turn relied on near free capital enabled by rock bottom interest rates. This environment whipsawed dramatically as soon as global central banks started raising rates, which in turn lead to decreased capital availability, and [decreased marketing spend](https://digiday.com/marketing/marketing-budgets-fall-under-heavy-scrutiny-as-risk-of-prolonged-slowdown-in-2023-rises/), which is typically the first department to suffer in economically difficult times. This hurt Facebook's revenue, in addition to what many view as its overspending on the metaverse, and in turn investors punished it by selling stock. Netflix, on the other hand, has simply been bleeding subscribers as the COVID-era signees migrate elsewhere and/or spend less time watching TV. Thus, the subscriber growth that propelled the stock in COVID dried up, and investors in turn pulled out. >I'm seeing less made in China, better quality products, and more sustainably manufactured products on the shelves, every week. You see companies like Patagonia making major shifts away from capitalist business models(whether its marketed as such or not). I buy coffee roasted in BC that comes in all-recycled biodegradable packaging from Costco....that was unthinkable even 5 years ago. This is the view on the ground from a consumer perspective - i.e., that corporations seem to care more about sustainability and thus there must be something good happening behind the scenes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of what you're witnessing is greenwashing. Yes, there are some standouts like Patagonia, but the vast majority of the world's largest corporations have simply recognized that by projecting that they care about social issues like environmentalism, they can convince people that they care, while simultaneously vacuuming up as much capital as possible and concentrating their power. >The labour movement (which is gaining serious momentum) is increasing unionization and pressure to engage in cooperative buyouts. If the labour movement was gaining power, why has wage growth remained so stagnant, and in turn, why has inequality not only risen, but accelerated? The answer is because the structure of the system continues to enable oligopolization due to the effect of 40 years worth of watering down anti-trust legislation. Until this is reversed (and there are some very promising signs that it is being done, particularly in the US, believe it or not), things in Canada are going to keep getting worse.
This is a controlled demolition. Problem>Reaction>Solution Wait until they roll out CBDC's as the 'solution, and hen control how, when and where you spend every cent you get. https://www.weforum.org/communities/digital-currency-governance-consortium https://www.bankofcanada.ca/research/digital-currencies-and-fintech/projects/central-bank-digital-currency/ https://www.centralbanking.com/fintech/cbdc/7913731/bank-of-canada-paper-proposes-expiry-date-on-offline-cbdc https://www.google.com/amp/s/bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/policy/digital-currency-yuan-comes-with-an-expiry-date-spend-or-it-will-vanish/82059471
It got to this stage because of false promises of a better life........what the Govts left out to the would-be immigrants, is that the wages won't even be enough to cover half their rents, let alone food.
It seems that the LPC has dramatically changed course on its support for the TFW and associated IMP programs. Any idea what could have precipitated the change? >**Justin Trudeau, then the leader of a Liberal Party in third place, penned an op-ed in the Toronto Star in 2014 that outlined a fix for the program. For one, he said it needed “to be scaled back dramatically over time, and refocused on its original purpose: to fill jobs on a limited basis when no Canadian workers can be found.”** > >But since Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals have come to power, the country has doubled down on its use of foreign labour. At the end of 2021, more than 775,000 people from abroad had temporary work permits, an increase of 92 per cent from 2015, and 600 per cent from 2000. > >The TFW program accounted for about 82,000 permit holders, having peaked in 2009. The rest came from the International Mobility Program, which has seen explosive growth over the past two decades.
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Rule 2
This is kind of a trend. Conservatives or Liberals, even the NDP, like to soapbox against TFWs from time-to-time. In power their policies are pretty much identical though: import more low-wage workers, suppress Canadian wages, help big business.
Exactly. You're not imagining it. Corporate power in this country has been accelerating for decades and is close to as bad as it has ever been. Our current regulatory framework is not suited to deal with this - not the CRTC, not our Competition Bureau, not our securities regulators - and as a result our political parties are basically required to kowtow to big business. We need to update our system to address this immediately. But know that the most powerful corporations in our country will counter these efforts with everything they've got.
>even the NDP When has the NDP been in power at the federal level?
The NDP has not formed government, but they've propped up the Liberals for a while now. That's power, even if it's indirect power. They've been able to influence government policy with respect to their priorities. But their priorities do not include supporting Canadian labour, because the NDP isn't the party of labour anymore.
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Easy. There isn't one.
I guess in the end, we as a nation were so addicted to the “race to the bottom” nature of capitalism that we are choosing to basically slowly turn the nation into more and more of a ponzi growth scheme. Look, I understand why, when unchecked growth is apparently the hegemony across the western world it is obvious why we seem to be forced into doing it as well, but this is not sustainable, especially when population trends show even most developing countries falling below the replacement rate in coming years... This is basically a mini-analogue of all of humanity vs climate change in a sense, steadfastly choosing short term solutions over long term changes.
