Conservative member of Parliament Michelle Rempel Garner, the shadow minister for immigration, has been on a social media tear. From August 26 to September 26, the member for the Alberta riding of Calgary Nose Hill posted on X about temporary foreign workers (TFWs). Nearly every day, she’d pluck a job listing from the jobwatchcanada.com website and imply it was fraudulent.

Her September 19 entry, for example, called out a posting in the Ottawa area for six cooks at Boston Pizza. These were full-time jobs paying between $17.20 and $23 an hour, around the range for that position in the Ottawa area based on government figures. Her accompanying commentary states that Ottawa’s unemployment rate currently sits at 6.7 percent, and that 206,000 young people are unemployed in Ontario. The implication is that the posting must be fraudulent because the unemployment rate is above the 6 percent threshold, which, under the new rules governing the Temporary Foreigner Worker Program (TFWP), should disqualify restaurants like Boston Pizza from hiring foreign workers, and that there should be enough unemployed youth in Ontario to fill those positions.

The point Rempel Garner is trying to make is that the TWFP is taking jobs away from young people in Canada, whose unemployment numbers have spiked over the past few years. The source of her information—jobwatchcanada.com—is a newly-minted site, registered on July 27, 2025, to a registrar based in Phoenix, Arizona, with the self-proclaimed goal to track “which employers frequently rely on the TFW program” and provide Canadians “with the information needed to make informed decisions about where to spend their money.”

It’s a clever bit of political framing. It’s also a classic case of scapegoating: blaming temporary workers, rather than the broken system that governs them. Temporary work, in all its varied forms in Canada, needs to be reformed. Instead, it is being turned into a polarizing wedge issue using a dangerous brand of nativism dressed up as concern for Canada’s struggling youth. This kind of outrage politics can deliver votes. But as the US has shown, it can also unleash violence.

Tyrel Chambers, a thirty-three-year-old software developer living north of Toronto, said he built jobwatchcanada.com as a tool to help Canadians keep watch over companies applying for Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIA), the approval process businesses generally need to go through to hire a foreign worker. “The goal,” Chambers told me in a recent email exchange, is “to show the companies who have applied for a LMIA and those who are currently wanting to hire a TFW.”

The site offers multiple tools, including a searchable database of all businesses in Canada that have posted jobs and either have LMIA applications pending or already approved, as well as a map feature that offers up the precise names and locations of businesses that currently hold approved LMIAs.

Early on, the site failed to get much traction. Chambers said he still has not received a single donation to his buymeacoffee.com page, and the site remains a one-man labour of love. But when Rempel Garner took it under her wing, it blossomed, surprising Chambers himself. “In the last 2 weeks I have gone more viral than any other time in my life,” he wrote on his LinkedIn account on September 10. Chambers’s Reddit community, r/jobwatchcanada, which he set up alongside the website, now attracts some 32,000 visitors a week.

Chambers told me he doesn’t know how Rempel Garner came across his site, but from day one of her campaign on August 26, she boosted it to her approximately 175,000 followers on X. “This handy dandy site shows all the jobs that will be available to TFWs: jobwatchcanada.com/jobs,” she wrote on that first day. In every subsequent post during her campaign, she led with: “Day [X] of posting jobwatchcanada.com/jobs data!”

The problem is, the data does not actually belong to jobwatchcanada.com. It is Government of Canada data that has been freely available to the public for many years. Chambers admits all of the LMIA-linked job postings on his site come from daily “scraping runs” it performs at the Government of Canada Job Bank website. “The site just represents the data that anyone could find on the Government of Canada’s website,” Chambers admitted.

The reason for building it, he told me, was to give Canadians a........

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