🇨🇦 Alberta Moves to Regulate Temporary Foreign Worker Employers — The First Honest Step in Years

Alberta is introducing regulations on employers who recruit through the Temporary Foreign Worker program — a program that has been systematically abused for two decades to suppress wages, bypass local hiring, and keep labour markets flooded on behalf of corporate interests. The federal government ran this scheme at industrial scale under the Liberals, importing hundreds of thousands of workers while Canadians in the same sectors sat underemployed. Alberta acting provincially to impose employer accountability is the kind of sovereignist move Ottawa should have made federally years ago.

Note the framing you will hear from the business lobby: this is anti-growth, anti-investment, xenophobic. What it actually is: a government choosing the interests of resident workers over the convenience of employers who found it easier to import compliance than pay competitive wages. Temporary foreign workers were never meant to be a permanent structural feature of the Canadian labour market. They became one because no one in Ottawa had the political courage to say no to the industries addicted to cheap, captive labour.

🍁 Maple Chronicles