All the cheap imported labor is having the expected effects on unemployment and reducing wages across the board.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business...D19%20pandemic.
It’s getting harder for young Canadians to find a job. A post-pandemic influx of cheap foreign workers in restaurants and retail stores may be making it tougher.
That’s contributing to a soaring rate of youth unemployment. Two years ago, the jobless rate for people 15 to 24 years old was a little over 9%. Now it’s 14.2% — the highest level in more than a decade outside of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For younger immigrants — those who’ve landed in Canada in the past five years — the unemployment rate is around 23%.
An analysis of government data by Bloomberg News shows explosive growth in the number of temporary foreign workers in food and retail over the past five years. The number of them approved to work in those two sectors jumped 211% between 2019 and 2023.
“In a sense what we’re doing is we’re subsidizing those activities by allowing them to bring in low-wage workers rather than make them pay a competitive wage,” said Christopher Worswick, economics department chair at Carleton University in Ottawa, who co-wrote a peer-reviewed report showing firms prefer temporary foreign workers due to their higher efforts for the same wage.