There is a lot of public chatter these days about the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the migrant workers who do much of Canada’s hardest and most essential work. Our political masters vie with each other to present themselves as the source of the best policy reforms to make the systems that bring workers to this country work for their donors and sponsors, the business class that wants to use workers from abroad when it is convenient and then discard them when that is politically advantageous.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has called for “reforms” that will reduce the number of workers who can get into Canada and secure a better life for themselves and their families. These “reforms” are doing what they are designed to do. According to government data referenced by the Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) News, “overall issuances of work permits from Jan – June in 2025 have fallen by 50% relative to last year, while over the same period only 33,722 net new TFWP work permits were issued.”
Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, argues that Carney has been insufficiently brutal. He is urging that Canada slam the door shut against foreign workers altogether. Both these “leaders” are eager to prove to their real masters that they and their parties have the best pro-business methods for exploiting workers and then sending them away.
Because they are Canadian politicians, their vile racist approach to foreign workers is couched in more polite terms than we are hearing from Donald Trump to the south of us. But make no mistake, both of our major parties are part of an international swerve into the gutters in a global anti-immigrant frenzy, a pulse of policy and rhetorical horror being promoted from the US and the UK, to India, to Hungary and other countries. Ugly and immoral in themselves, these anti-immigrant policies are the gateway drugs to fascism and threaten the world with a descent into racist barbarism.
We should oppose these anti-worker initiatives not only because they are immoral and inhumane, but because they try to pit workers already in Canada against those who want to come here and give power to elements who do not have our best interests in mind. Divide and conquer is a default tactic for these folks.
One way to respond to this toxic policy “debate” is to pay more attention to the voices of the workers involved. A new novel from Surrey BC based Punjabi author Harpreet Sekha, Frosty Lanes, provides us an opportunity to do just that. (Frosty Lanes is available via Amazon.in or the publisher; locally. The novel is stocked in Surrey at India Book World.) Sekha has published widely in India, and one of his earlier books, Journal of a Taxi Driver was published in an English translation in 2024.
The male protagonists in Frosty Lanes, Kananvir and Gursir are drivers too, truck drivers in their case, trying to find their way through the Kafkaesque maze of bureaucracy that Canada has created to manage immigrant workers for the benefit of business. Their main direct exploiters in Canada are corrupt employers like the villainous Shaminder and the “immigration consultants” who repeatedly demand more cash for questionable advice and spurious “help.”
In a larger sense, the true villains are Canada’s business class, so willing to use and discard human beings like redundant spare parts. The book provides a moving account of the anxiety and humiliating poverty the protagonists endure as they try to secure the documents that will let them stay and work. Their pain is real and palpable, but the author provides some moments of comic grace to relieve the gloom. (Admittedly, the translation from Punjabi is sometimes a bit awkward, but that does not detract from the importance and the power of this novel.)
A scene in which Karanvir tries to navigate a first date with Jiti, another young immigrant, using prompts and tips from an online article about what to do on a date is both funny and tender. Jiti is the only female character given much development in this novel, but few readers will forget her spirit and humour.
The grinding details of human lives caught up in the gears of Canada’s morally corrupt temporary worker systems are neither amusing nor tender. They are an outrage, and the brutally stupid system portrayed in Sekha’s book is a moving human document that all of us who care about human rights and simple human solidarity should read and act on.
What would be an adequate response? As many refugee and immigrant advocates have argued, Canada’s evil tangle of paperwork and human cruelty in its treatment of workers and others who come here from abroad needs to be replaced by a simple “status for all” solution that offers those who come here a direct and easily accessed path to permanent residence status and citizenship. .One of the most vocal and active organizations on this front is No One is Illegal.
Their arguments are compelling and deserve the attention of all Canadians of good will.
Status for all!
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