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Diana Donat looks across the street from her restaurant at the construction site where her home once stood.
She’s not sure whether some of the construction workers she sees are here on temporary visas.
“I think there are some of them. Who are helping the contractors.”
His home burned down in a fire that devastated the community of Jasper, Alta., in July 2024, but he did not lose the restaurant he had opened just a year earlier.
“Temporary foreign workers – they work hard, they’re committed to their jobs,” she says, as a former temporary foreign worker herself. “They help businesses like restaurants in Jasper.”
The Rocky Mountain city relies heavily on foreign workers, especially during the busy summer season, when up to 3,000 seasonal employees are needed.
Joseph Francisco says tourists started flocking back to Jasper shortly after last year’s devastating wildfires, keeping business afloat.
But when he is busy working as a chef in some restaurants in the city, sometimes he gets lonely.
“I tried to move here to Canada to bring my family with me,” he says, adding that he hasn’t hugged his daughter in almost four years. “Times are getting tough these days.”
The federal government is aiming to reduce Canada’s temporary resident population, promising additional changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which requires employers to submit a Labor Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) before hiring a foreign worker.
Ottawa has already made changes to the program, for example, by imposing limits on areas with high unemployment and limiting the percentage of temporary foreign workers who can make up an employer’s workforce.
However, as unemployment remains high, particularly among young Canadians, the effectiveness of the TFWP continues to be debated. But as new people arrive, their views on the program become divided.
‘Labour markets move faster than governments’
A recent survey conducted by Leger exclusively for OMNI News found that 36 per cent of immigrants believe temporary foreign workers are taking jobs away from young people, while 47 per cent say the program helps fill jobs that many Canadians don’t want to do.
Katherine Conley, professor and business research chair at McMaster University, says there are many common misconceptions about the TFWP, but the program has changed significantly over the past few months, and many companies are no longer able to hire foreign workers for low-wage jobs.
According to the OMNI-Leger poll, most newcomers believe Ottawa should only allow temporary foreign workers into specific sectors of the economy or in areas where unemployment is low, but Connelly argues that fixing the TFWP is not a realistic approach.
“Labor markets are moving faster than the government expects,” she explains. “It is unlikely that the government will be able to continue making those changes.”
‘Everyone expects me to stay’: Changes to TFWP are already affecting immigrants
Irene Bloemraad, co-director of the Center for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia, says another common misconception is that all foreign workers in Canada are here under the TFWP, when in fact, there are many ways for temporary residents to live and work here.
“If the temporary worker program were canceled tomorrow, there would still be hundreds of thousands of people in Canada with temporary work visas,” he told OMNI.
Since 2023, Marco Calabretta has been working as a technician for a Montreal company through a program called International Experience Canada.
He told OMNI News that after two years on the job, his coworkers are like a second family, but his plans to continue life in Canada have been affected by recent changes to work permits at the provincial and federal level.
“Everyone expects me to stay,” he says. “They’re doing everything they can to help me.”
A small but equal share wants the TFW program to either end or be kept as it is.
The OMNI-Leger survey found that immigrants are evenly divided on whether to keep the TFWP in place or eliminate it entirely.
Federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has called on Ottawa to eliminate it entirely and instead create “a standalone program for legitimately hard-earned agricultural workers.”
But Blomraad believes reducing the number of temporary routes for immigrants should mean returning to a system where coming to Canada is a long-term investment for both the country and the newcomer.
“It’s not very reasonable to think that we can just bring in people for our economic growth and then treat them like robots in a factory,” she tells OMNI. “Like, if the economy gets bad, I’ll shut down my robot, or deport immigrants.”
“If we think they’re good enough to work for us, they might as well be good enough to stay with us.”
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Using Leger’s online panel, the poll was completed between October 2 and October 15, 2025 among 1,510 respondents, all of whom were born outside Canada. No margin of error can be added to this.
This story is part of a series from OMNI News featuring data releases throughout the month.