Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: The Low-skilled Stream

Lecture by Judy Fudge, Professor and Lansdowne Chair, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria.

Abstract

The Canadian federal government is promoting temporary foreign migration, especially of low-skilled workers, to promote economic growth. This presentation places the Canadian Low-Skill Temporary Foreign Migrant Workers Program within the international approach to managed migration. It begins by sketching the three dominant approaches to managed migration – neo-liberal, social development, and migration as development – and identifies some of the limitations in each of these approaches.

A more inclusive framework for evaluating temporary foreign worker programs (TFWP) is constructed, and it is used to evaluate the Canadian Low-skill Temporary Foreign Migrant Workers Program. The changes that have made the program more “employer-friendly” are discussed, and the mechanisms designed to protect temporary foreign workers are examined.

The presentation concludes by characterizing the Canadian TFWP in light of the international approaches, and considers what Canada should do to ensure that temporary foreign workers are neither exploited nor used to lower the wages of Canadian residents and citizens.

About the speaker

Judy Fudge is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria, Canada, where she teaches employment and labour law. She began her academic career at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, and she has written extensively on labour law, employment law, labour law history, pay equity, and human rights at work.

Her current research is on the regulation of working time, constitutionalization of workers’ rights and the rights of temporary workers admitted to Canada to perform low-waged work that is not attractive to citizens and permanent residents. She was awarded the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights from the Social Sciences and Human Research Council for 2009- 2010 for her research project Labour as Human Rights: Unions, Women and Migrants.

Presented by the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism   and the  Hans and Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law.