THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL AFFAIRS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Wednesday, September 27, 2023
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met with videoconference this day at 4:15 p.m. [ET] to examine and report on such issues as may arise from time to time relating to social affairs, science and technology generally.
Senator Ratna Omidvar (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: I would like to begin by welcoming members of the committee, witnesses and members of the public watching our proceedings. My name is Ratna Omidvar, senator from Ontario and I am the chair of this committee.
Before we begin, I would like to do a round table and have senators introduce themselves starting with the deputy chair of the committee, Senator Cordy.
Senator Cordy: My name is Jane Cordy and I’m a senator from Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Senator René Cormier from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Moodie: Senator Moodie, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Senator Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Osler: Senator Gigi Osler from Manitoba.
Senator McPhedran: Senator Marilou McPhedran, also from Manitoba.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: Senator Marie-Françoise Mégie from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, senator from Ontario.
The Chair: Thank you, colleagues.
Today, we continue our study on Canada’s temporary and migrant labour force. Joining us by video conference on our first panel, we welcome Catherine Bryan, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Dalhousie University; and Donald Walmsley, Executive Director, Neepawa and Area Immigrant Settlement Services.
Thank you for joining us today. You will each have five minutes for your opening statements, followed by questions from our members. Professor Bryan, let’s begin with you.
Catherine Bryan, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Dalhousie University, as an individual: Thank you. I have spent the last 15 years conducting ethnographic research on immigration to Canada and I focus primarily on the experiences of migrant workers and their families, as well as the systems and histories that condition those experiences.
In my five minutes, I have two features of temporary workforces that I’d like to highlight. The first concerns the undervaluing of labour markets where those with temporary residency status are concentrated.
Importantly, these labour markets often correspond to essential sectors: food production and provisioning, service and hospitality, cleaning and sanitation and care. Despite their necessary quality, we see a kind of persistent devaluing of that labour and of the labour that supports these sectors. This is evidenced in rates of pay, conditions of work and in the kinds of social status associated with, for example, working in food retail.
At the grocery store next to my office, for example, the students who work there — some of them international students on temporary residency permits — cannot afford the food they sell. All of it is grown locally, much of it on farms reliant on seasonal agricultural workers.
Last week, I met several internationally trained nurses who were all temporary foreign workers in Nova Scotia. Employed as home care workers and as personal care assistants, each have taken on supplemental cleaning jobs simply to make ends meet.
In February, I met with workers in Manila on their way to B.C. to work at a quick service restaurant. They spoke with excitement about earning Canadian wages and of the possibility of being supported by their employer in their application for permanent residency. When I visited them in B.C. in June, they could barely make their rent as their wages were only slightly above minimum wage and their weekly hours were consistently lower than what was specified in their contract.
Rather than reflecting on the issue of wages to explain the labour shortages that prompt the recruitment of migrant workers in the first place, employers will often point, for example, to the grueling nature of the work and the unwillingness of Canadians to do it.
Two years ago, I met with a fish plant operator in Nova Scotia who did not recruit temporary foreign workers. He managed to retain his local staff despite the dirty and dangerous nature of the job. This, he explained, was because he paid them well.
Other sites deploy a different logic, one which suggests that the only way to safeguard the viability and profitability of fish processing, agriculture, grocery retail or even care is to cut labour costs. Arguably, this is accepted because of the ways in which these sectors are already devalued.
Programs encouraging of migrant recruitment, however, do more than provide access to labour. They offer access to workers that are highly vulnerable to exploitation. This follows from their dependency on their employer and the precarity of their legal status. The threat of deportation embedded within this arrangement immediately heightens worker vulnerability to a range of abuses.
This brings me to my second point which is that even when the threat of deportation is resolved or mitigated by other kinds of temporary status that might allow for greater labour mobility within Canada, exploitation persists. A number of programs exist to facilitate the transition of temporary migrant workers to permanent resident status. While they do redress some of the more exploitative features of temporary workers schemes, they also have the tendency of re-enforcing the dependency so central to those schemes. This is because of the requirement of employer support.
Between 2009 and 2014, I met 80 temporary foreign workers who transitioned to permanent residency with the support of their employer in Manitoba. Told they could remain in Canada and be reunited with family, these workers became all the more willing to accept poor working conditions and all the less likely to say anything about them. At the height of the pandemic, I met migrant workers in Nova Scotia’s fish processing sector hired on a three-month contract. They tried desperately to secure permanent employment that would allow them to transfer to permanent residency. Unable to do so because the season was over, they eventually made their way to New Brunswick. Finally, in P.E.I., again during the pandemic, the operator of a quick‑service restaurant cancelled the contracts of temporary foreign workers he had already recruited in the Philippines, opting instead to hire more readily available international students whose own precarious legal status and aspirations for residency and citizenship in Canada rendered them as vulnerable as the temporary foreign workers whose contracts were cancelled.
In sectors where labour is already chronically undervalued, the centring of employers in the immigration process of migrants with precarious legal status reinforces problematic power imbalances as well as the probability of exploitative work arrangements. Moreover, and returning to our counter attendants in B.C., when employers can adjust work schedules to attenuate a downturn in profitability, despite their employment of temporary workers, this comes not only at the expense of those workers in the moment but it also jeopardizes their long-term immigration plans.
To conclude, immigration policy is a highly adaptive instrument that intersects with vulnerabilities already endemic in central sectors and enables higher levels of productivity and profit relative to what is otherwise achievable with local labour. This is because in a social context otherwise invested in equality, presumably, legal status remains a viable mechanism of labour market stratification. The only way to redress this is to ensure a straightforward pathway to permanent residency for those who want it and to make sure all workers in Canada, regardless of where they are from or who they are, are compensated fairly.
Again, my thanks to the committee for the invitation, and I welcome your questions.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Bryan. Mr. Walmsley, your five minutes.
Donald Walmsley, Executive Director, Neepawa and Area Immigrant Settlement Services: Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to thank the members of the committee for inviting me to speak to the temporary and migrant worker situation in our particular area. Our area consists of several rural municipalities with a number of small communities of which Neepawa, Manitoba, would be the largest.
Since 2010, there has been a steady flow of temporary workers coming into Neepawa at the rate of about 200 new temporary workers every year. The driving force for this recruitment is the local meat processing plant, HyLife.
It must be noted that the larger majority of these temporary workers have the intent to bring their families to Canada and pursue obtaining their permanent resident status. The impact of this steady influx of temporary workers to this community and the surrounding area has been life changing.
The population of Neepawa as of 2010 was around 3,400 individuals, which had not changed much during the previous 70 years. The census in 2021 indicated the population was 5,685, but more recent estimates suggest that the current population figure is over 6,000, a tremendous growth rate over the past 12 years.
An additional impact is that we have had what we term “secondary migration” occurring from Neepawa to other outlying communities. It is challenging to quantify the impact of so many newcomers, but I hope to give you a sense of what it has been like over the past 12 years in our area. I would like to bring to your attention some of the impacts and issues in the following domains.
In health care, we have increased birth rates. Access to family medicine is challenging. We have increased in prenatal and postnatal care. There are general health issues. There are dietary differences, cooking patterns and diseases associated with diet such as diabetes and blood pressure. There are attitudes towards medical professionals and the issue of educating health care professionals.
In education, we’re having younger families, so we have impacts on schools. It requires more schools, staff and supplies. Language can be challenging, and school systems differ from culture to culture. In Neepawa, the current classroom demographic is around 60 to 70% newcomer children out of a total of 1,400 students within all three of the schools in the community. We also have adult education needs.
With employment, we have diversity within workplace cultures, and 25 to 30% of our temporary workers are internationally educated and are not able to work in their chosen field. A change in work status can result in a change in family dynamics. The credential recognition process is flawed and challenging. Regarding entrepreneurship, many immigrants operate their own businesses. Engagement and education of employers around employing newcomers are all factors.
As for welcoming communities, the receptivity of receiving communities and surrounding areas is critical to facilitating integration. Integration starts as a temporary foreign worker. Infrastructure of receiving communities needs to be forward‑thinking; it requires active community engagement. It is not just integration, but we are looking at a blending of cultural strengths and values. Validating different strengths is important, but deciding what as a Canadian culture we are willing to accept or not accept is also a challenge.
