I'll quote from the legal brief. The effect is essentially “to prohibit Canada from imposing any limit on the number of foreign workers entitled to enter the country so long as they fall under one of the broadly defined categories of workers Canada has agreed to admit”.
What are the categories of workers that would fall under the TPP labour mobility provisions? There are four: business visitors, intra-corporate transferees, investors, and professionals and technicians. For three of these four categories, and I quote directly from the TPP text, it says that Canada has agreed that it will not (a) “require labour certification tests” for these workers; and (b) they've agreed to not “impose or maintain any numerical restriction relating to temporary entry”.
For the other category, business visitors, and again I quote from the agreement, Canada has also foresworn the right to “impose or maintain any numerical restriction relating to temporary entry”.
According to our legal opinion, these constraints effectively remove the ability of Canadian governments to impose a needs test on employers wanting to bring temporary workers into the country. This means that foreign workers covered by Canada's commitments under the TPP will be entitled to take jobs in Canada even if Canadian workers are readily available to fill those jobs and regardless of the prevailing unemployment rate.
Some might say, “Don't worry, it's only four categories. We'll only be taking a few temporary workers”, but that's simply not the case. Under the agreement, business visitors are defined as any citizen from a signatory nation, hardly a narrow definition. Similarly intra-corporate transferees are defined as “anyone who has worked for a company in the signatory nation for more than a year, again, hardly a narrow definition. The category of professionals and technical workers is made up of an extremely long list of occupations that includes everything from nurses and lawyers to construction and trades people and oil field workers.
To make matters even worse, TPP-sanctioned workers in all of these categories will be able to have their so-called temporary permit renewed indefinitely, and most of them will be able to bring their spouses, who will also be able to work in the country under similar conditions.
At this point, I want to make two things abundantly clear. First, these TPP-sanctioned workers will not be immigrants. There will be no paths to citizenship for them. We submit that this is not how we build our country and it is not how we should structure our labour market going forward.
Second, it's important to understand that these workers will not fall under the existing temporary foreign worker program. People who know me know that I've been a leading critic of the TFWP. The program's rules to protect the interests of Canadians workers are weak, but at least they exist. With the TPP-sanctioned workers, even these minimal rules, designed to protect the interests of Canadians and stop the abuse of foreign workers, won't apply. Employers bringing workers into Canada under TPP will not have to prove that they've offered the job first to Canadians; they will not have to pay a prevailing Canadian wage; and in most cases they will not have to demonstrate that the workers in question have been properly trained.
The trade lawyers we hired say that there's even some question as to whether Canadian minimum wage and basic employment standard laws could be applied to these workers, because it would be hard to enforce these rules on companies that operate outside Canada. For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of this situation is that the current federal government has signed this agreement and is seriously considering ratifying it at exactly the same time that they say they have announced a comprehensive review of the TFWP.
