When Tourism Dreams Depend on Unjust Employment

The Government of Alberta has a plan to diversify its resource extraction-tilted economy: double its tourism industry by 2035.

That includes creating all-season resorts on public land across the province.

Which raises questions. Who will do the work to make those tourist destinations hum? And how will those employees be treated?

Alberta can make itself “the best place in the world,” proclaimed Minister of Tourism and Sport Joseph Schow last month, “by unlocking the potential of our natural resources above the ground — namely the beauty of our landscapes and the warm hospitality of Albertans.”

He pledged Bill 35, the All-Season Resorts Act, would “ensure projects balance economic growth, environmental protection and Indigenous opportunity.”

But the industry Schow touts is built on the backs of vulnerable workers, many in Alberta on temporary visas. And those who profit tend to treat labour as a cost to be suppressed rather than an investment in building expertise.

In Alberta, the median hourly wage for workers employed in accommodation and food services is $17, or $2 above minimum wage.

Roughly two in five workers employed in the tourism sector are temporary foreign workers.

“Foreign workers have become a linchpin to maintaining low-wage, low-desirability jobs,” said Jason Foster, a professor of human resources and labour relations at Athabasca University.

“Under normal circumstances, employers would be forced to find a way to improve wages and working conditions to compete in the labour market. But what has happened in the last couple of decades, especially in areas like tourism, is that the whole business model has become predicated on the use of migrant workers — they don’t know how to operate without them.”

Minister Schow’s vision of tapping the “natural resource” of cheerful Albertans clashes with the fact that tourism in his province is dependent on disposable migrant labour. His United Conservative Party government has done little to change the structural inequities that make temporary foreign workers susceptible to abuse and exploitation.

To glimpse that reality, pay a visit to Banff, Alberta’s top destination, where the magnificence of the Rocky Mountains casts a shadow over the struggles migrant workers endure in hopes for a better future.

Relentless pace, low wages

In the summer of 2020, Javiera Jerez arrived in Banff to work as a housekeeper for one of the townsite’s largest employers. “I just wanted to leave Chile,” she told The Tyee over Zoom. “Chile is beautiful, but I don’t think it’s a very good place to live.”

For $15 an hour, Jerez cleaned 15 hotel rooms five days per week. But the physical demands quickly took a toll on her body, so she started searching for work elsewhere — a perk she would soon realize isn’t available to all migrant workers.

While on a working holiday visa, a travel document available to young adults who are citizens of one of the 36 countries that have a youth mobility agreement with Canada, Jerez was entitled to an open work permit that gave her the freedom to move cities and change jobs.

In the spring of 2021, she quit her job in Banff and moved to Canmore, where a local restaurant hired her as a hostess.

“It’s not the same to be a housekeeper than to work in a restaurant,” Jerez said. “A restaurant keeps you above the minimum wage because they give you tips, so you make significantly more money.”

Six months into the job, in the midst of a bustling summer season, her working holiday visa expired. To retain her, the restaurant sponsored Jerez via the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, allowing her to extend her stay in Canada for another two years, and to qualify for permanent residence via the provincial nomination program.

But this opportunity came with a hefty price tag.

Unknown to the patrons she welcomed into the restaurant, Jerez was no longer free to change jobs, or to find additional work during the low season, at least not legally. Once she switched to a closed work permit, a condition of the TFWP, Jerez’s status in Canada depended entirely on her employer.

“It feels like you have to constantly prove yourself when you’re a migrant worker,” she said. “It’s like you need to let employers know that you’re good at your job, otherwise they’ll just look for another person — you’re 100 per cent disposable.”

Jerez faced a hard decision shared by thousands of others with her status. At what point does the dream of making a life in Canada become no longer worth pursuing?

“Most workers who come through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program want to stay in Canada,” Foster said. “So they’re willing to put up with lower wages and higher levels of mistreatment to try and achieve that goal. But the structure of the program makes them more vulnerable to abuse because we restrict their mobility rights. The more vulnerable you make a worker, the more they will put up with to maintain that job.”

Tied to a single employer

Because Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program requires that employers demonstrate they can’t find staff locally, the mobility of workers in this program is restricted to the workplace that received a positive labour market impact assessment for a specific position.

