News release from the Conservative Party of Canada

Today, the Hon. Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Official Opposition, and the Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner, Shadow Minister for Immigration, announced their plan to tackle the Liberal unemployment crisis by permanently scrapping the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program and immediately ending new permits.

“Prime Minister Carney has failed to meet his own already excessive immigration targets and now he’s on track to issue the highest number of TFW permits ever in a single year,” Poilievre said. “It’s time to take decisive action to protect our youth and workers.”

Under the Liberals, too many corporations are relying on cheap foreign labour while Canadians pay the price. Recent data shows a 7.4 percent increase in Employment Insurance requests since Carney took office (504,110 in March to 541,430 in June), while almost 400,000 Canadians have been searching for work for over two years – outside of the pandemic, this is the highest share of long-term unemployment since February 1998.

Youth employment is at its lowest in more than a quarter-century (outside the pandemic), while an oversaturated job market continues to suppress wages even for the gainfully employed. Companies like Tim Hortons, the once beloved coffee shop that gave a first paycheque to countless Canadian teens, have hired an almost unimaginable number of TFWs – 1,131 percent more for Tim Hortons over just four years alone.

“We know why a foreign-owned mega chain wants to be greedy – it’s good for their corporate profits – but our immigration system doesn’t exist to pad their bottom line,” Poilievre said. “That’s why the government should immediately stop issuing new TFW permits, and end this wage-suppressing, opportunity-stealing program.”

“Not long ago, young Canadians could gain vital skills in entry-level jobs, earn enough to pay for school, and build a future,” said Rempel Garner. “In return, employers built a skilled domestic workforce. But the Liberals broke that deal, leading to staggering youth unemployment and heartbreaking stories of graduates sending hundreds of resumes without a single callback.”

Over the last decade, TFWs have ballooned to almost two percent of our total private sector workforce. The impact is dramatic, considering that nearly three-quarters of these temporary immigrants earn less than the median income and exert downward pressure on wages.

That’s as Canadians struggle with an unemployment crisis that CIBC says matches “levels typically only seen during recessionary periods.” In June 2009, the height of the Great Recession, 684,200 Ontarians were out of work, 16,300 fewer than the 700,500 reported this July.

Yet, we are still bringing in record amounts of predominantly low-skilled foreign labour. Carney’s government has issued 105,000 new Temporary Foreign Worker permits in the first six months of 2025 alone. Despite a promised cap of 82,000, the Liberals are on track to issue the most TFW permits ever.

“As Canada’s economy slides into recession, productivity hits rock bottom, and AI disrupts the job market – all while we grapple with housing and healthcare crises – Canadian youth are trapped,” Rempel Garner added. “They can’t buy homes or start families without good-paying jobs, but they can’t get those jobs without experience, lost to competition from temporary foreign labour.”

Under this urgently-needed plan, the Temporary Foreign Workers program would be permanently abolished with a separate, standalone program for legitimately difficult-to-fill agricultural labour. For ultra-low-unemployment regions, there will be a transition period of, at most, five years while the program winds down, but no new permits will be issued anywhere in Canada.

It’s time for Canadian jobs for Canadian workers. If Mark Carney is serious about fixing the immigration system his party broke, he would immediately enact these reforms. Conservatives will always fight to protect our youth and all Canadians from reckless policies that lock them out of work and suppress their wages.

  David Clinton

Based mostly on their 2024 budget, the federal government has promised $2.4 billion in support of artificial intelligence (A.I.) innovation and research. Given the potential importance of the A.I. sector and the universal expectation that modern governments should support private business development, this doesn’t sound all that crazy.

But does this particular implementation of that role actually make sense? After all, the global A.I. industry is currently suffering existential convulsions, with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of sector dominance regularly shifting back and forth between the big corporate players. And I’m not sure any major provider has yet built a demonstrably profitable model. Is Canada in a realistic position to compete on this playing field and, if we are, should we really want to?

First of all, it’s worth examining the planned spending itself.

• $2 billion over five years was committed to the Canadian Sovereign A.I. Compute Strategy, which targets public and private infrastructure for increasing A.I. compute capacity, including public supercomputing facilities.
• $200 million has been earmarked for the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative (RAII) via Regional Development Agencies intended to boost A.I. startups.
• $100 million to boost productivity is going to the National Research Council Canada’s A.I. Assist Program
• The Canadian A.I. Safety Institute will receive $50 million

In their goals, the $300 million going to those RAII and NRC programs don’t seem substantially different from existing industry support programs like SR&ED. So there’s really nothing much to say about them.

And I wish the poor folk at the Canadian A.I. Safety Institute the best of luck. Their goals might (or might not) be laudable, but I personally don’t see any chance they’ll be successful. Once A.I. models come on line, it’s only a matter of time before users will figure out how to make them do whatever they want.

But I’m really interested in that $2 billion for infrastructure and compute capacity. The first red flag here has to be our access to sufficient power generation.

Canada currently generates more electrical power than we need, but that’s changing fast. To increase capacity to meet government EV mandates, decarbonization goals, and population growth could require doubling our capacity. And that’s before we try to bring A.I. super computers online. Just for context, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle all have plans to build their own nuclear reactors to power their data centers. These things require an enormous amount of power.

I’m not sure I see a path to success here. Plowing money into A.I. compute infrastructure while promoting zero emissions policies that’ll ensure your infrastructure can never be powered isn’t smart.

However, the larger problem here may be the current state of the A.I. industry itself. All the frantic scrambling we’re seeing among investors and governments desperate to buy into the current gold rush is mostly focused on the astronomical investment returns that are possible.

There’s nothing wrong with that in principle. But “astronomical investment returns” are also possible by betting on extreme long shots at the race track or shorting equity positions in the Big Five Canadian banks. Not every “possible” investment is appropriate for government policymakers.

Right now the big players (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) are struggling to turn a profit. Sure, they regularly manage to build new models that drop the cost of an inference token by ten times. But those new models consume ten or a hundred times more tokens responding to each request. And flat-rate monthly customers regularly increase the volume and complexity of their requests. At this point, there’s apparently no easy way out of this trap.

Since business customers and power users – the most profitable parts of the market – insist on using only the newest and most powerful models while resisting pay-as-you-go contracts, profit margins aren’t scaling. Reportedly, OpenAI is betting on commoditizing its chat services and making its money from advertising. But it’s also working to drive Anthropic and the others out of business by competing head-to-head for the enterprise API business with low prices.

In other words, this is a highly volatile and competitive industry where it’s nearly impossible to visualize what success might even look like with confidence.

Is A.I. potentially world-changing? Yes it is. Could building A.I. compute infrastructure make some investors wildly wealthy? Yes it could. But is it the kind of gamble that’s suitable for public funds?

Perhaps not.