Criticism of the Temporary Foreign Worker program has gone from a trickle to a tsunami recently as the media big boys take an interest in the story. It's no longer just fringe bloggers and union types who see a problem with bringing in hundreds of thousands of "temporary foreign workers" at a time when over a million Canadians don't have jobs.
After spending the last couple of years hoping the issue would go away, Kenney has finally been forced into action. The action he is taking meets the most obvious part of the media controversy head-on, namely the revelation that mega fast-food chains Tim Hortons and McDonalds have been bringing in workers by the thousands because no Canadians have the skills to pour coffee or flip burgers.
The Minister announced on Friday that the fast-food industry will be temporarily banned from using the program, until such time as people forget about it, whereupon it will be quietly resurrected. In making the announcement the Minister portrayed himself as the champion of ordinary Canadians. He was, he said with a straight face, giving the employers the message that they should "improve wages and benefits" of their Canadian workers!
Hopefully most Canadians are not that gullible. The exponential growth of the TFW program under the Harper government has been deliberately engineered to erode the wages and benefits of Canadian workers, and it has worked very well in achieving that objective.
Too bad those media busy-bodies had to shine their light on things...
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