Milarosa Robarios’s prayers were answered one night in late January.
Her husband was at work, as the front-house manager at Boston Pizza, when he received the phone call they had been waiting for since November 2013. Their family of four was about to be cleared for permanent residency under Alberta’s provincial nominee program.
If things had gone differently, the Robarios family would have been on a plane back to the Philippines at the end of February.
“I feel happy because our priorities are the kids and they were now happy they don’t want to leave. They want to graduate here,” she said.
Milarosa Robarios and her husband both work at Boston Pizza on foreign worker visas.
Robarios has been in Canada for almost two years. Her husband arrived under the temporary foreign worker program five years ago. In 2010, there were 240 temporary foreign workers in Cold Lake. By 2012, that number had jumped to 560. Mayor Craig Copeland said they are mostly working in the city’s hotels and restaurants.
In fall 2014, they were preparing their two children, in grades six and seven, for the possibility that they might have to go back to a country they no longer considered home.
“It’s devastating because the kids finally adjusted here. They like it here. They find fresher air to live in,” Robarios said in October.
Permanent residency still isn’t a sure bet. They are in the process of submitting their paperwork to Citizenship and Immigration Canada for final approval, but they are allowed to stay in Canada for two more years while it is being processed.
Robarios works as a front-desk clerk at a local motel, owned by a Filipino couple, for $14 an hour, $4 above minimum wage. Her husband works for Boston Pizza, rising from line cook to a manager making $16 an hour. She also serves tables at Boston Pizza for one night per week, making slightly more than the $9.75 minimum wage for alcohol-serving staff.
They think they’re living the Canadian dream.
“I’m not sure that we could provide the things that the kids needed even if we go back to our country because the salary, or the compensation, there is way too small compared to here and sooner or later they’re going to be going to college,” she said in October.
Milarosa has been on an open work permit since she arrived in Canada, which allows her to work for any employer, but her husband has only been allowed to work for Boston Pizza since they sponsored his temporary foreign worker visa and then his application for permanent residency. Because their application has been accepted by Alberta, her husband will now also be on an open work permit.
“He could work now two jobs because he has an open work permit,” she said.
Rise of the temporary foreign worker program
Families like the Robarios came to Canada under the temporary foreign worker program, introduced by the federal government in 1973 to address labour shortages.
The federal government expanded it in 2002 to include low-skilled workers, who now dominate the program, filling jobs in the hospitality and food service industries. The number of temporary foreign workers in Alberta, most from the Philippines, has blossomed alongside the oil boom. In 2005 there were 10,245 foreign workers in the province. By 2012 there were 84,465, according to Employment and Social Development Canada.
Since the federal government announced changes to the temporary foreign worker program last April, Cold Lake’s local business and immigrant communities have been in turmoil. Nobody agrees with the reforms from Ottawa that are supposed to cut down on abuse and open up jobs for Canadians.
“We’re not going to get the applications. Neither is the McDonald’s or the other fast-food places. Eighteen year old kids around here, they wanna go in the oil patch,” said Bob Buckle, the owner of the local Original Joe’s restaurant and a member of city council.
Changing the rules
Under the old rules, business owners had to pay $275 per labour market opinion to hire one temporary foreign worker for a two-year contract. There was no limit to the number of temporary foreign workers a business owner could hire as long as they could prove that they had a labour shortage.
In April the federal government announced a moratorium on hiring foreign food service workers under the temporary foreign worker program because of reports that employers were hiring foreigners instead of Canadians. In June it announced that the entire program would be overhauled in 2015. Under the new rules, beginning in February, it costs all business owners $1,000 per labour market impact assessment, known as the labour market opinion under the old rules, to hire a temporary foreign worker for a one-year contract.
Furthermore, businesses can only have 30 per cent of their workforce as foreign workers. That cap drops to 20 per cent starting July 1 and 10 per cent in 2016. Buckle is one of several small business owners partnering with the Cold Lake Chamber of Commerce to petition the federal government for a regional exemption for northeastern Alberta under the new temporary foreign worker guidelines.
Cold Lake’s chronic labour shortage
He said that the temporary foreign worker program fills a chronic need in Cold Lake for unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the city’s restaurants and hotels.
“The labour shortage is a fact of life around here,” he said. “We’re not going to get people moved out from Toronto. They’re not coming from Victoria to come to Cold Lake to work. No matter what you do.”
The unemployment rate in Cold Lake was 3.6 per cent in February 2014, according to Statistics Canada. Since the crash in oil prices it’s risen to 6 per cent in February 2015 — but that’s in-line with the six to seven per cent employment rate that economists assume will always exist in the economy.
The program came under scrutiny in April when Canadian employees alleged that a McDonald’s franchise owner in Victoria was paying their temporary foreign workers better and taking jobs away from domestic workers. Buckle doesn’t buy it. “The government wanted to know how we were going to transition to a Canadian workforce,” Buckle said.
“My answer is that I’ll hire every Canadian that applies. That’s how I’m telling you that there’s nobody here.”
