Between May 2018 and March 2026, at least 203 employers of foreign workers were fined a total of $ 9.04 million for various violations, including that THE BUSINESS DID NOT EXIST. ESDC needs to explain how they issued the work permits in these cases.
(Note: The hard legwork of digging into the government data / reports / information for this was done by the X account @jobwatchcanada. All the credit for this article goes to them; they agreed to my request to compile the data in a table & make it available to me. I cannot recommend this account enough, for anyone who is interested in immigration policy.)
WILD WEST
Over the past three years, we have learned of a series of malpractices that had become rampant in the immigration arena. These include: no criminal background checks for international students, visa-mill colleges, public colleges enrolling international students in huge numbers without regard for the impact on local communities, a black market for Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) that was flagrantly out in the open, fake listings for LMIA-based jobs at ridiculously high wages in order to sidestep regulations, wage-theft and other abuse of foreign workers by their employers, bogus asylum claims and more. Over these years, I have reported on many of these issues extensively, for which I received appreciation from many Canadians. However, in all humility, I must state that in most cases, I was able to report only because concerned Canadians passed on the relevant information to me; I am merely the public face of these fine Canadians who, for their own reasons, decided to avoid the spotlight. The most satisfying instance of this came when I was approached by Bloomberg, to cooperate with them on their major article on the widespread exploitation of young foreigners under the student visa and work permit regimes. A lot of right-minded Canadians who were in a position to share insights and personal knowledge of the wrongdoing responded to my call on X, leading to a well-rounded report by Bloomberg that looked at all the sides of the issue.
While it is gratifying that the Canadian government was forced to respond to these exposes (by your truly as well as by many others) and to make changes to policy, the unfortunate fact remains that where enforcement is concerned, the government’s performance still remains at the D- level (if not lower). In particular, there seems to be no appetite for punitive action against bad players; perhaps the constituencies that propelled faulty policy and its more defective administration still have the political clout to avoid answerability.
A NEW FRONTIER
Having practically breathed immigration issues over the past few years, I have come to the unfortunate realization that no matter how much corruption one has seen in that arena, there will always be a new revelation of yet another kind of corrupt practice there. It was therefore completely unsurprising when, a few days ago, I noticed that the X account @jobwatchcanada posted about an employer being penalized for, inter alia, hiring a foreign worker while the business for which they were purportedly hiring did not exist. The natural question, of course, is how EDSC had issued a work permit for this foreign worker. One would imagine that at the very least, ESDC would want to know if the business in question actually existed.
Over the next few days, the account kept posting more instances of this kind, so I requested them to compile a list that I could publish as an article. My purpose was to facilitate referencing to all the cases that we know of as of now; this would make it easier to access and quote the instances.
The entire list contains 203 cases where the employer was fined for different violations, including obtaining a work permit for a foreign worker for a business that did not exist; the total amount of fines comes to $ 9,041,000, over a period of almost 8 years. It would not be out of place here to ask how many cases of such abuse have gone undetected. Are these 203 cases the tip of the proverbial iceberg? Given my work on immigration-related malpractices over the years, I am inclined to believe that they are – but perhaps I am jaded.
Before I reproduce the list, the province-wise numbers of such cases are as follows:
Alberta: 38
British Columbia: 95 (46.6% of the total)
Manitoba: 7
New Brunswick: 2
Ontario: 49 (24.0% of the total)
PEI: 1
Quebec: 9
Saskatchewan: 2
From the above numbers, the logical question is, given the population of British Columbia, what accounts for the fact that the province accounts for nearly half of all the cases nationwide? Is it stricter enforcement? Or is it higher incidence of corruption / fraud? I know that we don’t expect anymore that MSM will dig into this, but a person can hope.
And finally, a note on the penalty itself: in most cases, the employer was found to have violated multiple rules applicable for foreign workers, so a penalty of, say, $15,000 is too low. As many people have pointed out in replies to the posts by @jobwatchcanada, given the high (black market) rates for which these work permits are being sold, the penalty merely amounts to cost of doing business for these employers. Or, to put it in a nutshell, the penalty should be punitive enough to act as a deterrent.
Additionally – and perhaps more importantly – I hold the view that obtaining work permit for a foreign worker for a non-existent business constitutes – or should constitute – a criminal offence. Just as making a false declaration on a tax return makes one subject to criminal charges, making a false declaration that the business exists AND that it is unable to find the needed worker(s) locally should also be treated as a criminal act.
So, without further ado, here is the list provided to me by @jobwatchcanada. My computer skills are less than modest, so I have taken screenshots of the Excel sheet; I hope this will not be a hinderance to readers.
In closing, I urge readers to write to their MP (whichever party they may belong to) so they can take it up in the parliament and end these malpractices via better administration and stricter enforcement.
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