On mental health and well-being, we have different cultural values. The impact of the immigration experience itself as evidenced by culture shock is very important. Pre-arrival services are often not sufficient to prepare immigrants for Canada. Regarding cultural mental health attitudes, we need resources, expertise and trauma-informed workers. As for the immigration impact on youth, we don’t know. Are they adapting as well as we think?
Immigrants bring a fresh look at recreation. Instead of hockey, maybe basketball, soccer or cricket become the predominant recreation preferences.
For employers, educating immigrants on the Canadian workplace environment is a factor as is educating and training employers about hiring newcomers. Most newcomers come with skill sets developed in work outside of Canada. It’s all about finding a fit.
Other challenges generally include funding, staffing, training of staff, inconsistent technology, lack of research specific to rural jurisdictions in all provinces and recognizing that services and opportunities can vary from province to province. Is our immigrant population truly integrating into the communities or do we find cultural silos as a result of the way we’re looking at supporting them?
I have tried to paint a broad brush stroke of the immigrant canvas in the service area we cover. It is by no means the entire story, but I do hope that it stimulates a conversation. The information included here is a result of 10 years of working in this sector as well as observations of the sector as a whole.
I thank you very much, and I look forward to your comments and questions.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Walmsley.
You were all spot on in time, so this gives my colleagues is a full five minutes each for your questions and answers. We will start the question round with Senator Cordy.
Senator Cordy: You can both speak much faster than I can write. I have to tell you that.
I have before me a paper by a special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery at the United Nations, a man by the name of Tomoya Obokata. He speaks about several issues. The author is disturbed by the fact that certain categories of migrant workers are made vulnerable to contemporary forms of slavery in Canada by the policies that regulate their immigration status, the employment and the housing in Canada. You both made reference to that in your comments.
In particular, there was the view that the agriculture and the low-wage streams of temporary foreign workers constitute a breeding ground for what they call a “form of slavery.”
One of the things mentioned was the closed work permits. We heard about this from people who are dealing with migrant workers. We also heard from employers who said, “Well, we pay a lot of money to have the immigrants come, and, if they have an open work permit, they could be with me for five weeks and then go off to another employer without the costs of bringing them over.”
How can we as a committee evaluate that? How do you solve the problem where both sides have considerable concerns about changing the way that it would be?
The Chair: Was that question to Professor Bryan or both?
Senator Cordy: Both if they can both answer.
Ms. Bryan: The closed work permit is sort of the primary concern because it ties the worker to the employer. It makes it very difficult for them to contest any difficulties that they are encountering and it makes it almost impossible for them to leave. It is not impossible, though. Among many of the workers that I spoke to — the several that I referenced in the five minutes — people are able to find other employers elsewhere in Canada. They are able to move a little bit. For the agricultural workers, that is far less the case. For them, one of the key problems is that if they are too critical of an employer, then they are not invited back.
There are also the ways in which these bilateral agreements hold workers in place and leave them vulnerable to whatever the employer wants to do. Even good employers benefit from the exploitative kinds of possibilities that are made possible through these programs.
Allowing workers to transition to permanent residency does redress some of that, as I said. However, there needs to be a shift in terms of how employers are integrated into that process. You have examples of employers who recruit, in a way, directly through the Provincial Nominee Program. The upfront costs to them are actually lower because they are not responsible to pay for accommodations. They don’t have to pay airfare, et cetera, so those costs are minimized. But the worker arrives either with permanent residency status or they are more able to quickly transition to permanent residency status. They are able to operate with more agency and autonomy than they would be otherwise. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t unintended problems associated with that kind of labour recruitment. However, absent the temporariness of the workers, it certainly goes a long way to remedying what you are describing.
Senator Cordy: Thank you. Mr. Walmsley, you certainly explained quickly the challenges that are faced with population increases that happen quickly. I think you used the term “finding a fit,” which I thought was a good way to phrase it.
How do you deal with significant increases and the challenges of so many newcomers? You listed the health care system and the education systems, all those kinds of things that a community may not be prepared for. How are you dealing with it in your communities?
Mr. Walmsley: First, when I started this, I had hair. I no longer have any.
It is interesting. I’m listening to Professor Bryan and what she says is right on the money. The fixed work permit is a challenge, but it depends on the agency. I referred to that large meat processing plant. They pay for people to fly over. It is a unionized job that those fixed work permit, temporary workers come to. There is a little more leeway. The challenge is with the seasonal agricultural workers. There is no clear structure. We don’t know who’s out there. We do know with the others, but that’s challenging. So how do you meet it? Every issue that Professor Bryan raised is exactly right on. There is that fear dynamic, and there are issues from both the employer and the temporary worker.
In terms of answering your question regarding how we make it work, that’s done with a tremendous amount of collaboration, networking, information and education for the communities around them. The community needs to be receptive. I find rural communities often more receptive — especially when a lot of rural communities, certainly in Manitoba, were struggling. They were becoming fairly rustic, bucolic and had many retirement homes. Suddenly, you have an infusion of young people coming in who are keen to come and be here.
It is a lot of work, but there is understanding. I talked about cultural differences. You can’t negate them. You can’t ignore them on both sides of the coin. Our rural areas were a product of waves of immigration in the past. Each wave brought different thinking to this area. I keep telling people, going forward, 10 or 15 years from now, we will see the impact of the different kinds of ways of looking at things than we have in the past.
For example, most of our newcomers are multi-generational family oriented. That’s something we in Manitoba and perhaps in other parts —
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Walmsley. I’m sure we have lots of time to dig deeper.
Senator Osler: Thank you to both the witnesses for appearing today. I will follow up on a comment that Professor Bryan made about how the program centres the needs of the employers.
My question is for Mr. Walmsley, so you will get to continue on a bit longer. I would appreciate hearing any specific recommendations you have on how the Temporary Foreign Worker Program could better support and integrate these international workers into rural communities. What is the program lacking now that you would recommend it have to better integrate the workers into rural communities?
Mr. Walmsley: I’m going to speak specifically to the seasonal agricultural worker situation because I feel that has the least amount of structure to it. There’s no oversight. We cannot find an organization with oversight to be able to get information as to where these seasonal agricultural workers are located, especially in the smaller rural areas.
We need to have a mechanism whereby we can find out not only where these workers are located but also who the employer is and the expectation that people who can provide supports have the ability to access them. The employers often act as strong gatekeepers, not making them available for even simple things like eye appointments. In certain agricultural situations, with the dust involved from the plants, there can be eye issues. We’ve had those kinds of situations occur before. The employer says, “Oh, they’re busy. They’re working.” There needs to be more of a structure associated with that. In terms of the ones coming into those larger operations, in a unionized position, there are structure and accessibility.
Communities need to be aware beforehand so that if they never had a newcomer or temporary people come in before, they need to understand some of those culture changes and be open and welcoming. Faith-based communities are a good source to be looking at. They are powerful supporters for many of these people and sometimes the only support they have. Does that help answer your question, senator?
Senator Osler: Very helpful. Thank you. I will cede the rest of my time to my colleagues.
The Chair: Good. Perhaps you will cede it to me because I have a question.
Professor Bryan, we’ve just come back from a fact-finding mission in the Maritimes. We didn’t go to Nova Scotia, but we were in New Brunswick and P.E.I. I am interested in hearing from you about the source that you cited where employers in Nova Scotia are choosing to pay higher wages and source local labour as opposed to temporary foreign workers. Do you have any more data? Can you tell us how much more they are paying?
Ms. Bryan: This is a bit how ethnography and anthropology can work. We came across this employer in the context of doing research on fish processing and specifically migrant workers within the fish processing sector. We tried to speak to employers within that sector who hire and recruit temporary foreign workers. It was difficult. There is a sort of culture of secrecy around it. But in doing that, we found this employer who had managed to hold on to his Canadian or local workforce. The salary was part of it, but he also offered a fulsome benefits package. He had an anecdote about an employee finding work elsewhere, but then he offered more money and a different position.
The point I am trying to make there is that paying people the money that they need to survive — and I might be naive — goes a long way at retaining workers. I don’t think it’s actually that complicated.
That was the point he was making and the point I was trying to make.
