As Canada’s unemployment rate ticks upward, politicians and social media rhetoric have increasingly pointed to the temporary foreign worker program as the culprit. But government data and immigration experts say that narrative distorts the facts, fuelling a heated debate over the real role migrant labour plays in Canada’s economy.
The debate, further ignited after Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre claimed the program has ballooned out of control and should be banned, comes at a critical moment. A recent poll suggested that nearly half of Canadians want the TFW program scrapped altogether.
But some sectors, including agriculture and health care, warn that without migrant workers they risk deepening already critical staffing shortages, with some businesses cautioning they could be forced to shut down, even as public anxiety over job security continues to grow.
Adding to the tension is confusion over what the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program actually is — and what it isn’t.
Created in 1973 to fill jobs Canadians could not or would not take, it brings in thousands of workers each year, the vast majority in agriculture, and makes up a small share of the overall workforce.
Unlike the substantially larger International Mobility Program — which covers work permits for international students, intra-company transferees and other categories — the TFW program requires employers to prove no Canadians are available to fill the role through a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), and ties workers’ status to a single employer, leaving them vulnerable to abuse.
The Star set out to examine and unpack some of the most prominent claims made about the program.
CLAIM: The TFW program is taking away jobs from Canadians amid rising unemployment.
CONTEXT: Earlier this month, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called on Mark Carney’s Liberals to ditch the program, claiming it was shutting people out of jobs.
Canada’s unemployment rate rose to 6.9 per cent in April, the highest since November, largely a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on a raft of Canadian imports, according to Statistics Canada. Jobs in the manufacturing sector have been particularly affected.
The unemployment rate continued to tick up to 7.1 per cent in August as the economy lost 66,000 jobs for the month. The professional, scientific and technical services industry lost 26,000 jobs, while transportation and warehousing lost 23,000 positions and the manufacturing sector lost 19,000 jobs in that period.
At the same time, temporary foreign worker approvals declined year over year.
Data from Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), which oversees the TFW program, shows that LMIA approvals dropped from 71,177 in the first quarter of 2024 to 53,845 in the same period of 2025.
“There’s a decrease in the number of temporary foreign workers who are coming to Canada and then we are simultaneously blaming them for the unemployment rate being higher,” said Catherine Connelly, a professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business, who has been studying the program for more than a decade.
“We can’t have it both ways.”
Jim Stanford, economist and director of the think tank Centre for Future Work, agrees.
“It is wrong to suggest that migrant labour is a major source of the problems Canadian workers are experiencing today — which are the result first and foremost of Donald Trump’s tariff attacks, lingering high interest rates, the decline of high-wage industrial jobs, and government austerity in some provinces,” he said.
A recent report from Desjardins found that even young international students, or the children of recently arrived workers now old enough to enter the labour force themselves, are disproportionately struggling to find work today, compared to those born in Canada.
The claim that TFWs are taking jobs from Canadians also misrepresents how the program works, Connelly said, noting that the TFW program allows employers to hire foreign nationals for temporary positions only after submitting an LMIA for government approval. This document requires employers to provide substantial evidence that no local Canadians or permanent residents are available for the role.
While there are certainly cases of abuse and fraud in the program that need to be addressed, many companies still have to “do their very utmost best to hire Canadians and they have to articulate all the steps that they took and they have to document that it was just not possible,’” she said.
CLAIM: TFWs make up almost two per cent of Canada’s overall workforce.
CONTEXT: Poilievre also made the claim that TFWs have ballooned to almost two per cent of Canada’s total workforce, calling it “a staggering number, an unprecedented number.” He accused the Liberal government of breaking its promise to cap the number of migrant workers admitted.
“The Liberals promised they would cap the temporary foreign worker program at 82,000, but in the first six months, they’ve already handed out 105,000 permits,” Poilievre said.
However, government data on the TFW program shows there were about 191,000 work permit holders in total in 2024, which makes up “less than one per cent of the workforce,” Stanford pointed out.
