Before We Look Abroad

 We keep hearing that we need to import foreign workers to meet demand. That's extremely misleading.

We have citizens and Indigenous people here who need living wages that match the exponentially rising cost of living. As a worker who works while injured, and as someone considering a run for city council, I can tell you there are thousands of struggling skilled workers here who simply want decent wages. I hear it constantly, from co-workers, from people at the shop, from people in line at the food bank. It's the same thing every time: *a living wage.*

I've also talked to new Canadians and landed immigrants who came here on the promise of prosperity. Many of them are still waiting for it.

So who are our leaders actually speaking for?

## The gap isn't an opinion. It's calculated

Alberta's minimum wage is $15/hour. It hasn't moved since 2018, the lowest in the country. Calgary's 2025 living wage, calculated annually by Vibrant Communities Calgary and the Alberta Living Wage Network, is $26.50/hour. That's a $10.85-an-hour gap between what the law requires an employer to pay and what it actually takes to live here. Across the province, the gap between minimum and living wage runs anywhere from roughly $3 to $17 an hour depending on the community.

Meanwhile, average wages in Alberta grew by about 2.7% in 2025, while inflation ran close to 2.5 to 2.9 percent. Real wages are flat at best. And the number that actually shows up in people's grocery bills, food inflation, ran hotter than that, at 3.5 percent nationally in 2025. People aren't imagining the squeeze. It's in the data.

## Before we look abroad: hire from here

Alberta has a documented, underemployed workforce sitting in plain sight. Indigenous unemployment off-reserve sits at 10.9%, nearly four points above the provincial rate. Youth unemployment has topped 14%. Indigenous workers who *are* employed still earn less than their non-Indigenous counterparts. In 2024, First Nations workers off-reserve earned $33.37/hour on average against $37.77/hour for non-Indigenous workers, an 11.6% gap. That gap has persisted for years. It isn't closing on its own.

These aren't people who don't want to work. They're people the system has never seriously tried to train, hire, or retain at a wage worth taking.

## The treaty right nobody talks about

Here's something most people don't know: Indigenous peoples on this continent already have a legally recognized right to move freely across the Canada to US border for work. Article III of the 1794 Jay Treaty guarantees it. The United States honours it. A Canadian-born status Indian with proof of 50%+ Indigenous ancestry can enter, live, and work in the US with no visa and no work permit.

Canada does not honour it. The Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that the treaty was never implemented into Canadian domestic law, and it still isn't, despite a 2016 Senate committee report recommending exactly that fix. So American tribal members trying to come the other way, into Canada, are treated like any other foreign national.

That's not a gap in "the system." That's a specific, seventy-year Canadian policy choice. If we're serious about tapping the labour pool that's already here, nations whose presence on this continent predates the border itself, that's the first place to look, and the first thing to fix.

## Who are we actually importing, and why

Ottawa's low-wage Temporary Foreign Worker stream is drawing most heavily from India and the Philippines. The separate Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program draws mainly from Mexico, Guatemala, and Jamaica. You don't see the same volume from the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, and the honest reason is economics, not exclusion. Workers from those countries have comparable or higher wages at home, so there's little pull toward a $15 to $18 an hour Canadian job. The wage gap is the recruiting engine. My read is that a program built around that gap is also a program built to keep wages down, and the federal government has said as much itself. Officials have acknowledged the TFW program was letting wages stay "artificially low," which is part of why Ottawa is now cutting allocations from 368,000 down to 230,000 for 2026.

And that wage-gap engine has a dark side that's well documented, not speculative. CBC investigations have found Alberta-linked cases of workers charged $40,000 for a job placement, immigration lawyers describing cases up to $75,000, and one Alberta recruiting operation ordered to repay nearly $165,000 to eight workers it illegally charged. It is against the law for a recruiter or employer to charge a foreign worker anything for a job placement. It happens anyway, at scale, because enforcement hasn't caught up to the money involved.

## This isn't anti-immigration

Let me be clear about who this piece is aimed at, because it isn't new Canadians.

The people I've talked to who came here as landed immigrants and refugees are some of the hardest-working people in this province. Many of them took the same wage-suppressed jobs I'm describing here, on the same false promise of prosperity, and got exploited by the exact same system I'm criticizing. They're not the problem. They're often the first and worst-hit victims of it: the $40,000 recruitment fee, the closed work permit tied to one employer, the job that turned out to be nothing like what was promised. If anything, this piece is *for* them as much as it's for anyone born here.

Immigration is fine. But a job has to exist first. Refugees and newcomers should be trained into real work, not funnelled into it through a system that leaves them owing tens of thousands of dollars before they've earned a paycheque. What's broken is the *sequence*: bring in outside labour only after the local pipeline, Indigenous workers, citizens, immigrants already here who can't get their credentials recognized, has genuinely been tapped, not as the first and cheapest option to avoid raising a wage.

Watch who's quitting. If a job were actually good, people wouldn't be leaving it for something better. The fact that turnover is constant in the same sectors leaning hardest on TFWs isn't a coincidence. It's a signal.

Before we reach overseas: are Indigenous communities employed, educated, and supported? Are the citizens and settlers already here doing well? Are the immigrants who became citizens years ago doing well?

No. Not yet. That has to come first.

If you decide, you answer. Name the human.