Persistent staffing shortages in the health-care sector across Canada in the wake of the pandemic have led some organizations, including some provincial government agencies, to increasingly call upon temporary foreign workers to fill positions in clinics, hospitals and senior care facilities across the country.
While health-care still represents a small fraction of the overall temporary foreign worker program, federal data analyzed by CBC News shows the government greenlighted the hiring of 4,336 health-care workers last year — up from 447 such positions in 2018. Health-care occupations represented roughly two per cent of the total temporary foreign worker positions that were approved in 2023.
But employers have also turned to the program to fill other positions, such as nurses (612 positions approved, up from 65 in 2018) and family doctors (216 positions approved, up from 72 in 2018).
“I think this is another example of the overall health-care workforce crisis,” said Ivy Bourgeault, who leads the Canadian Health Workforce Network, a network of researchers who study issues facing health workers. She said staffing shortages driven by burnout and attrition have employers turning to increasingly novel means to bring in new workers.
The uptick in health-care hiring is reflected in the number of positions approved through labour market impact assessments (LMIAs), which employers need to prove there’s no one in Canada available to take a job before they can hire a temporary foreign worker.
There isn’t an exact one-to-one ratio between the LMIA data and the number of temporary foreign workers in the country.
For example, the Vitalité Health Network, a regional health authority in New Brunswick, was cleared to hire 190 health care workers last year, but told CBC News in an email it expects to use fewer than 10 per cent of those permits in part because it’s now leaning instead on another immigration program that more narrowly targets francophones.
But other organizations say the temporary foreign worker program has become a key part of their human resources strategy, at times as a stepping stone to bring a worker to Canada permanently.
Program fills staffing gaps, organizations say
Much of the hiring has been in Quebec, where health-care staffing shortages have been well-documented. Federal data shows just under half of the temporary foreign worker jobs approved last year were in that province, which represents just 22 per cent of the Canadian population.
The Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montreal (CHUM), one of the largest hospitals in Canada, said it’s used the program since 2007 and employs 141 nurses hired through the temporary foreign worker program.
“Due to a substantial health-care staff shortage, and while [we] prioritize hiring within the province of Quebec, this program helps fill positions that would otherwise remain vacant, despite our best recruiting efforts,” said spokesperson Jessie-Kim Malo.
But employers in other provinces are using the program too.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) — cleared to hire 79 nurses and 74 doctors through the program last year — told CBC News in an email the TFW program is one of many it relies on to recruit local and internationally trained nurses.
As for doctors, spokesperson Kerry Williamson said AHS is focused on recruiting international medical graduates right now as a way to deal with doctor shortages, and that “many” apply for work permits under the temporary foreign worker program before seeking permanent residency.
Medicentres Canada, which runs walk-in clinics across Canada, started using the program about a year ago. Samantha Wilk, the company’s senior manager of physician services, said they had hired a doctor from the U.K. who was struggling to get a work permit in a timely way and were advised by an immigration consultant that going through the temporary foreign worker program would be faster.
“We obviously still would love to give preference to permanent residents and Canadian citizens to fill the vacancies that we do have,” said Wilk, who said they’ve filled jobs in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto and London, Ont., this way.
“However, if a physician is fully qualified and able to practise, our main goal is filling our vacancies and getting patients access to physicians.”
Last year, Canadian employers were given the green light to hire 4,336 health-care workers through the temporary foreign worker program, a major increase from just 447 such positions in 2018. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Some employers, like CHUM and Medicentres, primarily recruit staff from countries, such as France or the UK, whose credentials can easily transfer to Canada.
But Spectrum Health Care, a home care company in the Greater Toronto Area, hires nurses from the Philippines who work for the company as personal support workers while they strive to meet the qualifications to work as nurses in Canada.
That company said it’s so far hired 50 nurse aides, orderlies and patient services associates this way.
“While [internationally educated nurses] cannot single-handedly solve the country’s staffing challenges, they play a critical role in building nursing capacity and providing care in communities where they are very much needed,” said Sandra Ketchen, the company’s president and CEO, in an email.
Not the ‘highest return on investment’
Burnout and attrition have driven labour shortages in many parts of Canada, says health-care staffing expert Ivy Bourgeault. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
While the temporary foreign worker program is one way to increase staffing levels and lighten the burden on health-care workers, Bourgeault said it’s not necessarily the most effective.
“I wouldn’t say that it is the highest return on investment,” said Bourgeault, who is also a professor in the University of Ottawa school of sociology and anthropology.
Instead, Bourgeault thinks time and money would be better spent trying to retain workers who are already employed in the health-care system, encouraging those who’ve left to come back.
She also wondered about the fairness of hiring health-care workers away from other countries, when she said it isn’t clear that any countries have excess workers to spare.Why the health-care sector is hiring temporary foreign workers like never before
It’s ‘very difficult’ to find health care workers in Canada, says Samantha Wilk, a senior manager of physician services for Medicentres Canada.
Still, University of Waterloo economics Prof. Mikal Skuterud, often a vocal critic of the temporary foreign worker program, said he has some sympathy for employers struggling to hire nurses, for example.
“The wages are largely paid by public funds and they’re set by collective agreements through union-management negotiations,” he said. “And so it’s harder for employers to kind of increase wages [than it is in the private sector].”
CBC requested an interview with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada for this story, but the request was declined.
Via email, spokesperson Julie Lafortune told CBC that “immigration continues to play an important role in addressing labour shortages across the country, supporting social services and infrastructure by recruiting health-care and skilled trade workers.”
Under pressure to shrink the number of temporary residents in Canada, the federal government has recently moved to tighten up some streams of the temporary foreign worker program. This spring, employers in sectors that had been given special permission to hire up to 30 per cent of their staff through the low-wage temporary foreign worker program were told they need to cut back.
But two sectors have been given exemptions — health-care and construction — which a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said was because those two sectors continue to deal with some of the country’s most acute labour shortages.
For Wilk, with Medicentres Canada, the plan is to continue using the temporary foreign worker program as part of their broader hiring strategy. And while the program may have “temporary” in the title, the program is anything but — she said all the staff they’ve hired have applied for permanent residency.
“Patients love them, they’re very qualified, trained doctors.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