The Chair: He or she seems to be an exception. We did hear from many employers that without a temporary migrant workforce, they would have to shut their plants.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: My question is for Ms. Bryan. Just so I can understand, in your research on temporary foreign workers, did you go all the way back to the beginning of the creation of this program? I ask because, when we recently travelled with the committee, employers told us that they would go out of business without these workers. And yet, before this program, they were already open. So, concerning the idea of going from local workers to foreign workers, if there’s a cause or a reason — One reason is to increase the workforce, but are there other reasons and challenges behind it?
[English]
Ms. Bryan: I think what I was trying to communicate in my five minutes is that when you have a sector like nursing that is consistently and persistently underfunded, the work becomes more and more difficult in the context of, for example, the pandemic. Of course, local workers are going to shy away from that work if they have other opportunities. I think there is some truth to this labour shortage rhetoric. At the same time, however, it is a kind of standard move for employers to figure out the most effective way of cutting costs. I think, increasingly, the easiest way for employers to do that is to cut labour costs. That means relying on new sources of labour where folks might be more inclined to accept lower wages than what local workers are willing to be subjected to. Of course, as many temporary foreign workers discover when they get to Canada, those wages aren’t actually all that they’re cut out to be because you have to pay for your life in Canada. All of the wages end up going to supporting a very bare existence in Canada.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: Since employers have to prove that they couldn’t find workers locally before they’re allowed to bring in foreign workers, I wondered if it’s because local workers didn’t want to do the job, or is it because employers are looking for cheap labour?
[English]
Ms. Bryan: I think it’s probably a combination of those things. Local labour isn’t willing to do it because these jobs are dirty, dangerous and underpaid. They know that they’re not going to be able to meet their needs with the income they’re earning through this work. Again, I do think that raising wages — making wages more viable for people — would actually do the work of remedying this problem.
The other piece is that temporary foreign workers offer all kinds of different value as well. There’s the value that an employer can accrue by virtue of paying lower wages, but there’s also the fact that, for example, in service and hospitality, most of the folks coming through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program all have post-secondary degrees. Filipino nurses are another excellent example. You have home care workers who are providing a service and offering a value to their employer that far exceeds their rate of pay not only because that rate of pay is low but because they are working so far below their skill set. These are highly trained people. The folks I was referencing in my five minutes were all electrical engineers working in fish processing plants. This kind of disconnect also generates a lot of value for employers.
The Chair: I’ll take your last 10 seconds to pose a question, which can be answered later because I have my colleagues here to give time to.
Employers pay for a Labour Market Impact Assessment, or LMIA, housing, airfare, interim health insurance and other costs. I’m not sure there’s a real saving to employers. I’ll just leave that question mark for you to reflect on and come back.
Senator McPhedran: I wanted to pick up on a point that I think Professor Bryan made about a pervasive power imbalance that permeates the situations we’re discussing here. This really is a question to both Mr. Walmsley and Professor Bryan. In parentheses, I just want to acknowledge that I was born and raised in Neepawa, Manitoba — the Neepawa, Manitoba, of 70 years ago. It’s really amazing to go back now and see so many of the changes.
About a year ago, the Government of Canada did introduce regulations to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations dealing with temporary foreign workers. They said at the time that these regulations were to strengthen protections for temporary foreign workers and enhance the integrity of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
My question to both of you is this: Have you seen any evidence of this? If so, could you share with us what your experiences and observations are?
Mr. Walmsley: No, not really. We heard about that. We are still waiting to see what that looks like. The simple answer is no.
Senator McPhedran: Thank you.
Ms. Bryan: I think there are good examples in some places. When I did my PhD field work, for example, the work that was being done in Manitoba to keep track of where workers were to follow up on complaints were robust and inspiring.
I think that allowing temporary foreign workers to — within the lower-skilled streams — transition to permanent residency really does remedy some of the more exploitative tendencies of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Of course, seasonal agricultural workers are excluded from that transition, so they are left in this kind of constant limbo or this constant cycle of coming and going. I do think that for some folks, that works for them in their lives and with their families. However, for those who would like to stay, I think permanency should likely be extended to seasonal agricultural workers as well. I think the issue there is really about skill and the kinds of skills that we value and that come to be valued through these programs. But I think, similarly —
Senator McPhedran: Sorry, I’m just hoping I have enough time for a second question. Forgive me, but I’d like to move on to that and invite both of you to answer.
The second part of my question is, again, about a fairly recent — more than a year ago — announcement in April of 2022 from the government indicating that they were bringing in an escalation process that was to notify provincial stakeholders within 48 hours in situations where the health and safety of a temporary foreign worker were at immediate risk.
Have you seen any evidence of this, and if you have, could you share with us your observations? Both of you, please. Professor Bryan, if we start with you and then go to Mr. Walmsley.
Ms. Bryan: We can pass it along right away because I haven’t seen any evidence of that being implemented or initiated for the workers that I’ve been in contact with.
Mr. Walmsley: I would echo Professor Bryan’s statements.
Senator McPhedran: If you were to see it, what would be a positive indication to you that these new regulations were actually working? It’s a hypothetical question, but I think it is relevant.
Ms. Bryan: For me, it would be that there would be some kind of meaningful consequence for the employer. I don’t know what that would look like, if it would mean no more foreign workers or something, but that there would be some kind of consequence to that sort of action.
Mr. Walmsley: I would echo that and say it also gets word around that things can happen, that issues can be addressed.
Senator McPhedran: Thank you very much.
Senator Cormier: My first question is for Mr. Walmsley.
You spoke about culture challenges. I would like to know if you can share examples of innovative community-based programs or strategies that have proven effective in integrating temporary foreign workers into rural and remote communities and how, in your opinion, the federal government could help those programs because there are issues that we heard when we were on our mission in New Brunswick and P.E.I.
That’s my question for you, sir.
Mr. Walmsley: What’s been very valuable in our jurisdiction is when a new deployment of new temporary workers are coming, for example, to the meat processing plant, we are part of the orientation session, which means our worker who works with temporary foreign workers is able to talk about the program and be a contact.
As well, you take a look at the different domains. Really, it’s about education. It’s about helping the new temporary worker understand the culture that they’re coming into. People have a lot of misconceptions. We don’t necessarily do a very good job of letting people know before they come exactly what it’s like to arrive in Manitoba, say, in February, when it’s a balmy minus 25 degrees below zero and there’s snow everywhere.
So we take a look at different domains, try to give information to the newcomer coming in, help them with adjustments to child tax benefits — whatever those basic fundamental things are — as well as understanding things in culture. We have a preschool program that talks about things like parenting in Canada, child development, the differences and how they find that fit in work.
Senator Cormier: May I ask you, what kind of work do you do with communities because they have to adapt to the community, but the communities have to adapt to them too. What kind of work do you do, and how is the federal government helping that?
Mr. Walmsley: We actually do a lot of collaboration with recreation, with town councils and with different organizations within the community. We have workshops available. We promote and support any kind of integration that goes on. In a smaller community, you’re able to access a larger range of people than you might necessarily in an urban centre, so it’s very much involved. We engage them in part of the process. They have to be part of that process.
Senator Cormier: Thank you very much, sir.
[Translation]
My question is for Ms. Bryan.
You published an article in 2019 titled “Labour, population, and precarity: temporary foreign workers transition to permanent residency in rural Manitoba.” In this article, you mention the case of a small hotel in Manitoba that relies on transnational network recruitment — that is, it relies on the ability of temporary foreign employees to call on family members and friends to come and work. We’ve also heard this in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
My question is this: Since you’re talking about the issue of transitioning to permanent residence, does this dynamic of calling on family and friends to come and work pose challenges in transitioning to permanent residence, or does it facilitate that transition? I’d like to hear what you have to say about this.
[English]
Ms. Bryan: I think it facilitates. The migrants who are able to do that, who are able to recommend a friend, a family member or a former co-worker who they used to work with, it allows for different kinds of family reunion or the re-establishment of important social ties and networks in the site of resettlement, which I think is, on balance, a very good thing.
These folks still integrated well into the local community. It’s a kind of thriving and incredible example of a rural community really embracing a migrant workforce.
But, yes, the employer was able to fairly strategically do that and then, as I was talking about earlier, use the Provincial Nominee Program to facilitate the arrival of some of those people. Some of the family members and friends arrived through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, so through the regular process, but others were supported immediately through the Provincial Nominee Program.
