Migration and the Canadian Labour Market

The 2015 federal election changed the tenor of the debate about Canadian immigration policy in unexpected ways. The Liberal Party's pledge to admit 25,000 Syrian refugees did not at first seem a vote winner; after terrorist attacks in Paris in November of that year, pollsters claimed that a majority of Canadians opposed Liberal leader Justin Trudeau's plans. At the same time, however, Trudeau's promise seemed to resonate with Canadians eager to see their country lauded again – after the "dark days" of Stephen Harper's government – as an upholder of human rights. By December of 2015, following the election and the Liberal Party's victory, the same polls showed that the majority of Canadians favoured the policy of accepting Syrian refugees.

This focus on refugees marked a change from one year earlier in the character of the discussion over migration policy. While the Harper government's treatment of asylum seekers and refugees had garnered some attention beyond activist circles prior to the election, it was economic migration – in particular, the expansion of programs to admit temporary foreign workers (tfws) – that had received the most coverage in 2014 and 2015. The number of Temporary Foreign Worker Program (tfwp) work permit holders had increased from around 14,000 in 1995 to a high of over 112,000 in 2009,¹ and there was vigorous debate at the provincial and local levels about the need for "foreign" workers – especially after controversies over employers' preferences for tfws. Yet during the election campaign, the issue – including the impacts of reforms to the tfwp in 2014 – largely disappeared from view. Following the Liberals' victory, the new government tacitly admitted that temporary migration remains a largely unresolved issue when it announced a parliamentary review of the tfwp in February 2016.

Employers have long argued that the need for migrant workers stems from labour-market shortages in sectors and occupations that citizens shun, or in remote locations without adequate populations of workers. The massive expansion of temporary migration from the mid-2000s, however, went beyond the jobs that "Canadians won't do" (like low-paid agricultural and care work). Migrants were increasingly being admitted to work in sectors such as accommodation and food services, with no path to permanent residence or citizenship. After the 2008 global financial crisis, this expansion was concomitant with higher unemployment and more precarious employment across Canada, leading to pressure on the federal government when the media reported that employers were hiring migrant workers over job-seeking Canadians.² Reforms implemented in 2014 were intended to mollify a restive public unhappy with the idea of citizens being passed over for jobs, but failed to address this confluence of insecure employment and insecure legal status in the Canadian labour market.

The three books discussed in this essay grapple with the epistemological and empirical dimensions of migration and insecurity in Canada. Building on a Canadian tradition of rich scholarship on the political economy of migration, each offers a different conceptual starting point for doing so. In what follows, I provide a brief overview of each volume and then focus on their joint contribution to the analysis of the political economy of the Canadian labour market (or labour markets). I conclude with thoughts on the strengths, and some weaknesses, of this contribution.

All three volumes are edited collections and each is organized around a conceptual "hook" on which the chapters, many of them geographical and topical case studies, hang. These "hooks" might be characterized as mid-range theories that connect to macro-level accounts of socioeconomic change (globalization, financialization), but loosely. This loose connection facilitates a diversity of approaches and empirical analyses within each collection and...