The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed
The only way to stop companies from abusing the system is to end it
iStock / Emery Forbes
This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca
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.
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.
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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 they became available.” In other words, Mac’s and Bansal colluded to turn the program into an open repository for cheap labour.
The ruling lays bare a structural problem with the TFWP: the very nature of the program—its temporariness—is what makes it prone to this kind of abuse. Businesses, often seasonal enterprises like farms or fast-food franchises, work in tandem with immigration consultants to turn a program intended as a stopgap during labour shortages into a permanent business model. In most cases, the mistreatment goes unnoticed by authorities: the main targets are workers in the low-wage stream of the program, those who are the most vulnerable because their economic precarity makes standing up for their rights risky. Once they arrive in Canada, their temporary status—tied to their job—gives employers power over them. Shifting over to permanent status, through paths like Provincial Nominee Programs, is often dependent on employer sponsorship, adding another level of employer control.
There are safeguards, but those, too, are failing. Since 2019, any temporary worker claiming abuse has had the option of transitioning to an open work permit, giving them the freedom to change employers. But that process is onerous and carries its own risks. The worker must somehow obtain documented proof of the abuse. And even if the permit is granted, it is only valid for one year, after which the worker will again need to find an employer to sponsor a temporary visa. Temporariness is only deferred, not eliminated.
Rather than addressing that core problem, successive Canadian governments have tweaked the equation. They’ve tried limiting the number of temporary workers businesses can hire at any time or reducing the duration of the work permits they issue or more diligently enforcing the requirement that employers attempt to hire Canadian citizens and permanent residents before turning to foreign workers. When the rules tighten, businesses lobby the government to include carve-outs for them, something Marc Miller admitted to in 2024 while minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship.
A new law passed in 2021 was supposed to set strict guidelines for how immigration consultants operate and beef up oversight mechanisms, including setting up a government-mandated institution, the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, or CICC, to replace the ineffective self-governing body that had been responsible for oversight since 2011. Stricter rules were also put in place to clean up the Labour Market Impact Assessment process that immigration consultants use, and often misuse, to recruit foreign workers.
The results have been unimpressive, said Eoin Logan, a Surrey-based lawyer specializing in professional negligence claims against immigration consultants. Over the five years since it was established, Logan told me, the CICC has done little to enforce the code of conduct that’s supposed to deter the kind of malpractice Bansal and Mac’s were engaged in. “There’s a bunch of people in Burlington,” he said, referring to the CICC’s head office west of Toronto, “trying to figure out how to stop gangsters in Surrey. And you really can’t; you gotta have boots on the ground and you have to go toe-to-toe with them. The college has been deathly afraid to have those fights for whatever reason.”
Bansal himself was investigated by the CICC’s predecessor starting in 2015. The proceedings dragged on over seven years and were ultimately decided by the CICC’s disciplinary committee in 2022. It found insufficient evidence for the most serious offences and slapped Bansal with a minor administrative infraction: failing to provide retainer agreements. He ultimately had his licence suspended and was fined over $65,000 in penalties, a pittance relative to the millions he’d accumulated through the scam. By January 2023, he was back in business.
Will the BC Supreme Court decision finally get one of Canada’s most notorious immigration consultants barred from working in the industry? In an emailed statement, the CICC said they were reviewing the ruling. Its spokesperson, Stefan Lach, told me over the phone that if warranted, a new investigation would be launched.
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Susanna Quail, the co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the class action, believes finally shutting down one of the immigration consultant industry’s most prolific scammers would be a good starting point for meaningful change. But she doesn’t believe it will impact the TFWP. She, like a growing cohort of lawyers, activists, and politicians, has concluded there is no reforming the program. Exploiting temporary foreign labour is easy, and it is lucrative. There are likely even bigger TFWP scams out there yet to be unearthed and more yet to come, Quail told me. As long as temporariness remains a labour market tool, labour abuse will remain an issue.
Canada is no stranger to the exploitation of temporary workers. It’s been a feature of the Canadian labour market practically since Confederation, from the contract labour schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the seedy “labour brokers” they spawned, to the introduction of the TFWP in 1973, the birth shortly thereafter of the immigration consultant industry, the abuse of agricultural and domestic workers that followed, and the expansion of the program during the low-wage labour shortages of the early 2000s and during the pandemic. By 2023, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery declared the low-wage stream of the TFWP a “breeding ground” of modern enslavement.
Over the decades, successive governments have used a largely economic argument to justify temporary labour: businesses need flexibility in hiring to help them navigate the ups and downs of the labour market. The logic of that argument, experts say, places short-term economic needs above humanitarian obligations. And the results have been predictable: flexibility has turned into dependency, dependency into abuse.
Today, with Canada facing an uncertain economic future, the demand for temporary foreign workers is on the decline. But when that changes, the machinery of exploitation will lurch back into motion. We will see more businesses lobbying the government for more access to cheap foreign labour and more immigration consultants leveraging that demand to enrich themselves, leaving in their wake a trail of broken lives.
That cycle will endlessly repeat, as it has for more than a century, until Canadian politicians finally admit what the real problem is: temporariness itself.
Adnan R. Khan is a freelance writer and editor based in the Netherlands and the author of the Canada in the World newsletter.