What that employer support generated was a real sense of loyalty. The employees who arrived with permanent residency status, maybe they left six years later, but they were quite inclined to stay in place with the employer for a long period of time.
The Chair: Thank you, Professor Bryan.
Senator Dasko: Thank you to both witnesses for being here today. I have a question for each one of you.
Professor Bryan, just building on your comments about low wages and the importance of trying to increase those, do you think it would be viable to increase wage levels such that this program may not be necessary? Would you suggest that as a way to deal with the issue of a lack of workers? Do you think this is a viable solution? This builds on your comments because you did say quite a bit about low wages, and I wonder if that’s viable.
That’s my question. Thank you.
Ms. Bryan: Perhaps I can’t speak to the viability or what exactly it would look like, but I do think that if people are able to access a living wage, it does make things much easier for them, and the reliance on temporary foreign workers would likely diminish if people were able to access decent wages within these sectors.
At the same time, I am a proponent of immigration, and I think that people should be able to come here. But when they come here, they also need to be earning salaries and incomes that allow them to support themselves and their families.
Senator Dasko: Do you think we can solve this problem without the program? Can we get by? Can we have a labour supply without this program?
Ms. Bryan: I think so, yes. And, perhaps, if not, permanent residency or a less complicated pathway to permanent residency would undermine some of these issues.
But to the chair’s point earlier about the lack of savings because of all of the costs associated with going through the program, temporary foreign workers provide a great deal of value that goes beyond simply either savings for the employer or spending for the employer. They tend to work harder because they’re dependent and vulnerable, so there are all of these added benefits as well.
Senator Dasko: Thank you. Mr. Walmsley, you spoke a lot about the impact on the community of the migrant foreign workforce, and you had positive and negative, let’s call them, challenges.
We did hear about these issues when we were travelling to Eastern Canada, but on balance, would you say the influx of immigrants into Neepawa has been a net positive for the community or are there still challenges that make it problematic that really have to be dealt with? Take a stab at that question, please.
Mr. Walmsley: It is an interesting question. Unequivocally, I would say net positive, without question. We’ve seen it in all sorts of responses in terms of engagement. It’s very hard to find a business within the community now that doesn’t have at least one newcomer.
Back to the comment made about reunification of families, we are seeing a lot more of our temporary workers coming here. One of the things we help with is sponsoring family members to come over. Usually, if it is an adult member of the family, they’ll come over with an open work permit. It changes the dynamic. We have a lot of people going forward and processing through, successfully, their permanent residence status, and they are staying. Hence the dramatic increase in population within the community.
It’s been very positive from a number of sectors. For the education sector, the growth in the schools. Even in the faith‑based community. Our local Catholic church was on the verge of closing. Now it has standing room only at masses. That’s just a simple example, but it has been very engaging within the community. I’d say it’s very positive.
Senator Dasko: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: My question is for Mr. Walmsley. I have a question about the vulnerability of temporary workers. We’ve talked about it many times in committee. Most of the time, when we’ve talked about the vulnerability of these workers, we’ve made the connection with a vulnerability that’s linked to the dependency relationship with the employer.
However, earlier, I heard you list all the challenges these small communities face in welcoming these workers and in accessing health services, education and recreation. I was wondering about something. If this welcoming isn’t done properly, could we go so far as to say that we would end up with two levels of vulnerability among these people?
[English]
Mr. Walmsley: That’s an intriguing question, and I would have to say yes. Depending on where they are located, if they are in a fairly remote, rural situation, yes, indeed, the challenges will be more evident. As they are closer to a large community, more people know or are aware of individuals. There is more scrutiny, for lack of a better word. So, yes, there are varying levels of vulnerability. I think that’s quite true.
It goes back to what I mentioned earlier, that we need some oversight. We need somebody we can go to and say, “Look, we have concerns here. How can we operationalize on that or follow-through with that?”
I hope that answers your question.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Yes, absolutely. In your experience, when we have an industry and need to welcome these workers, do we prepare for their arrival upstream, or do the workers arrive and we find solutions afterwards? Are we good at anticipating what will be needed — beyond the needs of the job itself — to integrate these people into the community, or is there still a lot to do?
[English]
Mr. Walmsley: Wow. How much time do you have? Yes. It depends on the industry bringing over the workers as to the extent of the pre-arrival information. Those who have been doing it for a while, they go over and actually recruit, but it is hit and miss with the other. It really depends on a number of different factors. It is not a clear-cut kind of situation.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Moodie: Thank you, Dr. Bryan and Mr. Walmsley, for your very informative contribution to today’s proceedings.
One of the things that I think we are struggling with is understanding the extent to which any of these issues is prevailing in these communities. It doesn’t seem to be that there is data — knowledge — at the granular level of counting that explains how many people actually want to stay here. We’ve heard they never want to stay here. Very few want to stay. We’ve heard from you that most people want to stay here.
Can you share with us if you know about any such data? Is anyone looking at this, asking this question? Is it documented anywhere?
Mr. Walmsley: From my perspective, any data we have is old. We don’t have anything new. That’s why I said research specific to certain areas, especially rural areas. You must recognize that each province is different. There are different needs, and we don’t have enough current research.
I regularly support various research requests coming out because we need this kind of data.
Senator Moodie: Dr. Bryan?
Ms. Bryan: I agree. There is a lack of quantifiable data concerning how many people, what they want, where they are and what their experiences or trajectories are.
The other thing, however, that complicates this is that when we’re talking about temporary immigrant workforces, we usually are thinking about folks who come through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program or we’re thinking about seasonal agricultural workers.
There are cohorts of temporary migrants working in Canada who are not captured by this conversation. International students are also trying to make permanent their residency status in Canada. They are temporary, precarious and working. Similarly so, refugee claimants. In Nova Scotia, we had refugee claimants on the front lines of health care during COVID.
These workforces or these sectors are shot through with different kinds of precarity, and some of that is related to immigration status but across a number of pathways. We don’t have any way, it seems to me, of capturing that statistically. So to answer your question: not really.
Senator Moodie: You made mention of oversight. As far as we understand it, Service Canada is that oversight. Would you comment on what kind of job they are doing, please?
Mr. Walmsley: I will speak to the experience I’ve had as well as to anecdotal experiences from colleagues.
It is hit and miss. I’m used to dealing with knowing where to go and who to talk to about certain things. In this particular situation, it’s hard to find that. I would have to say that it’s conspicuous by, perhaps, its absence. Not that there may not be something there, but we don’t see it and it’s not promoted to us to say, “Here is where you go.”
Senator Moodie: Thank you.
Senator Osler: I wanted to follow up on an interesting comment I heard from Mr. Walmsley. When this committee was in New Brunswick and P.E.I. on our fact-finding mission, we were told that community organizations and agencies that provide settlement services are not supposed to provide support in integration services to the temporary and migrant workers.
I am curious. After hearing the work that your organization, Neepawa and Area Immigrant Settlement Services, is providing the temporary workers, is that a provincial difference? How is it that you are able to support the workers in Manitoba when in the Atlantic provinces, we heard, they are not supposed to?
Mr. Walmsley: You are quite accurate. If you are funded by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, to provide settlement services, the target population are permanent residents, refugees and people in protected status. However, if you have connections, you listen well and you take a look, you can access other government funding.
Currently, we have funding through Employment and Social Development Canada, or ESDC, to provide a temporary foreign worker program as a project for the Prairies that is based or controlled of out of Calgary. I leaped on that as soon as I could because that was a real gap. Manitoba provided almost exclusively work to temporary foreign workers from 1996 to 2013 using federal dollars because they were in charge of the program. They were repatriated in 2013, and at that point the settlement program moved from working with temporary foreign workers to just permanent residents — a big gap. We were fortunate to get on board. It was largely because of the numbers and because people knew about us. That’s why we are able to do that.
Senator Osler: A quick follow-up, Mr. Walmsley. Can you comment on how accessible that information is and that information to find the funding? How accessible and easy is it to find that on either IRCC’s website or ESDC’s website?
Mr. Walmsley: IRCC’s website won’t have it on there at all; ESDC might. We got it because of who you know. It is those connections that are important in this sector. That’s how we build programs. We partner with a lot of other agencies. I haven’t had an occasion to go to the website simply because I didn’t need to. It may well be on there.
