Some employers using foreign worker program facing bigger fines for violations

Author(s): Luck, S.

Date: 2026

Resource: CBC News.

Amid increasing scrutiny on the use of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, the total dollar amount of fines imposed on employers who are found to violate the terms of the program has risen dramatically.

However, some observers think changes to monitoring and enforcement of the program are still required.

Catherine Connelly is a professor of human resources and management at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., who has studied the temporary foreign worker program.

She says the federal government historically seemed to take an “educational approach,” with fines that were usually in the hundreds rather than the thousands of dollars.

“There just didn’t seem to be too much of a deterrence in terms of how they were approaching the enforcement of the rules of the program,” she said.

But Connelly says as public perception of the program soured, she noticed a gradual change that built into a “dramatic shift” over the last year.

“Now the approach seems to be more of a deterrence approach and we see fines easily into the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said.

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Related Research Areas: Vulnerable Workers