BCbusiness advocates are calling changes to Canada's temporary foreign worker (TFW) program "overkill," and say they will have dire consequences for fast-food franchisees and other small business owners.
"It will probably frighten away small businesses from doing as much as they did … They'll just have to do without or disappear into the night, I guess," John Winter, president and CEO of the BC Chamber of Commerce, told Business in Vancouver.
The federal government recently announced changes to the program, including:
•a new fee for employers applying for a labour market opinion (LMO) (to obtain an LMO, employers must show they have made efforts to find Canadian employees);
•a price increase for work permits for foreign workers;
•eliminating a fast-track process for obtaining an LMO; and
•scrapping a rule that allowed employers to pay TFWs up to 15% less than the government's calculated Canada-wide average wage for job classifications.
A lawsuit against HD Mining, which applied to hire workers from China to staff a B.C. coal mine, and media reports about the Royal Bank of Canada's use of temporary foreign workers in its IT department have put the issue in the spotlight.
But Winter said that in B.C., it's employers who hire the workers for low-skilled jobs, and especially fast-food franchisees, who will suffer the most.
"The [program] is critically important to many restaurants," agreed Mark von Schellwitz, vice-president of Western Canada for the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA).
Von Schellwitz said restaurant owners wouldn't hire TFWs unless they had to.
"It's a very expensive, cumbersome process in terms of employer time, money and administrative resources," said von Schellwitz.
He said it was especially important in regions of the province, like Northeast B.C., which have a booming oil and gas economy. There, restaurants simply can't find enough people, no matter how much they pay, he said.
"That's where you'll find the quick service-type restaurant saying, in order for us to open up a 24/7 business, we can find Canadians to cover 30-40% of our shifts but we can't open up this new restaurant unless we've got [enough] workers," he said.
"So if they don't have access to those temporary foreign workers, there are some Canadians that aren't going to be hired either because they can't open."
Instead of more restrictions on the program, von Schellwitz and Winter would like to see more enforcement of the existing rules and better co-operation between federal and provincial governments.
But Jim Sinclair, president of the BC Federation of Labour, said hiring temporary foreign workers to fill low-skilled jobs isn't a good use of the program.
"The program is wrong for this whole [restaurant] industry," said Sinclair. "These are entry-level jobs. There's 1.4 million people unemployed in Canada, and if anything there's a wage shortage in these jobs, not a labour shortage."
Sinclair is advocating for the program to be revamped to work as it did when it was first introduced: A short-term fix for employers who needed specific, skilled workers to fill temporary vacancies.