Senator Osler: Thank you, Mr. Walmsley. We looked and have not found it on the website.
Mr. Walmsley: Okay.
The Chair: Mr. Walmsley, would you recommend that IRCC extend its understanding of who settlement services should serve?
Mr. Walmsley: I think it is important for any organization that provides services over a long period of time to have periods of evaluation to look at whether they are meeting the needs of the population and if there is a need to look at expanding. The policy to date has been sticking with their particular population. I would love to be able to do that because there are certain things we can do with permanent residents that we can’t do. For example, we can have English language training classes. We are not allowed to do that.
The Chair: Thank you. There is one minute left to Senator Cormier.
Senator Cormier: I need more time because my question needs context.
The Chair: You can ask the question, Senator Cormier, and the witnesses can get back to us in writing.
Senator Cormier: Okay. We met with le Centre d’accueil et d’accompagnement francophone des immigrants du Sud-Est du Nouveau-Brunswick, or CAFi, here last week and I did a follow‑up with the organization. When they welcome workers, they explain their rights and all that, but those organizations don’t have any mechanisms to go back to the federal government and to present the issues that foreign workers have in terms of health and working conditions. I was surprised to hear that there is no real mechanism. Apparently, the federal government doesn’t have a clear mechanism to consult with those organizations.
If this is the case, this is an important issue. Do you have any information on that? Is that the case elsewhere? Those are my questions, Madam Chair.
The Chair: Perhaps Mr. Walmsley and Ms. Bryan can get back to us in writing. Senator Cormier, next week we have the deputy minister of IRCC coming. I suggest you pose that question then as well.
Senator Cormier: I will.
The Chair: To our witnesses, many thanks. We could have spoken to you for another hour. Thank you for the time you have taken and for the wisdom you have provided to us. Our sincere appreciation.
We are joined this evening by our second panel, who are here in person. With us are Arin Goswami and Anmol Sanotra, members of the Naujawan Support Network; and by video conference, Larissa Bezo, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Bureau for International Education.
Thank you so much for joining us, in particular, in person today. I remind you that you each have five minutes allocated for opening statements, followed by questions from our members. We will begin with the Naujawan Support Network. Mr. Goswami and Mr. Sanotra, the floor is yours. Between the two of you, you have five minutes. That is hard, I know.
Anmol Sanotra, Member, Naujawan Support Network: Thank you. We planned for that.
Honourable members of the Senate of Canada, distinguished Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology and fellow Canadians, thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. My name is Anmol Sanotra, and with me is Arin Goswami. We are members of the Naujawan Support Network, or NSN, an organization of international students and young immigrant workers from Brampton, Ontario. The “Naujawan” in Naujawan Support Network is Punjabi for “young people.”
We formed this organization because international students in Canada were — and are — dying by suicide and workplace deaths at an alarming rate. A large part of the reason for this is exploitation at work. Exploitation is robbing us of our dignity, youth, mental health and, sometimes, our lives. Meanwhile, international students contribute $8 billion into the Canadian economy each year and form its backbone in cities and towns across the country. We urge you, members of the Senate, to take immediate action to address the exploitation of international students that they are facing in Canada. This can begin with, first, permanently eliminating the 20-hour work limit for international students; second, overhauling the labour code system to impose meaningful penalties on employees who steal wages; and, third, providing a swift and fair pathway to permanent residency. We will speak more about the three issues in the time we have left.
First, the 20-hour work limit on international students directly facilitates our exploitation. Rather than helping us focus on our studies as the government claims, the 20-hour limit makes it harder for students to assert our rights in the workplace. This is confirmed by our experience with employers who deny international students the minimum wage because they worked over 20 hours and then threaten them with deportation or criminal charges if they speak up.
Notably, the 20-hour limit was suspended once during the pandemic and has been suspended again until the end of this year without any reported negative impact on students’ education. The suspensions prove that students are able to focus on their studies while working above 20 hours. In our experience, the suspensions have made students more confident in challenging abuse and unsafe conditions in the workplace, as they are less fearful of retaliation by employers. Permanently eliminating the 20-hour limit will add to students’ confidence and is a step in the right direction.
Arin Goswami, Member, Naujawan Support Network: A second issue of concern is that employers regularly steal wages from international students. We work across many industries such as trucking, warehouses, factories, restaurants and construction. Across all of them, wage theft has become a rite of passage.
Employers steal our wages for all kinds of reasons, be it when we complain about unsafe conditions, when we quit our jobs, when equipment gets damaged or when our performance just is not good enough. When we protest to demand our pay, employers respond with violence, including death threats and assaults, as well as multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuits.
Rather than have us protest, employers mockingly encourage us to file claims in labour court for our wages, knowing that the process is tedious, slow and inaccessible for most workers, especially at the federal level where workers have only six months to file a claim and are left waiting for years to receive orders to pay.
Even when payment orders are issued, employers simply ignore them because they know the orders will not be enforced. In these ways, the labour court system does little to protect workers and instead incentivizes employers to steal wages. The system needs a fundamental overhaul to make it more accessible to workers and to drastically increase penalties for wage-stealing employers.
The last issue we would like to highlight is the role that employment plays in international students’ access to permanent residency. At present, international students cannot get permanent residency without the blessing of an employer. Students are required to work for lengthy periods for specific employers and to keep quiet about exploitation and abuse while employed. If we speak out, employers not only fire us but deny us the letters and documents we need for our permanent residency applications. This is a very serious problem that lends itself to egregious abuse. We have heard from international students whose employers have demanded additional money or even one-year bonded labour contracts in exchange for reference letters.
To stop this kind of exploitation, international students should be given swifter access to permanent resident status with no requirement for employer support.
Thank you again for inviting us here and for listening to us. We are happy to answer your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Larissa Bezo, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Bureau for International Education: Thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to this committee’s timely and important deliberations on temporary foreign workers and Canada’s economic prospects.
As the head of the Canadian Bureau for International Education, or CBIE, my remarks will focus on labour market issues affecting international students, and I will touch briefly on three issues: First, what we know from CBIE’s most recent biennial International Student Survey about the labour market experiences of international students in Canada. Second, what we hope to learn from an innovative project that we are leading that focuses on labour market access and integration for international students. And, third, what CBIE is doing to bridge critical knowledge gaps about how international students contribute to our labour market while in Canada and after graduation, whether they remain here, return home or move elsewhere.
Before I begin, I want to note that CBIE is mindful that the committee’s work is occurring against the backdrop of increasingly heated and unfortunately very narrow public discourse on Canada’s affordable housing crisis. Too often the focus is on facile, demand-side solutions; that the answer is to cap international student enrolment and that there are no downsides to doing so; that we need quick-fix solutions now and can focus on smarter, more nuanced policies later because, regardless of what we do, Canada will always be a magnet for global student talent. But this is not guaranteed.
I urge committee members to be mindful of the practical and reputational risks that the current debate poses for Canada. There are no easy wins, and we need to be cautious to avoid poorly conceived measures that may ultimately prove self-defeating. Rather, we need balanced, thoughtful and evidence-informed solutions that enhance our global reputation as a destination where international students are not only welcome and safe, but can expect a high quality international education experience. We need to focus more on how Canada’s international education sector and ecosystem can better honour its end of the bargain to support international students to realize their academic, professional and personal aspirations.
While our 2021 International Student Survey was conducted during a global pandemic that saw many students studying online, some of our findings are instructive. First, roughly half of the over 40,000 international student respondents reported working part-time during their studies. Second, among respondents who had worked or were working, over 4 in 10 reported difficulty finding work, and a significant number of them attributed their difficulties in finding work to their inability to understand the expectations of Canadian employers, Canada’s work culture and to their prospective employers being unfamiliar with or daunted by regulations for hiring international students. Third, female respondents were more likely than males to attribute their difficulties finding work to not having enough Canadian work experience or work experience overall, and they were also more likely to indicate challenges in describing their skills and to cite a lack of confidence in them.
Also of concern is the lack of community connection reported by a significant number of survey respondents off campus, a sense of being an outsider who doesn’t quite belong. This is troubling on a number of levels. There is clear evidence that the earlier international students engage at a community level and the deeper the connections they make, the greater the likelihood of them achieving a successful international education.