He said he hasn’t received a Canadian application in at least six months to work in his kitchen, the only part of his business where he uses temporary foreign workers. “I’ve hired cooks from the Toronto area and they never showed up,” Buckle said.
Foreign workers essential for service
Sherri Bohme, executive director of the Cold Lake Chamber of Commerce, which has partnered with the Bonnyville Chamber of Commerce to hire a lobbyist to petition the federal government for an exemption, said temporary foreign workers are essential to maintaining service levels in such a rapidly growing community. She said capping temporary foreign workers at 10 per cent of every business’ workforce would lead to reduced hours and poor service levels because there just won’t be enough staff to go around.
“If you’re already annoyed waiting in the Tim Hortons drive-thru, it could get worse,” she said.
Buckle said that temporary foreign workers are essential to maintaining the services that make a liveable city. In the early days of the Fort McMurray boom, the Tim Hortons was closing at 3 p.m. because there weren’t enough workers, Buckle said.
“How do we keep northern Alberta from simply turning into a work camp community where big industry will just import their workers, they’ll live in camp for 10 or 14 days and then go back to Newfoundland, Victoria or where ever?”
Taco Time and Wok Box are two of the chain restaurants in Cold Lake that staffed by temporary foreign workers.
For Filipino migrants who work at Original Joe’s, A&W, Wok Box, McDonald’s and in the various hotels in Cold Lake, the temporary foreign worker program provides a shot at the Canadian dream.
Allegations of program abuse
But critics say it opens migrant workers up to abuse from employers. Tim Hortons announced in October that it was ending its relationship with a franchise owner with locations in Fernie, B.C. and Blairmore, Alta. following a complaint from a temporary foreign worker that he or she had been denied overtime pay.
However, the federal government’s temporary foreign worker employer blacklist has only four employers on it, so it’s difficult to know for sure how widespread employee abuse is.
Both Bohme and Buckle said they encourage the federal government to hire more inspectors — it plans to hire about 20 more nationally for a total of 60 — and crack down on bad employers using the program. They believe abusive employers don’t represent the majority of employers and employee abuses occur because the government has not done a good enough job monitoring and auditing employers.
“If there are abuses out there happening then my question to the government is: what have you done?,” said Buckle.
What is known for sure is that the Alberta government has been slow in processing permanent residency applications under its provincial nominee program. The current wait time for processing of both semi-skilled workers, like Robarios’s husband, and skilled workers is 25 months.
The federal government recently announced a one-year bridging work permit for all temporary foreign workers who have already applied for permanent residency. April 1, 2015 was the deadline for temporary foreign workers who have been in Canada since 2011 to leave the country.
The Chamber of Commerce has had meetings with provincial and federal politicians to drum up support for a regional exemption. Bohme said that the response from Cold Lake’s provincial representative, Genia Leskiw, has been very positive, but the federal response has been decidedly more muted.
Politics of the temporary foreign worker program
She said Brian Storseth, their member of parliament for Westlock-St. Paul, was “somewhat supportive” of their concerns about the moratorium on food service workers and said the Cold Lake business community would be happy with the changes coming to the program.
“When those changes came down we weren’t sure what it was we were supposed to be pleased with, because there was nothing good for our region,” Bohme said.
Storseth announced that he is not running again in the fall election. Furthermore, the boundary lines are being redrawn so that his seat will no longer represent Cold Lake. He said that he was an outspoken critic of his government’s position on the temporary foreign worker program.
“I actually oppose the government’s position on it. I can understand that changes need to happen to the temporary foreign worker program. I applaud the minister for a lot of changes he made,” Storseth said. “But at the end of the day I do believe the country is too big to fall under one set of guidelines, especially when you talk about labour.”
However, as a backbencher and outgoing member of parliament, there is little Storseth can do to influence his government. In early February the Chronic Labour Shortage Committee asked Cold Lake city council for $5,000 to go toward a $40,000 study of labour issues in the Cold Lake-Bonnyville area. Mayor Copeland said it would be decided at a later council meeting. Buckle is not particularly optimistic that the federal government will reverse its decision on any of the changes, which is why they’re hoping for a regional exemption.
“I believe this was a political decision to begin with and it’s probably going to end with a political solution,” he said.
For now, things have slowed down a little bit in the oil patch as companies have laid off contract workers and delayed starting up projects until oil prices go back up. But that doesn’t mean that out-of-work welders are going to switch to become a line cook at the local chain restaurant. In Alberta, they’re used to waiting out the oil cycle and if they’re not from Alberta, they’ve probably gone home.
Temporary foreign workers have the right to stay for the duration of their contract, but if the federal government doesn’t find the same labour shortage after the downturn, they may not be allowed to stay in Canada.
The Robarios family plans to stay on in Cold Lake, managing servers and hotel front desks, regardless of what happens with the price of oil. They’re scrambling to get their paperwork in to Citizenship and Immigration Canada before the July deadline.
Robarios said she didn’t know how long it would take them to make a final decision on whether or not they will receive permanent residency. It could take up to a year. Even though their future is still uncertain, for a family used to living month-to-month, they feel blessed.
“He answered us. Definitely. Loud and clear,” she said.