Canada Work Permits Issued In Record Numbers As Labour Crunch Leaves Employers Scrambling
A record number of foreign nationals are working in Canada this year under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP), the latest data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) shows.
In the first 10 months of this year alone, these two programs resulted in almost half a million foreigners, 498,435 to be exact, being granted Canadian work permits.
That’s 20.3 percent more work permits under these programs in the first 10 months of this year than the 414,170 for all of last year.
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Based on the current trend, Ottawa could issue 598,122 work permits to foreigners by the end of this year, or 44.4 percent more than in 2021.
Both programs have seen massive growth this year as employers increasingly recruit workers from outside the country to fill Canada’s labor shortage.
The IMP’s previous record for the number of work permits issued was last year when IRCC issued 310,805 to foreigners.
Ottawa had already issued 378,365 work permits under the IMP by the end of October this year and, based on the current trend, could issue 454,038 work permits under the IMP this year.
That achievement would result in Canada issuing more than double the number of work permits under the IMP this year, compared to the 222,720 it issued under the same program in 2017 just five years ago.
Under the TFWP, by the end of October this year, immigration officials had already issued 120,070 work permits, nearly 16.2 percent more in those 10 months than the 103,365 for all of last year.
Based on current trends, Ottawa could issue 144,084 work permits through the TFWP by the end of this year, or about 39.4 percent more than all of last year.
This achievement would mean that the number of work permits issued by the TFWP would have almost doubled from 72,965 in 2015, just seven years ago.
Employers are turning to foreign workers to fill the 959,600 vacancies
Employers are increasingly turning to foreign workers to fill positions, who will be begging for Canadians to fill them.
In its report on job vacancies for the third quarter, Statistics Canada noted that there were 959,600 job vacancies in Canada at the time, down only slightly from the record high of 992,200 job vacancies in the second quarter of this year.
“It was 8.3 percent higher than in the third quarter of 2021 and 72.7 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2020,” reports Statistics Canada.
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The job vacancy rate, which is calculated by dividing the number of job openings in Canada by the total number of filled and unfilled positions, was 5.4 percent in the third quarter of this year, up from 5.7 percent in the prior year quarter.
It’s a very, very tight job market. Even if every unemployed person had the right skills and experience to fill the jobs available, there were still barely enough unemployed people in Canada to fill the country’s available jobs in the third quarter — and of course, there isn’t such a perfect match in the workforce.
“In the third quarter of 2022, there was an average of 1.1 unemployed per job vacancy in Canada, similar to the record low seen in the second quarter,” reports Statistics Canada.
Canadian employers trying to survive during this acute labor shortage can recruit and hire foreigners through the TFWP and the IMP.
Ontario snaps up more than a third of all foreigners who come to Canada on a work permit
British Columbia and Quebec still have the highest job vacancies among provinces and, perhaps unsurprisingly, are also two provinces where many foreigners with work permits will work.
In the first 10 months of this year, foreign nationals en route to British Columbia received 27,825 work permits through the TFWP and another 56,600 through the IMP.
During the same period, foreigners traveling to Quebec obtained 34,070 work permits through the TFWP and another 42,060 through the IMP.
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However, the recruitment of workers from other countries by Ontario employers through these programs puts both British Columbia’s and Quebec’s numbers in comparison.
Canada’s most populous province and economic powerhouse opened its arms to 37,200 foreigners who were granted work permits through the TFWP and another 140,170 through the IMP in the first 10 months of this year alone.
That’s a total of 177,370 foreigners with TFWP or IMP work permits in Ontario as of the end of October, or nearly 35.6 percent of the total number of such work permits issued nationwide.