Last year, prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced a cap on the use of the TFW program, limiting most employers in most sectors to hiring a maximum of 10 per cent of their workforce through the program, down from the previous 20 per cent. The changes excluded certain sectors like agriculture, construction and health care, the industries that employ the largest number of temporary foreign workers.
According to federal data, Canada set a target to admit 82,000 new arrivals through the program this year.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said Poilievre’s 105,000 figure does not “represent new arrivals to the country” and includes permit extensions for people already in Canada.
“Between January and June 2025, 33,722 new workers entered Canada through this program, which is roughly 40 per cent of the total volume expected this year,” a spokesperson for the department said in an email.
Stanford pointed out that the biggest proportional expansion in the TFW program occurred under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, in which Poilievre served as minister of employment and social development in 2015. Despite an unemployment rate that spiked in 2009, the number of TFWs in Canada more than doubled over the course of six years from 2006 to 2012, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
The idea that Canada is hiring record numbers of temporary foreign workers has also been spreading widely on social media.
One viral post claimed that more than 15 million temporary workers have entered since 2015, while another suggested Canada “imported” 36.5 per cent of its population in the last decade.
Much of the outrage is directed toward the TFW program, without distinguishing it from the much larger International Mobility Program (IMP) and people who entered the country with study permits, which Connelly stresses is “a completely different program.”
“People who come through the IMP program have open work permits,” she said. “They can quit their job anytime they need, which is a stark contrast with the TFW program, because these workers have closed work permits and they are tied to their employer,” she said.
The number of temporary resident permits in many instances also includes visas that have been reissued to the same person each year, not just new arrivals to the country.
Stanford noted that non-permanent migration has actually been declining since late 2024.
He explained that figures circulating online are often misleading and that the total population of non-permanent residents has declined from 3.05 million to 2.96 million over the last year, according to Statistics Canada data.
At the same time, 90,000 more non-permanent residents have left Canada than have arrived over the past six months, Statistics Canada data shows.
Stanford acknowledged that the TFW program was mismanaged in the years after the COVID pandemic, which left many sectors grappling with significant labour shortages. Many employers have grown accustomed to the ceaseless supply of temporary foreign labour and international students to fill low-wage jobs in fast-food restaurants, retail, warehouses, factories and gig work.
However, it’s important to note that the main culprit for the misuse of the program is not the workers themselves but “businesses looking for cheap labour,” he said,” rather than its intended purpose to fill specific shortages.”
CLAIM: TFW program is exploitative and must be abolished.
CONTEXT: As Canada increasingly relies on migrant workers to fill gaps in key sectors, reports of abuse have also skyrocketed.
The UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery denounced Canada’s TFW program as “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”
Tomoya Obokata pointed out that exploitation stemming from the “structural precarity for temporary foreign workers would be mitigated by systematically providing workers with a pathway to permanent residence.”
Granting workers permanent status, he said, would “reflect the fact that, despite their nominally temporary nature, the demand for labour met by the migration programs is permanent.”
Advocates have long called for stronger protection and permanent pathways for workers.
Echoing Obokata, Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, underscored that simply ending the program would not end exploitation, which could only be solved by giving workers permanent status and rights equal to Canadian workers.
“These programs have existed for more than half a century,” he said. “This is not a temporary program. It is a permanent program.”
Hussan pointed out that the Conservative party, while calling for the TFW program to be abolished, is simultaneously suggesting “a separate, standalone program for legitimately difficult-to-fill agricultural labour.”
Agriculture makes up the majority of the TFW program, and “it is the place where the highest levels of exploitation and abuse are taking place,” he said. “How is that going to end exploitation?”
While Poilievre has pointed to the exploitation of TFWs as a reason to end the program, Connelly said that rhetoric “is piggybacking off of some anti-immigrant sentiment in the general public” as way to bolster support.
She emphasized that “the best way to protect workers is through enforcement of employment standards … and a transition to open work permits instead of closed work permits.”
“Just eliminating the program is not likely to be implemented,” she added. “It seems as though people suggesting this are absolving themselves of any responsibility for fine-tuning the program in a way that is practical and actually works for both the workers and the businesses hiring them.”