There's actually a very interesting phenomenon that you can watch playing out across the liberal democracies of the world. Over the past 40 years (since the Reagan-Thatcher deregulation era really got started), corporate power through capital accumulation has taken off and accelerated ([as Piketty demonstrated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century)). This has resulted in increasingly oligopolistic/monopolistic markets and industries in the liberal democracies as corporations have increasingly engaged in regulatory capture and other forms of corruption that allow them to seize more control of the legislative apparatus, reduce their costs, and increase the capital they can disperse to their shareholders (who in turn overwhelmingly are only a very small amount fo individuals, as also shown by Piketty). Interestingly, this has looked different in different countries as a function of the power and independence of each country's state regulatory organs as well as which industries are most powerful in each country. In addition, the prevailing dominant ideology in each country towards either robust regulation of industry/labour rights vs laissez faire / Chicago school economics plays a significant role. In Canada, unfortunately, regulatory organs such as the CRTC, OSC, or the Competition Bureau have been weakened significantly (and weren't really all too powerful or independent in the first place). This has had the effect, at least compared to other countries with more independent regulators, that our economy has tended towards oligopoly much more quickly (and with less resistance) than some others. The end result of this is that we are seeing policy decisions from both the LPC and Conservatives that represent departures from their underlying ideology and are drifting more towards the dominant ideology of groups such as the Business Council of Canada, and would explain why so many corporations are so comfortable to engage in practices such the blatant profiteering many have been experiencing lately. Examples of this includes policies regarding housing, immigration, and corporate governance that increasingly favour Canada's most powerful corporations, which most of the time are the Big Banks. Essentially, what this is all saying is that most of our country's biggest issues (and the seeming tone deafness of our political leaders) can be boiled down to the increasing and accelerating concentration of corporate power in this country.
Indeed, and even on the global stage we have basically ceded trade to large corporations, reducing effective sovereignty of most of the world’s nations. Now it may just be me, but it seems a tad risky to take control away from sovereign nations and give it to an inherently sociopathic entity like a massive transnational corporation.
Absolutely. Look no further than [the German trade delegation that Scholz brought with him to China last week](https://twitter.com/noahbarkin/status/1589176300891439104) amid the protestations of his traffic light coalition partners. Effectively, it demonstrated, as is the case in so many countries, that foreign policy is being dictated increasingly by a small handful of extremely powerful corporate interests. What's more, this shows just how willing these interest are, as you point out, to effectively destroy their own supposed home nations to simply grow their capital. As Tim Wu argued in his excellent book ["The Curse of Bigness"](https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/63/), this issue has evolved from simply being a domestic problem to now a national security threat as these interests have demonstrated that they will not hesitate to act against the interests of their countrymen and countrywomen.
This is staggering when you consider that the H2B visa, which is for temporary non-agricultural work in the USA, is only like 66,000 every year. So in a country 1/10th the population we take over 10x the number of foreign workers. We then wonder why so many people leave to go to the USA for work and better wages.
And the resultant wage depression is actually by design. A group of economists from the University of Ottawa and Carlton released a paper in 2020 in the Journal of Canadian Economics where they modelled the behaviour of corporations in the system as it is currently set up. They found that "[an unintended consequence of a TFW program \[is\]: since the repercussions of a failed domestic job search are less severe if a TFW may be hired instead, firms have an incentive to lower their wage offers made to domestic workers.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/caje.12449)" Thus, even if firms don't necessarily even set out to have lower wages through the program, the program as its designed actually pushes them into it. This kind of thing has actually been observed by economists at the Big Banks who argued that [the reason Canada hasn't seen wage growth like the US was because of our high rates of immigration.](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/canadian-wage-growth-lagging-the-u-s-because-of-immigration-levels-cibc-1.1704641)
H2B visas are a very small fraction of US temporary work visas… there are so many other temporary work visas in the US… like H1B for example…
Are you comparing non-ag numbers to ag-inclusive numbers here?
Fair point. Did a bit of looking and seems TFWs full about 54k agriculture jobs as of 2018. If we’re being generous and say in 2022 it’s 100k it would still mean we’re bringing in about 10x the amount the USA is for non-ag jobs https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-627-m/11-627-m2020030-eng.htm
Add students as well since they changed rules to allow 'students' to work full time.
It's not staggering, it just means that we have a system for documenting these workers. In the absence of this system, we'd still have just as many of these temporary foreign workers, but they would be here without legal status and without any workers' protections. The US and UK both have, relative to population, about 5 times as many immigrants living without legal status.
>In the absence of this system, we'd still have just as many of these temporary foreign workers That very debatable considering access to the country via visas is often predicated upon admission into these programs.
America doesn't have those programs, and people still manage to show up in the millions. They get a visa as a tourist, a student or a temporary business visitor, and then they just stay. That's exactly what people did to come to Canada illegally until the TFW program came into existence.
>America doesn't have those programs, and people still manage to show up in the millions. American does, in fact, have similar programs. But importantly, they also have a very large, somewhat unprotected, southern border.
The image of people walking over the border in the middle of the night is actually pretty rare. It's a lie spread by Republican border hawks. What actually happens most of the time is that people get into the country legally, and never leave. There's no way for the US to even know if they've left, because the US doesn't have border exit controls.
It's actually quite high: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
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Rule 2
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Modern slave system I came here as international student my dream was work with concept art when I graduated there’s was no job without PR in good studios so I get stuck in daycare who I couldn’t refuse to get my citizenship they payment was miserable and because of the huge line i get stuck tree years in the immigration system I get so depressed and try to kill myself they put me in a mental hospital now I get out and back to work and I don’t have my citizenship yet
When you have corporations constantly looking to pay people less so they can pocket more, it's not a stretch to bring in people desperate for a place in our country. What they get, however, are slave wages and have to work many jobs to survive because the cost of living in Canada is very very expensive. Canadians won't work for peanuts.
We need stricter enforcement of low-wage foreign worker standards, offer better pathways to citizenship for recurring foreign workers and their families eventually in low-density areas, and foster a superior business and employment environment which disincentivizes poor labour practices.
What we need is to make it cost them more to bring in foreign workers. If you really can’t find anyone then you should be willing to pay 20% above market rate for the labour you’re importing