The general manager of one of Victoria County’s largest employers says Pierre Poilievre’s call to scrap Canada’s temporary foreign worker program shows the federal Conservative leader doesn’t understand the struggle that rural communities face in filling positions.
Osborne Burke of Victoria Co-operative Fisheries in Neils Harbour, N.S., was reacting to Poilievre’s assertion Wednesday that Ottawa should axe the program because it has flooded the market with cheap labour and made it harder for young Canadians to find work.
“I ask Mr. Poilievre, I challenge him: where are these workers that are unemployed that are looking for work?” said Burke, a past president of the Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance. “Reality, contrary to what Mr. Poilievre says, is there’s nobody else left to employ.”
Burke said the co-op tapped into the program for the first time in 2013, bringing in 10 workers. This year, that number swelled to 35. He said the temporary foreign workers, mostly from Mexico, are happy to work in the northern Cape Breton community.
“We’re in competition with [the] national park, local restaurants, local hotels and the seafood industry, the harvesters as well, looking for crew members,” said Burke. “We do not have the labour pool. We do not have the workforce.”
The Conservatives say that while they want the temporary foreign worker program eliminated, they would create a separate, stand-alone program for legitimately difficult-to-fill agricultural labour.
Canada already has a separate immigration stream for farm workers called the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program that allows employers to bring in workers from Mexico and other participating Caribbean countries.
Stacey Gomez is the executive director of the Centre for Migrant Worker Rights Nova Scotia. She said Pierre Poilievre’s comments twist the figures regarding Canada’s temporary foreign worker program. (Robert Short/CBC)
Advocates for the workers say Poilievre’s comments do more harm than good for migrants looking to provide for their families.
“It’s easier to blame specific communities, especially a vulnerable one, than actually making changes concretely and in a material way to address these issues,” said Stacey Gomez, the executive director of the Centre for Migrant Worker Rights Nova Scotia.
She said the Conservative leader’s charge that temporary foreign workers are taking work away from young Canadians is unfounded.
“The majority of migrant workers in Nova Scotia and across the country are employed in sectors like agriculture, fisheries and trucking. And these are industries where youth are not typically employed in the summertime,” she said.