Certainly. Thank you for the question.
There are reasons to believe that the impacts of, let's say, removing the temporary foreign worker program would impact different sectors of the Canadian economy and different cities versus suburban areas, rural areas, small towns and somewhere in between.
In the absence of a temporary foreign worker program, if a firm advertises a position and is unable to fill it at the advertised wage, one would expect that three main things could happen. The first is that they might readvertise at a higher wage and they might get applicants at that higher wage. The second is that they might instead say, “Well, I need to make investments in technology, and then my existing workers are more productive or it's easier to attract people to these job vacancies.” The third possibility is that the company may go bankrupt because the company is not viable at these higher wages.
It's in that flexible wage framework. There is no maximum wage in Canada, so firms can always advertise at a higher wage if their profitability allows it, but that could vary by types of jobs, regions and levels of experience. For example, I don't love the idea of a carve-out for agricultural workers, but there's a possibility that it might be the right thing to do because farms might have to raise the wage too much to get these workers doing jobs that are fairly remote geographically and seasonal.
How this would impact different employers, if we were to eliminate the temporary foreign worker program, depends a lot on that context.