Proposed changes to Canadian immigration rules for temporary foreign worker program

Currently, no provisions exist in the Canadian Immigration regulations to hold employers or third-party agents accountable for their actions regarding the treatment of temporary foreign workers and the proposed amendments would  minimize the potential for exploitation of temporary foreign workers, implement stronger monitoring mechanisms and reinforce that employment through the temporary foreign worker program is meant to be temporary in nature.

The proposed changes to the Immigration regulations would:

• Establish a set of factors to guide the assessment of the genuineness of an employer’s offer of employment to a temporary foreign worker;
• Make an employer ineligible to access the temporary foreign worker program for a period of two years if the employer has previously been found to provide significantly lower wages, working conditions or an occupation different than what was offered to a temporary foreign worker;
• Provide for the publication of a list with the names, addresses and period of ineligibility of employers who are not eligible to access the temporary foreign worker program on the Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s external website;
• Establish a limit of four years of work for temporary foreign workers, followed by a period of at least six years in which they would not be authorized to work in Canada, with exceptions for certain workers (eg. Intra-Company Transferees, NAFTA Professionals); and
• Introduce a requirement that Human Resources and Skills Development Canada’s Labour Market Opinion indicate a period of time during which the opinion is in effect.

Under the new regulations, an assessment of the genuineness of the job offer would be carried out regardless of whether an Labour Market Opinion is required and accordingly, Work Permit applications involving LMO-exempt cases (such as Intra-Company Transferees and NAFTA Professionals) will be subject to this new genuineness assessment process.

The Canadian Visa Bureau is an independent consulting company specialising in helping people with their Canadian Visa applications to the Canadian Embassy.