[T]he … [Canadian temporary] Foreign Worker Program serves as a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery… [W]orkers’ … status depends on an employer-specific, closed work permit. … [C]losed work permits … and the absence of a clear pathway to permanent residence also create vulnerabilities for … workers under the high-wage and Global Talent streams (…) – Tomoya Obokata, UN Rapporteur.
United Nations (UN) Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery 2024
In September 2023, an in-person visit by the Human Rights Council’s appointed Special Rapporteur has put Canada in the spotlight for a widespread audience.[1] Tomoya Obokata’s resulting report released in 2024 was merciless: Canada’s temporary migration system was associated with regulatory mechanisms likely to foster contemporary forms of modern slavery. It is true that labour migration and selective entry requirements have been an intrinsic feature of Canada’s history. However, there have also been humanising efforts, which at times have led to progressive amendments such as the removal of explicitly racist (im)migration laws in the late 1960s. Where then does the bifurcation lie? Some have argued that the consolidation of the aggregate Canadian immigration system has indeed been bifid: an increasing focus on migrants’ economic potential has superceded racial categorisation, but only within the permanent immigration programme. In the case of temporary migration, echoes of Canada’s early 20th century racialisation of migrants hired to address employers’ punctual labour needs have recently materialised with unprecedented growth in some Canadian provinces, to the point where temporary migration has become a vividly contested terrain across the federal territory and beyond.
In October 2024, Patrice Jalette and I organised a workshop during the Interuniversity Research Center on Globalization and Work’s (Crimt) conference to provide space for discussion around the major features of the Canadian temporary migration system and its implications within the context of Quebec. Both of us examined temporary migration in our individual and common research projects. Our overarching objective was to assemble the ideas, analyses and experiences of different actors who had encountered in varying ways temporary migrant workers, hiring employers and the main components of the temporary migration programme in its contemporary form. We aimed to facilitate lively interaction within a variegated group of guests and cross-examine distinct perspectives and field experiences. The workshop took place on 25th October 2024 in Montreal during the conference’s ‘community forum’. Social actors such as trade unionists, activists, workers and other practitioners were invited to engage with CRIMT co-researchers on their respective approaches to addressing common themes, while focusing on work and employment practices.
That year, the CRIMT’s conference title, Work on the Brink. Better Work for a Just and Sustainable Future carried a sense of urgency. CRIMT hosted more than 650 participants attending online and in person, with the aim of examining “disruptions and crises affecting the world of work, address[ing] their consequences, and critically assess[ing] the strategies, policies and actions implemented by world-of-work actors to support, mitigate, or counter these effects’. The Canadian temporary migration system and the alarm it has triggered at the international level constituted a hot topic propitious for an open debate within this international network. Not to mention that, at the time of the CRIMT conference, press coverage in Quebec and Canada had either depicted a dark portrait of less skilled migrant workers’ experiences or focused on law relaxation aiming to facilitate temporary migrant workers’ recruitment for Canada-based employers or reduce their number, because the capacity of Canadian society to accommodate them had been reached.
Following the dynamic and rich conversation that emanated from the workshop, we hoped that the exercise would offer a more comprehensive portrait of the situation. The workshop was held in French for a Quebec-based audience. We therefore, decided to share the highlights of the workshop with a larger audience by building this Futures of Work issue with syntheses of our guests’ contributions. We aim to both ‘zoom in and out’ of the sociopolitical phenomenon. Overall, we intend to show how rethinking the future of decent work in the Canadian context will require urgent attention to both work and non-work elements that affect those who engage in work activities as migrant workers in Canada and become victims of sharply asymmetrical power relations within capitalist production and service-provision regimes. Drawing on researcher and practitioner experiences, contributions highlight how forms of systemic racism are perpetuated through a regulatory mechanism that intrinsically ensures migrant workers’ dependence upon their employers, thus putting dependents at risk and in a vulnerable position.
Zooming out implies the depiction of the situation at the scale of the federal country, with specific contextualising insights that may explain the institutional factors that allow the system to persist in Canada. The first contribution addresses concerns surrounding the impact of constraints imposed on migrant individuals’ fundamental rights by an employer-specific (or closed) work permit and temporary status. Jurist and activist Eugenie Depatie-Pelletier touches on specific historical facts and dares to suggest new imaginaries away from ‘unfreedom’ that would require the complete eradication of the employer-specific permit. The impact on employers of such an ideal human rights-oriented proposition would be significant: to date, the temporary employer-specific permit provides an indirect advantage to employers in terms of employee retention in the medium term. However, while employers can be subject to criticism for contributing to the persistence of the temporary migration programme, Catherine Connelly’s analysis across Canada provides a nuanced account of employers’ roles and experiences with temporary migration as an intrinsic component of their workforce planning, including their own challenges.
‘Zooming in’ on the meso-case of Quebec has allowed Patrice Jalette and me to identify some of the specific elements that depict workers’ work and non-work situations once they are hired as temporary migrant labourers. Elsewhere, researchers have shown that there are cases of workers involved, for instance, in agricultural work who experience an absence of social protection beyond the basic labour legislation provision. However, our scholarly account of workers’ experiences corroborates Mouloud Idir’s critique of the ‘temporary’ status as a legal concept. According to the union official, ‘unfreedom’ is also present for unionised migrant workers, insofar as the employer-specific permit and ‘temporary’ status foster vulnerability and dependence on the employer, despite union membership opportunities and ensuing protection.
While it is important to acknowledge skilled migrants’ success stories, such as those encountered by law practitioner Jean-Philippe Brunet, the aggregate observation across our guests’ contributions leaves us in a reflexive cul-de-sac. Based on Brunet’s contribution, we acknowledge that the dark side of temporary migration in Canada can be nuanced by stories of skilled workers who have been able to identify a ‘clear’ pathway’ (to echo the UN Special rapporteur’s words) to permanent immigration. Success stories mitigate our portrait of the situation, while one equally wonders how they compensate for the problematic moral deficit that this type of permit delivery implies for fundamental rights for both skilled and unskilled migrants. Temporary migration, as the UN Special Rapporteur reminds us, goes beyond being a work- and employment-related matter: it constitutes a human rights issue for all that has yet to be properly addressed in Canada.
Image credit: Ravi Patel via Unsplash