We need a new approach and closer collaboration between institutions and communities that host those international students and that benefit from their contributions. This must include socializing employers and volunteer groups to recognize and accommodate the unique needs of newly arriving international students. Doing so will benefit the entire international education ecosystem, the students as well as communities and businesses.
I also wanted to draw the committee’s attention to a research project that CBIE is leading in collaboration with the City of Hamilton, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, McMaster University and Mohawk College, with support from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. This initiative investigates networks, programs and services that support international students in transitioning into the labour market and in becoming permanent residents in Ontario. The project is focused on identifying and developing a framework of the most effective supports to provide community leaders and policy-makers with interventions that can be replicated in other communities. Our objective is simple: assemble hard evidence, raise awareness of the challenges across the ecosystem, showcase interventions that work and develop practical tools and guidance that will make a positive difference for our students and our communities.
Finally, as the committee is by now well aware, the absence of comprehensive and up-to-date information on international education in Canada is an ongoing challenge for policy-makers at all levels.
Too much is at stake for us to keep flying blind. To that end, CBIE has advocated to establish a centre of excellence on international student talent mobilization, to assemble and share information on best practices and to develop planning tools for institutions, employers, host communities and policy-makers to advance progress in this area.
I am happy to elaborate on these and further issues. I welcome any questions that committee members may have.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Bezo. Colleagues, you know the drill. Five minutes for questions and answers.
Senator Cordy: Thank you very much to the three of you. It’s been a lot of information that you have given us in a short period of time, and a lot of good information. What I’ve heard about some universities is that students are sort of promised the bird of paradise, that they will come and they will find jobs and everything will be wonderful when they get there, and they are arriving at universities that have high international populations and there are significant challenges. They are not able to find jobs, and they are financially having significant challenges because of that. Have you found any of that? Maybe we could start with the gentlemen from the Canadian Bureau for International Education.
Mr. Goswami: Sorry. We’re not from the Canadian Bureau —
Senator Cordy: Sorry. That’s the only name that I’ve got. Then, Ms. Bezo, I would like you to speak about setting up the centre of excellence. That sounds like a good idea, and you spoke about the need for research and that we don’t have enough information. If you could talk about students being promised things, they are arriving and it’s — is that common? I am hearing about it and reading about it. How common is it?
And, secondly, the need for up-to-date information and setting up the centre of excellence, how would that work? Two questions to you.
Ms. Bezo: Thank you for both of those. With respect to the student expectations and then reality and the student experience on the ground, one of the challenges that we have been increasingly seeing — and there has been a lot of discussion in recent months over the course of this last year — the continuum and the pathway of students coming into Canada begin when they are first exploring this and when they are looking at options in terms of a pathway to study in Canada, as they are beginning to look at potentially submitting a study permit application.
Part of the challenge that we are running into — and we’re seeing the very unfortunate impacts of this — is as agents and recruitment partners are seeking to attract students to Canada as a study destination, many of those agents and partners are very ethical players who are grounded and balanced in how they share those opportunities. But that is not consistently the case. So we have unscrupulous agents that are, in fact, providing a false sense of what those students can expect and also the challenges that they may face, both in adapting, in thriving within the community, in seeking employment, et cetera.
It is one of the pieces that needs to be tackled in terms of ensuring that we have robust frameworks and that we are communicating very clearly to students in terms of those expectations.
One of the other challenges we face as a country is we know there are a significant number of international students who have a desire to come and to study in Canada but who also have a desire to stay post-graduation. The reality, and we know from our own surveying at CBIE, is 60% of those students have a desire to pursue a pathway to permanent residency. Canada certainly has a very high threshold in terms of the number of new immigrants it welcomes each year. That being said, we are not in a position as a country to convert every single international student who has that desire towards a pathway of permanent residency. It’s one of the recommendations we’ve put into the department. We feel that in order to be much more explicit around the potential, there needs to be an explicit pathway that actually addresses how students can both study and stay in Canada, and that we can look at plugging supports into that process to ensure the wraparounds necessary to ensure students’ success and well-being broadly speaking.
With respect to the centre of excellence that I mentioned, it’s a proposal that CBIE has, in fact, submitted to the Canadian government as part of our conversations with the Canadian government on Canada’s future international education strategy. We feel strongly when we’re in a situation where Canada currently hosts over 800,000 students at present — and that number is projected to grow over this next year or two — there’s a need to really create a focal point to assemble and to share data that will inform policy decisions at all levels — at the community level, at the level of provincial and territorial governments and certainly at the national level.
We have employers, we have short-term shortages in the labour market. We have strategic needs in terms of seeking to advance many areas, whether that be climate or our path to net zero. There are many areas where global talent can be a part of that solution going forward for Canada. But in an environment —
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Bezo.
We have many colleagues lined up for questions and it’s extremely tempting to talk about the global issue of international foreign students. You know that is close to my heart. But this study is about international foreign students and their relationship to the labour market. So I’m going to suggest, although it’s extremely tempting and I’m tempted to do that too. So rein me in, please.
Senator Osler: Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. My question is for NSN. Could you share with the committee the experiences that international students face in Canada when they try to access health insurance and health care? Would you have any recommendations to improve those experiences?
Mr. Sanotra: In terms of health care, the main challenge — well, insurance is already a part of international students’ fee package usually, so I believe it should be a part of the orientation programs that they have. Still they face the same issues that other people are facing, long waiting periods at the hospitals. On top of it, they are not aware of what’s the process of enrolling at the local clinic and after that how to navigate through the Canadian medical system, if they face a particular issue.
I had an issue with one of my friends. They were just sitting at home wondering where to go because they were not familiar with what the process is. That’s one of the issues I feel, as a student, I have faced, along with my friends.
Mr. Goswami: Presently, we actually have a protest happening in Mississauga. One of the workers and her cousin — one of them is 19 and the other 20 — they both work at a bakery where the group of 37 workers where there was wage theft committed against them of $185,000. We have been in protest sitting outside that bakery or what remains of that bakery. It’s insolvent. We’ve been sitting outside for 32 days. Today is day 32 and we’re going to get the final instalment of $39,000 today. So far we have recovered $146,000 by doing this.
The two sisters — we call them sisters because for us cousins and sisters are interchangeable — have been living together, and the 19-year-old was working at that bakery when her hand got jammed into a machine and she lost some significant functionality in her thumb because the company didn’t do anything. She shrieked and wasn’t pulled off the line immediately. She had to walk herself over to the foreman, who made her wait in a waiting area. One of the other workers told me that she was present when this happened, she was two rooms over, she could hear the yell and it didn’t seem like management was able to hear it. Long story short, they didn’t call any ambulance for it. This poor girl sat there, bled and had her aunt call an Uber to come pick her up. Then they took her to an emergency room where she was treated and she has lost some functionality on her right thumb — a 19-year-old girl. She has the rest of her life ahead of her.
Her sister a few days ago had an accident. She was cutting something in the kitchen and the knife hit her in the stomach. She didn’t know what to do. She has insurance. They all have insurance, but it’s not a question of having insurance. It’s a question of what do you do? These are children — imagine yourselves at 19 and 20, what kind of decisions were you making? I wasn’t making any good ones, I can tell you that right now. The 20-year-old came to protest the day after the injury happened and didn’t tell anyone about it until we were about ready to pack up. We spoke about it and then we made sure she got to the hospital the next day. She got four stitches on her stomach for that.
This is the reality. People have insurance, but they don’t know what to do with it. We make it accessible, but we don’t really make it accessible. That’s the gap.
Senator Osler: Thank you.
Senator McPhedran: We’ve got a recent report from Ontario that is identifying that many women international students who must find work in order to be able to survive are reporting increases in various forms of harassment, including sexual harassment, in the workplace. I realize it’s an Ontario-specific report and you’re from the Brampton region, but I’m wondering if you could share with us whether you’re seeing a similar trend as identified in this report.
