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The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed

The only way to stop companies from abusing the system is to end it

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has, for a litany of reasons, cemented its place as the poster child for all things wrong with Canada’s immigration system. Corruption? Check. Exploitation? Check. Profiteering? Check. A growing majority of Canadians now blame the program for bringing in too many immigrants and contributing to the housing shortage, a crumbling health care system, and for some on the far right, a perceived crisis of too many Brown people.

Businesses work with immigration consultants to turn the temporary nature of the TFWP into a permanent business model

A recent BC Supreme Court case found Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. and Kuldeep Bansal liable for exploiting migrant workers

Some experts don’t believe the ruling will lead to changes in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program

The critiques are mostly political and occasionally racist. But a recent British Columbia Supreme Court decision in a class action suit tells a more sobering story: the TFWP is merely a tool bad actors can weaponize against the vulnerable in a broader immigration system that places a person’s productive value above their human value.

What makes this case extraordinary is its scale: between 2011 and 2016, a Surrey-based immigration consultant named Kuldeep Bansal ran a glitzy foreign worker recruitment operation out of a luxury hotel in Dubai, disguised as a series of job fairs, that defrauded hundreds, potentially thousands, of vulnerable workers with offers of jobs in Canada that, in many instances, didn’t exist.

The suit accused Bansal of charging vulnerable workers in Dubai between $2,000 and $8,000 for “services” related to obtaining these “guaranteed” jobs for Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. (The company, which has been rebranded as Circle K, is owned by Quebec-based Alimentation Couche Tard, which is not named in the ruling.) The hiring representative for Mac’s, a man named Geoff Higuchi, was accused of knowing about the scam but still helping Bansal secure work permits through the TFWP, then breaching contracts with the around 125 workers who actually arrived in Canada and were told the jobs they had applied for were no longer available.

If the class members, 880 people from around the world, are awarded the estimated damages sought by the suit—which could be around $45 million, including compensation for financial losses as well as punitive damages—it will represent the biggest fraud case in the history of the TFWP and, in dollar terms, the biggest immigration fraud case in Canadian history.

Behind those astonishing numbers is something more revealing: this was not merely a rogue immigration consultant devouring the dreams of vulnerable foreign workers to enrich himself. The Supreme Court ruling explicitly called out Mac’s for using the TFWP to “create a pool of foreign workers whom it could call on to come to Canada and fill positions as........

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