Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programme issues what are called closed work permits: the permit names one employer, and the worker may lawfully work only for that employer. If the job ends, so does the legal right to remain.

Amnesty International’s report on the programme, titled with a line from a worker — that Canada had destroyed him — made 32 recommendations to federal, provincial and other authorities. Its central finding was that exploitation and abuse are not incidental to the design but features of it, and that workers will remain vulnerable as long as the closed permit requirement stands.

Why the permit is the mechanism

The argument is structural rather than moral, and it does not require assuming employers are unusually cruel.

A worker whose immigration status is controlled by the same person who controls their wages, hours and housing cannot use the ordinary remedy for a bad job, which is to leave it. Complaining carries a risk that has nothing to do with the complaint: dismissal ends the visa. Labour law that depends on workers enforcing their own rights therefore does not function, however well drafted it is.

That is the same mechanism this site described in the Gulf kafala system. The difference is jurisdiction, not design.

The Ontario farms

Foreign Policy returned to the subject in mid-August with Caribbean agricultural workers in Ontario describing rat-infested accommodation and abusive supervisors.

One episode in that reporting is worth isolating. In August 2022, Jamaican farmworkers in the Niagara region wrote an open letter to Jamaica’s then minister of labour and social security, Karl Samuda, about their treatment at two farms. Samuda travelled to Canada, visited, and said he had seen no evidence of mistreatment. The criticism that followed from Jamaicans and migrant advocacy groups was sufficient that he then established a fact-finding team. Later that year, Jamaican workers were pulled from four farms after verbal abuse and poor living conditions were found.

The sequence matters more than the outcome. An announced ministerial visit to a workplace where the workers’ visas depend on their employer is close to the least reliable inspection method available, and it produced exactly the finding you would expect before an unannounced process produced the opposite one.

The defence of the programme

Canadian officials and employer associations make three arguments, and they are not frivolous.

First, that the sectors involved — agriculture, food processing, care, construction, hospitality — face genuine labour shortages that domestic recruitment has not filled. Second, that the tie to a named employer exists because that employer has been assessed and approved to hire, and an open permit would sever the link between the assessment and the job. Third, that the jobs, whatever their conditions, pay multiples of what is available at home, which is why people apply for them repeatedly.

The third argument is the one Amnesty and the unions engage with most directly. Their answer is that a worker choosing the best option available to them does not establish that the option is lawful, and that the comparison being made is not between the job and nothing but between the job and the same job under enforceable rights.

The wider count

Canada is not an outlier, and the framing of it as one is part of why this gets so little attention. The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre recorded 747 alleged cases of migrant worker abuse worldwide in 2025, linked to close to 600 companies, spanning wage theft, debt bondage, confiscated documents, unsafe conditions and deaths. Amnesty has researched closed work permits in several countries.

What distinguishes the Canadian case is the gap between reputation and structure — a country with a strong international profile on migration running a programme whose core legal instrument produces the dependency that everyone identifies as the problem elsewhere.

Sources

Report findings and recommendations from Amnesty International Canada; Ontario farm reporting and the 2022 Jamaican ministerial visit via Foreign Policy; global case counts from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.