Mr. Goswami: I’ll start and maybe Mr. Sanotra will want to add to that. In our communities, sexual assault is particularly hard to discuss and even harder to bring to the fore. We have heard of instances of it happening, but I can’t say that I have ever worked on a case or anything like that with that happening. I guarantee it happens. It’s just not something I have seen in the years. To be clear with everyone, NSN has only been around since July of 2021. In that time, we’ve recovered over $500,000 of wages for our workers. We try to focus on the wage theft issue for the most part. There are tons of different kinds of exploitation and we try to make the dent that we can.
Senator McPhedran: Ms. Bezo, did you want to respond?
Ms. Bezo: In our 2021 international student survey, we wanted to get a sense of students’ self-reported experience in terms of harassment broadly, not explicitly around sexual harassment as the question was posed, but to get a sense of the experiences of students both on campus, off campus, within the community, obviously including the labour market as well. Most students reported positive experiences.
However, in cases where students were extremely vulnerable across other indicators in our survey, they tended to report much higher risk in terms of negative experiences with harassment, with other types of aggression. That came through in our survey, not specific to Ontario but broadly speaking for students who found themselves in more precarious and vulnerable situations.
Senator McPhedran: Thank you. This report, which is a B.C.-based report that I’m now referring to, made a number of recommendations around the finding that international students have become the new temporary foreign workers and that it’s non-negotiable for students because they can’t survive without taking pretty much any kind of employment available.
The report makes some recommendations — I wanted some quick feedback on it — one being that there is a required English language testing as part of the study permit applications and also that the initial required sum to enter the country should be raised to $20,000.
There are other recommendations, but those are very specific and I’d appreciate some feedback on that.
Mr. Goswami: I’ll quickly get started and if Mr. Sanotra wants to add, he can. The issue isn’t that the barriers to entry aren’t high enough. That’s not the issue. They are plenty high as it currently stands.
It’s a question of exploitation. At one point somebody said paradise is painted for students. Mr. Sanotra can definitely speak to that, but in our experience it’s not a question of building a more prohibitive pathway to permanent residency. It’s the fact that there are so many prohibitions on the way to permanent residency that cause these issues, like the employers having to verify that you were a good employee and you were bonded to labour for them for a year.
Senator McPhedran: Does your colleague want to comment? Our time is so limited.
Mr. Sanotra: On the point of raising the bar for the minimum of high school and $20,000 initial funds that they deposit, a challenge we are facing, even if they come with a high score and $20,000, the workers are still not getting paid. That’s where the problem lies for us.
Senator McPhedran: Thank you.
Senator Kutcher: Thanks to all for being here. I’d like to follow up on the wage theft issue. Do we have any quantitative data in Canada on this? Australia in 2019, as you probably know, did a large study on this of over 5,000 students. They found about three quarters were paid below the minimum wage, particularly those who had lower language skills. Interestingly, they found that postgraduate students and undergraduate students were equally underpaid, regardless of the work they did, and about 40% of them did not seek help because of fear of reprisal. That report made a number of recommendations that maybe our committee could look at.
Do you have substantive quantitative data? How many students are being affected? What are the correlates of this wage theft?
Mr. Goswami: We had a meeting with the Minister of Labour in Ontario recently where we published some of that information on our socials. I can make sure we get that over to you in writing. Many of the same issues that they observed in Australia are true here as well. There are members of our group who have even decided to move to Australia because of the issues that they face here and the better fight against wage theft that’s being waged by the Australian government.
Senator Kutcher: Ms. Bezo, nice to see you again. Could you shed any light on wage theft from the study you did?
Ms. Bezo: We have not collected any specific data with respect to wage theft, but I can share with the committee that in 2023 — in fact, in two weeks’ time — we will be launching the next iteration of our survey that will delve into much more detail around the labour market experience and be able to unpack some of these issues.
One of those, for example, is input in terms of some of the policy framework around the current ability for students to work while studying, and we will share that with the committee when it becomes available.
Senator Kutcher: The other question is very specific and deals with work experience and permanent residency status, specifically for postgraduates, people in postgraduate studies. I call them emerging experts instead of postgraduate students because they’re not really students. They actually work in wet or dry labs, and they perform highly sophisticated and technical work.
Currently, the four years of their program is counted as one year of work experience, and that puts them at a substantive disadvantage of obtaining permanent residency status. Some actually drop out of their postgraduate studies in order to get a year of work so they can apply more quickly.
Are you aware of this problem? Do you know of the magnitude? If so, has any work been done to try to ensure that postgraduate trainees are actually treated the same way as a person who’s doing work in the workforce?
Ms. Bezo: CBIE specifically does not have quantitative data to speak to that. We’re certainly aware that is a barrier. It also speaks to a broader issue where there are a range of work-related experiences that our students can have while studying that currently aren’t recognized within the study permit or the study that allows work framework. It’s something we’ve been advocating with the department because even volunteer or for‑credit opportunities that students have that aren’t a graduation requirement currently preclude them from taking those opportunities and further integrating into our labour market and communities.
Senator Kutcher: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: My question is for Ms. Bezo.
You referred to that survey you conducted in 2021. The survey showed that many international students find it difficult to find employment in Canada, partly owing to their inability to understand the specific expectations of Canadian employers.
Here’s my question. Do you have any details about these expectations? What are the expectations that workers can’t meet? What are the reasons why they can’t meet these expectations? And last, what solutions and programs could help improve this situation, which is certainly problematic for both the employers and the foreign students who work in these companies?
[English]
Ms. Bezo: Thank you for your question. From our perspective, we see tremendous potential for our education institutions to play a more proactive role, including providing expanded job readiness training for international students. We’re seeing many initiatives across the country that are beginning to promote that.
But from our survey, we also see that there’s a gender focus in that training that needs to be applied given some of the additional limitations and barriers that I noted earlier, specifically related to female international students.
From our perspective, we also see a unique opportunity for greater engagement between our education institutions and employers and community groups. More outreach and collaboration are needed in that ecosystem to ensure we’re creating viable pathways for those students for them to be hired but also to support employers in terms of understanding some of those unique aspects of working with the students. As we saw in the survey, the biggest challenges were really around some of the unnamed aspects related to expectations, behavioural expectations, nuanced understanding of the work culture within specific labour market environments and then, of course, on the flip side, a real hesitance on the part of employers.
We’ve seen the 750 chambers of commerce pass resolutions to say they see value in international students, yet when we speak to individual employers who are members, they are daunted by the regulatory framework and the immigration policy framework, and many times they’ll default to not going through that process to hire a student simply because they don’t understand how to navigate it.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Did I understand correctly that you’re going to conduct another survey in 2023? If so, when those results become available, would it be possible to share them with the committee? It would be great if they arrived in time for our study.
[English]
Ms. Bezo: Yes, we will be undertaking that study in a few weeks’ time, and we will have some raw data probably available by the end of this year. I’d be pleased to share that with the committee. One of the areas that we want to look at is international students and entrepreneurship, to what extent there’s a desire on the part of our international students to start up businesses in Canada and to understand what they may perceive as barriers to that kind of seeding and growth, among other things related to future career paths and their specific labour market experiences during and post studies.
Senator Petitclerc: You shared about those two girls who were injured. I want to really understand, when it comes to insurance and recourse in cases of not only injury but abuse and mistreatment, where is the challenge or the problem? We’ve heard many times in this committee that sometimes the services, tools and recourses are there, but workers don’t go to it enough or as much as they could. Is it that they don’t know about it? You did mention the age. In this case, is it because they’re younger or is it because they’re afraid to get what they need in terms of help, services and rights?
Mr. Sanotra: In some cases, they are not aware of where they should be going. In some cases — let’s say they are working above their 20-hour limit, let’s say they get injured, the employer won’t want them to report that. The employer will discourage it. At the same time, it will be linked with their immigration status in some way. With that fear, they won’t really come forward. They would rather sit at home rather than coming forward and getting treated.
Senator Petitclerc: So it goes back to that power balance.
Mr. Sanotra: Yes.
Senator Petitclerc: Just a quick question because we’ve seen it in different situations — this is a totally different topic. In the case of the students, are we any good at providing age‑appropriate information? For example, in other situations, we’ve heard that they’re asking people to go on a website to find the information. We know 19-year-olds never go on a website. They want information to come to them on social media. Are we even trying to know who the audience is?
