Last week the Alberta Federation of Labour revealed that federal government decisions on whether or not to allow businesses to use the Temporary Foreign Workers Program are based on irreparably flawed data.
According to a report in the Edmonton Journal, instead of using data from Statistics Canada or another independent source, the federal government is relying on surveys from pressure groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. As these groups represent employers wanting to use the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, the findings are suspect.
Nor is this the only dodgy data, the federal government is using. Until it was caught, the federal government was also using job postings from Kijiji and similar websites as a source for labour data. The problem with using those sites as a source of data was shown by the sharp drop in job vacancies after the federal government stopped using those sites.
When funding for Statistics Canada was cut, researchers warned that the cost of those cuts would be high. The flawed data used by the federal government to determine whether businesses could use the Temporary Foreign Worker Program shows the damage those cuts will do.