Filling the labour gaps

Why relying on immigration as a quick fix for the skilled labour shortage may end up hurting immigrants and employers alike

Canadian employers will soon have to pay a $275 processing fee for every new staff member they want to bring in under the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program. It sounds like a fairly token amount, and it’s meant to cover administrative costs, but the fee is really designed to discourage firms from being too eager to use the program as a ready source of cheap labour at a time when more than a million Canadians are looking for work.

It’s Ottawa’s latest effort to respond to the public outcry that erupted last spring when the Royal Bank of Canada outsourced some IT jobs to a foreign company, which then brought in temporary foreign workers to help move the jobs offshore. The controversy led to further questions about the program—namely, why it admitted 213,516 temporary foreign workers last year, more than three times as many as a decade ago. Even so, Ottawa has made no secret it views foreign workers—whether here on a temporary basis or permanently—as a key weapon to fight a looming labour shortage brought on by retiring baby boomers, as well as a growing skills gap that’s predicted to result in more than one million vacant positions by 2021.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/09/10/filling-the-gaps/