Mr. Goswami: I reject that premise. I find most 19-year-olds are on websites consistently, but there is something to that. It’s the issue Mr. Sanotra talked about, primarily. It is entirely that if I go to the hospital, they find out I got hurt in my bakery and my employer has issues, then the letter that he’s going to write for me is not going to come and I’ll never get permanent residency; it’s as simple as that. It’s worrisome for them.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you. This is very helpful.
The Chair: Let me pose a few questions to the Naujawan Support Network. I want to follow up with what Senator Petitclerc has queried. Should the requirement for a letter of approval from an employer be lifted by IRCC as a condition of moving to permanent residency?
Mr. Goswami: Actually, that’s our demand. It’s going to stop that kind of exploitation. We want barriers to permanent residency to be lifted, specifically this one being one of those we highlight.
The Chair: I’m going to stick with foreign students working. You talked about wage theft, which is disturbing. My question is that labour market standards and enforcement is a provincial matter in Canada. What role do you think the federal government should have in ensuring that international foreign students are treated fairly at their place of work?
Mr. Sanotra: At the federal level, especially in the trucking industry, most of the international students are transitioning into truck drivers. At the federal level, we highlighted one point. There’s only a six-month time period for an employee to file a claim in federal labour court. That limit is sometimes — they’re waiting for the employer to pay them, they are due three paycheques back-to-back and somehow they buy that time. It’s linked with their permanent residency in some way as well. Enforcement is a challenge. In some cases, where the employer has already been ordered to pay from the federal labour court, there’s still no guarantee they will get paid. I just dealt with a case where the employee had an order to pay from the federal government for the past two years — from 2021 — and it was still not paid.
The Chair: I see. Thank you for that information.
I’m wondering, Ms. Bezo, if you would have a comment on the federal role in labour market standards as they relate to international students.
Ms. Bezo: When one steps back and looks at how we get at pan-Canadian solutions to address some of these challenges and to seize the opportunities for both Canada and our international students, I think we can all acknowledge there are jurisdictional realities in this country that make planning related to the labour market very challenging. I think one of those challenges is the collaboration that we need to see between the federal government and the provinces and territories in working collaboratively on some these solutions. The reality is given the jurisdictional element, there are levers that may be available to our federal counterparts, but at this point, it’s a very siloed approach. From our perspective, we want to see greater pan‑Canadian collaboration broadly, but also to address some of the issues we’ve talked about specific to the vulnerabilities of students employed in the labour market.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Bezo. Colleagues, we have time for a second round.
Senator McPhedran: Picking up on my points earlier, if I could ask each of you to respond to the kind of oversight. Is it investigation? Is it a hotline? Is it more resources at the community level? Is it all of the above? Just paint for us what you would consider to be a much more effective way of actually responding to the crisis that many international students are in at this point.
Mr. Goswami: I think the first of our requests was to remove the 20-hour limit for international students. It goes hand-in-hand with what we were saying. If they are working more than 20 hours and they’re worried about that getting found out about, then they’re not going to go to a hospital with their claim. That’s, I think, the fastest. It’s already in place presently until December of this year, I think, when it’s going to expire. If that could be turned permanent, that would be super easy. That’s my easiest one.
Mr. Sanotra: The second point I would like to highlight is the enforcement. If an employee is not paid, if they have an order to pay from the ministry of labour, they should get paid. It’s still not happening. The third thing is, which we already discussed, the requirement of a job letter from the employer, so the need of an employer’s blessing in the transition to permanent residency is a big challenge for international students. They don’t really come forward because of that. If that is lifted, it should help to some extent.
Ms. Bezo: One of the things that we’ve seen from our international student survey is that our most vulnerable students are ones who are aware of support services, give them a high rating, but do not actually use those services. I think there is a barrier here in terms of the uptake of many of the supports that are available. It’s a piece that needs to be tackled in terms raising awareness and encouraging those students to, in fact, step forward and avail themselves of what is available. Because we saw a tremendous gap in particular for our most vulnerable international students.
The other challenge is that there’s an ecosystem for students that needs to be engaged, where there are dots between community players, municipal governments, et cetera. We need to connect those dots. There are agencies that engage in different ways, but we are not taking a coherent approach to ensure that our students are supported and that we are managing the vulnerabilities that exist, whether in their work experiences or their experiences in the community. Our communities need to do more than pay lip service to inclusion.
Many of those communities have opted to make their communities destinations of choice for international students, but it means that those stakeholders have an obligation to provide adequate supports and to make sure that all of those stakeholders wrapping around the students are, in fact, providing appropriate supports. There’s more work to be done in that area, from our perspective.
Senator McPhedran: I wanted to zero in more on the health discussion and ask specifically about mental health. We just heard Ms. Bezo refer to hesitation across the board, but is there anything we could hear from you on mental health?
Mr. Sanotra: I want you to look at it from the perspective of an 18- or 19-year-old international student who is coming to a new country and still getting familiarized with the weather, the processes and the language. At the same time, even if they are working for 20 hours, there is still no guarantee that they will get paid.
That’s the main challenge that we are facing in our group and with the people who are approaching us. In most cases, the amount is accumulated. It is not one or two weeks of pay; it is over the period of a few months that they are promised.
Senator McPhedran: I take from that what you are identifying as a major stressor is the financial insecurity as a result of employers essentially stealing wages?
Mr. Sanotra: Yes.
Senator McPhedran: Anything more to add?
Mr. Goswami: Just to echo —
Senator McPhedran: Great. If you’re going to echo, I would like to ask Ms. Bezo.
Ms. Bezo: There is a balancing act here. We know from our surveys that one in three students who study in Canada rely on work to be able to pay for their studies. Two thirds do not, according to our survey, but a third do fall into the category that we’ve been discussing in terms of mental health pressures, fiscal pressures and balancing the commitments around work and study. There is a tremendous amount of pressure for those students beyond the process of adaptation and integration, especially in that first year of entry. We see that very clearly coming out in our survey.
Senator Cormier: I will ask my question in French. First, I would like to know what type of enterprises they are working.
[Translation]
I don’t know if the employees and students you’re talking about work in companies that are federally regulated, such as the communications and banking sectors. I understand that these employees can file labour standards complaints with the labour program, including monetary complaints for unpaid wages.
Can you tell us if this program is frequently used by these types of employees, by the people you’re telling us about? If not, why not?
If so, what is the satisfaction rate with this program?
[English]
Mr. Sanotra: The workers who approach us are mainly from trucking, warehousing, factories, restaurants and construction. Most of the cases that fall within the federal structure of the Canada Labour Code system are truck drivers who cross the borders, either to the U.S. or to different provinces. There is only a handful of them. But like I said, there is only a six-month period where they can file their application under the Canada Labour Code.
If after being ordered to pay they are not being paid, there is no enforcement of an order to pay. That’s where we are facing a challenge.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: What can you tell us about this program, Ms. Bezo?
[English]
Ms. Bezo: Not specific to the program, no.
The Chair: Does the federal government support your efforts in seeking wage justice for your members?
Mr. Goswami: As such, we presently have workers whose cases are being reviewed through the judicial process. That’s the extent to which the federal government has been supporting us.
The Chair: Just for clarification, are you receiving financial support, grants and contributions from the federal government?
Mr. Goswami: No. Presently, not to my knowledge, no.
The Chair: Should you be?
Mr. Goswami: I heard from the senator there that I should say —
The Chair: No, we need to get it on the record.
Mr. Goswami: Yes. Please. Definitely.
The Chair: Thank you. Given the increasing role that international foreign students are playing in essential parts of our economy and the labour market, do you think the federal government should, in fact, provide counselling at universities and colleges for the transition to the labour market?
Mr. Goswami: This is actually something that we have started doing ourselves. We go from college to college, teaching them about their rights. We have a “Know Your Rights” campaign. We get invited by South Asian or immigrant councils at colleges and student associations of all kinds. They hear about the work that NSN has done, and we have gone college to college talking about their rights and teaching them what the minimum wage is.
The Chair: Clearly, you are not doing this with any support from the federal government.
Mr. Goswami: Presently nothing, no.
Mr. Sanotra: No.
The Chair: Colleagues, that brings us to the end of our second panel. I wish to thank you all very much. You have given us some really important perspectives, and we value them a great deal.
To my colleagues, on our long list of studies, we should put international foreign students as a global topic.
(The committee adjourned.)