Carney rebuffs Poilievre call to cancel foreign worker program, says businesses need non-Canadian workers

After Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called for the end of the Temporary Foreign Worker program, PM Mark Carney said businesses tell him they need the foreign workers

UPDATE: Asked about Pierre Poilievre's demand that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program be scrapped, PM Mark Carney defended the scheme, saying businesses tell him they need the foreign workers:

"When I talk to businesses around the country...their number one issue is tariffs. And their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers."

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has revealed his party’s fall Parliamentary agenda, focusing on affordability, crime, border security, and abolishing the temporary foreign worker program.

WATCH POILIEVRE’S FULL PRESS CONFERENCE AT BOTTOM

Poilievre, along with his immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner, announced their plan to fight high wages and mass youth unemployment, which they say is made worse by the Liberals’ TFW program.

“Let’s be honest, young people today form what I call generation screwed. Let’s look at the situation for this generation, which is the first generation that cannot afford a home in Canadian history,” Poilievre said in Mississauga on Wednesday. “And now the double gut punch, they have the highest or the worst employment numbers of any group of young people, since the late 1990s, so you can’t get a job, and even if you did have a job, you can never buy a home.”

According to Statistics Canada’s unemployment rate data for July 2025, youth employment fell by 34,000 jobs, a 0.7% decline, bringing the rate to 53.6%. Excluding the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020-21, July had the lowest youth employment rate since November 1998.

According to the report, “Of the 1.6 million people who were unemployed in July, 23.8 per cent were in long-term unemployment, meaning they had been continuously searching for work for 27 weeks or more.”

“The system gets worse and worse and worse. The time has come for decisive action. We have major problems in our job market,” Poilievre said. “The unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24 is now 14.6% the employment rate, the share of young people who are employed, is at its lowest level in over a quarter century outside of the pandemic.”

He said Carney has “kept all of Justin Trudeau’s immigration numbers” despite the Liberal pivot to reverse its mass immigration intake. In the first four months of 2025, for example, Liberals welcomed 817,000 new comers (including extensions) to Canada, including both permanent and non-permanent streams.

“There are 16,000 more people unemployed in Ontario than there were in the Great Recession, Ontario has seen a massive increase in job losses and a massive decrease in home building,” Poilievre said. “Nearly 75% of temporary foreign workers that come into the country are for low-wage positions, which means they compete with working-class and young people, that ultimately drive down wages and drive away jobs.”

He noted that traditionally Canadian companies such as Tim Hortons have now hired an “unimaginable” 1,131 per cent more TFWs in the last four years, as reported by Bloomberg last month.

He added that in the first half of this year, the TFW program imported 74% more low-skilled labour than in all of 2015. He claimed TFWs now account for 2% of Canada’s overall workforce.

“Now, the Liberals promised they would cap the temporary foreign worker program at 82,000 but in the first six months, they’ve already handed out 105,000 permits,” Poilievre said. “To put this into perspective, if they do the same number of permits for temporary foreign workers in the next six months that did in the last they will break the record again, with over 200,000 temporary foreign workers coming in to take jobs when our own young people are facing record unemployment.”

Poilievre told reporters he believes most corporations don’t need TFWs. He said they want to continue paying low wages rather than raising prices to compete in the domestic labour market.

Rempel Garner has been posting on X different businesses paying wages for TFWS only, all while unemployment in their economic region remains high. Booster Juice in Calgary, for example, is looking to hire a TFW for $36.50 per hour, while Youth unemployment in Alberta is at 20.3 per cent.

“They specifically say they want it to be a temporary foreign worker. Why aren’t they offering those jobs to Canadian kids first?” Poilievre said. “It is a very exploitative system that has allowed corporate elites to profit off of driving wages down and driving jobs out, and we’re going to put an end to it. Canadian workers deserve Canadian jobs.”

During a press conference in Toronto on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney shut down the idea that his government would scrap the TFW program in its entirety.

“That program has a role. It has to be focused in terms of its role, and it’s part of what we’re doing, and part of what we will be discussing, how well the temporary foreign worker program is working and how our overall immigration system is working,” Carney said. “We’ve been absolutely clear as a government that we want and we’re putting in place policies so that the overall level of immigration, as proportion of the population, will decline from around 7% today to around 5% several years from now.”

Carney said the program isn’t the biggest contributor to immigration, adding his government can improve overall immigration policies and will work to do so.