I don’t care for this program much at all however, there are many Canadians who just don’t want to work and have a bad attitude when they do while foreign workers rarely cough up attitude. It’s like a mix bag. I’d rather see Canadians working more than bringing in people for a few years and sending them back.

Of course the temporary worker isn’t going to give attitude. When you have the constant threat of being sent back to whatever hell hole country you just escaped from, you’re not going to speak up for your rights or stand up for yourself in front of many of these little ‘dictator’ employers.

Not all businesses treat their temporary workers that way Mercenary! My cousin used to manage a restuarant in Surry and she used temporary foreign workers because they couldn’t get realiable Canadians to work. The Canadians that did work were run off their feet because some of their co-workers would constantly blow shifts or continuously call in sick. Signs for “help needed” were always up until they got a few temps that wanted to work. They were never abused.

The problem isn’t the temporary worker program, the problem is program abuse by Canadian businesses that choose to profit by the program.

Mercenary is so right. ..why hire Canadians who have a few rights left when you can hire a foreign worker with none. ..I really thought we abolished slavery but it exists a Dairy Queen in college heights for one where English is a second language. ..

They come for a purpose, and that is to earn Canadian money here which, when converted to the currency of the country they came from, will give them considerably more ‘purchasing power’ in that country than they could have got working the same length of time there.

It’s not a phenomenon unique to “temporary” foreign workers, either. Many immigrants who have obtained Canadian citizenship also work here ‘temporarily’, (for part of the year), then return to their country of origin where they can enjoy a far greater standard of living ‘at leisure’ than the rest of their former fellow countrymen can ‘working’. Simply through the anomalies of currency exchange rates.

If both groups thought it wasn’t worthwhile to do this, they wouldn’t come here and do it.

It is really not much different than Canadians working abroad, only in that instance the skill sets are generally ones which command more money there, payable in Canadian or US dollars, than the worker could make at home. And living conditions have to approximate what would be available for such workers here, or exceed them.

In the final analysis, people generally do the best work when they have an ‘inducement’ they can clearly see is in some way of benefit to them to do it.

Many people here, who could do the same jobs TFW are hired to do, may well not be able to see any real benefit to them from doing those same jobs. To them, there isn’t any ~ not financially anyways.

If they are ‘compelled’ to do them, you won’t get good work done. They will do the minimum they can get away with, and this is certainly not beneficial to the business hiring them, nor its customers.

If we raise the monetary ‘inducement’ offered, to make the job financially attractive to the worker, this additional ‘cost’ has to be recovered in ‘price’.

Which makes the product or service offered financially unattractive to the customer. While the rise in ‘price’ negates the increase in ‘income’ when they have to buy those products or services themselves. We’re back to square one.

One thing is certain. We cannot ever solve this problem trying to do it the way we’ve been trying to so far.

If there is an answer, and I believe there is, to most of it, at least, we should first of all discard some very outdated notions most of us harbor about ‘work’.

NoWay, I have to agree with you.

There are a lot of young Canadians out there that wants to be the best they can be, and have entered post secondary education and or trades and are working hard to make lives for themselves. Than there are the ones that entered min wage jobs after school and don’t take their jobs seriously.

So who is to blame for these lazy kids, I would have to say 70% of it would be the parents not teaching lifeskills to their children. The other 30% on the system where every kid is geared to go to post secondary. Thus when they leave school, they don’t go to college or take a trade, they work the min job and use the parents as their safety net.

So we do need foreign workers if we are to keep the engine running in this country, when your children is not willing to fill the shoes. We need these foreign workers to become Canadian Citizens so that they can contribute to our governments tax base to make this country all it can be. I also believe there are a few business owners that feel that the foreign workers can be treated like second class citizen, well shame on these people and they should be called in on it. Why, because its not Canadian to do that.

Without TFW’s, they’d have to close down most of the Tim Hortons. Oh the horror…

For the record….I have NO PROBLEM with the TFW themselves. I respect anyone who actively tries to improve themselves and their lives. AND I fully support people trying to get out of crappy countries for the chance at a better life here.

What I dislike….strongly is the ABUSE and THREATS that these TFW have to put up with when they get here from unscrupulous employers looking to make a fast buck off these people. Its these modern day ‘dictators’ that need to be shut down and thrown in prison for abusing the system.

Attach some hefty fines and prison time to those people who abuse the system and then things will improve dramatically.

I would love to know where the do theses surveys?
Is it big city people, small town, off the street or out of 3NE?

Are these the same yokels who said the Liberals were going to lose the last election?

I totally support the TFW program for skilled labour. We are not turning out enough trades people to fill all the positions, and the ones we do have don’t want to work up north, where there are severe shortages of skilled workers.
If the fast food restaurants can’t fill their open positions, maybe they need to look at why. These very profitable chains do not want to treat their Canadian employees in a manner that keeps them happy, and “need” slaves that won’t complain. There are not easy answers here, but what is going on now is not right.

Is it just possible that ‘someone’ in the gov’t wasn’t looking at the applications of employers properly?
I think something that can be said about the TFWs is that after they have done their service, been allowed to take out Canadian citizenship and become free agents to work wherever they want to, they are still some of the best workers around. Our workers can certainly learn from their work ethics.
I don’t think threats of deportation has a lot to do with the way they work.

Give more: You are wrong. I’ve worked along side some of these folks in the TFW program. One fellow was so worried about deportation that he was basically willing to do whatever the employer wanted just to remain here in Canada. When I told him he had rights and could refuse to do unsafe work, he didn’t believe me. The crap that he had to deal with back in his home country was so terrible that this guy was willing to put his life at risk just to remain here in Canada….

He BEGGED me not to go to the authorities and report his employer…..so I didn’t. In hindsight I probably should have….but when you’re dealing with people’s livelihoods and how they earn a living…its hard to see a ‘proper’ way out.

Mercenary: You are probably right, while they are TFWs. The point I was trying to make, is after they are free agents, they still work very well.

Mercenary you must be talking about tim Horton i.e Hart Highway as far as I am concerned they should be shut down I am not against TFWs but I get a tad upset with the way they are treated. It really upsets me to see those Union workers who are the ones promoting this when they go to Timmies and all the other fast food joints . Like get a grip refuse to support
these maggots who threat these people like they are scum. I for one will not support this kind of slavery.

hmmm, been to a couple places in town that are predominately foreign speaking workers and I didn’t think it was too polite to stand behind the counter talking and laughing while customers waited to be served. At least if it was a local worker I would have known what the joke was. The place was filthy and their food handling hygiene was atrocious. We actually left their without finishing our food, and I would have asked for the manager to complain but I couldn’t find anyone who could understand anything English unless it was something off the menu. No more Roast Beef Sandwiches for me at that slophole.

We need to drill down on this issue if we want to understand it. It is not that we have temporary foreign workers that is the problem, so much as it is how they are approved and how they are treated.

Problem number one is the labor market survey required to hire a foreign worker. It is a flawed process at the moment.

If we have union halls with call up lists for skilled trades and their apprentices… then companies should have no qualification to the TFW program for these trades. This includes most all trades.

The unions should ensure qualified members are available whether it be through attracting the skilled journeymen through remuneration and benefits, or apprentices through qualifications to meet the requirement to become an apprentice. Ratio’s of apprentices to journeymen should be enforced by the unions and possibly provincial regulations.

If a large contractor requires more tradesmen for a large contract like an LNG plant; than for those large contracts they almost always use union labor, and essentially would require union labor if they want to have the security of workers to complete the project. A union like the IBEW can call up from throughout North America… they have rules though, local then provincial, then national, then they can call up from across North America. There is simply no need to have a temporary foreign worker program for a union project. The process already exists for these unions and have worked well in the past on many large projects throughout BC.

Social license should require that these large projects are done with union labor.

This is the hitch, because the TFW program for skilled trades is more about breaking unions than it is about skills shortages. Non-union companies that use temporary labor with little social license for the horizon past the end of the contract push hard for the TFW program and the skills shortage scare.

Having large contracts done with union labor benefits all involved including the non union workers that get local priority to hiring for these positions. When confronted with this union companies train their own tradesmen as part of their social contract with their clients and partner unions. The temporary foreign worker program undermines this process.

Second important thing is pathway to citizenship. If a person puts in a defined time as defined on a labor market survey process no more than 2-years, and they stay employed in good faith throughout, then they should get credit for this on the permanent residency process for citizenship. They should not have to start off again at zero. I would also like to think they should have proper training on their rights from day one with the right to join a union to begin the process of seniority and worker rights protected by a union.

To me the temporary foreign worker program should not be about skilled trades… we should be training our own with proper succession planning in place. The TFW program should be about low wage positions that are predominantly non union… mostly meat packing plants, old age care homes, and summer farm workers, but also in extreme cases fast food and retail workers.

Someone with a unique skill set is not going to require the TFW program to enter Canada to work. If they want to become a permanent resident [b]they can on their own merits[/b], or we don’t really need them that bad. We should be a meritocracy of citizens and not a sweet shop of people working in fear of deportation.