In other words, if a temporary foreign worker loses their job, they also lose their status in Canada — a situation akin to indentured labour.

“A permanent resident might work for six months and realize they don’t really like the job, or they find a better job with a competitor,” said Foster, who is also a director of the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan public policy research centre at the University of Alberta. “But if a temporary foreign worker is unhappy at work — there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Close to 40 per cent of workers in Alberta’s tourism industry hold a closed work permit obtained through the TFWP, and few qualify for other immigration programs to stay in Canada.

“Part of the reason why these workers come as temporary foreign workers is because they are ineligible in our regular permanent immigration streams,” Foster said, noting that the point system guiding Canada’s programs — the Federal Skilled Worker Program, the Federal Skilled Trades Program and the Canadian Experience Class — fails to adequately weigh the experience of migrants in high-demand, lower-wage occupations.

“The government seems to set up these policies to make things look good to a casual observer,” he added. “But if you actually dig into how they operate, they just don’t work.”

In Alberta, one of the few pathways to permanent residence available to temporary foreign workers employed in occupations that don’t require post-secondary education, such as cooks, food servers and housekeepers, is the province’s tourism and hospitality stream, which was launched in March.

According to Amber Edgerton, press secretary at the Alberta Ministry of Tourism and Sport, this option was created to address labour shortages in the tourism industry, as well as to “help those coming to work in these important sectors gain a streamlined pathway to permanent residence.”

But because qualifying for this stream requires that foreign workers remain employed and closed work permits bind workers to their employer, pursuing permanent residence can make migrant workers even more vulnerable.

For Jerez, applying for permanent residence in 2023 meant staying with an employer that wouldn’t increase her wage or give her benefits, despite having expanded her workload. At the time, Jerez’s hourly wage was $18, whereas the living wage in Canmore was estimated to be $39.

Despite the drawbacks, Jerez pressed on. “When I had the chance to stay longer, it got caught in my mind that I was going to get my PR, regardless of the circumstances,” she said. “I was fully committed to it because otherwise I felt like it was going to be a waste of time after spending 2 1/2 years working here.”

Shrinking slots dim dreams

Competition among immigrants to gain permanent residence is fierce. In March, the Alberta Advantage Immigration Program designated 600 spaces for the tourism and hospitality stream, a target that was met by June. Currently, there are 3,334 applications in the selection pool.

The pathway has been further constricted by recent policy changes introduced by Ottawa.

The total number of provincial nominations across the country is set to be cut in half in 2025. The number of closed work permits issued via the TFWP will be slashed as well.

“The ham-fisted way in which the feds are making these changes is going to be a nightmare for migrant workers,” Foster said. “Every time policymakers do a contraction of the foreign worker program, we create workers without status.”

In October, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith denounced the federal government’s caps on immigration — for not going far enough. Her statement carried no hint that foreign workers are key to the tourism sector her government vows to double in size.

“As a province, we need a reprieve from this explosive population growth so we can catch up with these pressures,” she posted on X, blaming high immigration levels for the rising cost of living and strained public services.

“The federal government’s plan to cut a mere 105,000 new permanent residents will not solve these pressures when they are bringing in almost two million additional people annually.”

‘There’s always people looking for a job’

The promise of life in an idyllic setting, plus doses of youth and naiveté, is the formula that attracts many migrant workers to work in Canada’s tourism sector. That powerful pull is part of what makes the actual work so precarious.

“The thing about the Bow Valley is that employers don’t really need to make your life better because there’s always someone else coming,” said Jerez, who became a permanent resident in June. “People from Australia, the U.K., Latin America come here because they want to be in the mountains to hike, mountain bike, ski, whatever — so there’s always people looking for a job.”

But some workers are catching on to the charade.

After spending one year in Banff on a working holiday visa, Mona Wu became aware of the challenges caused by being bound to an employer while awaiting permanent residence.

“I saw my friends struggle with their employer for two years,” she said. “So I was, like, ‘OK, I definitely don’t want to work for that employer if I have a chance to choose.’”

For this reason, before Wu applied to the provincial tourism and hospitality stream, she diligently researched and offered herself to companies that would offer reasonable wages, benefits and staff accommodation.

“I asked around, ‘How’s the people? How’s the work environment?’”

But many of Wu’s immigrant peers can’t be so selective. They grasp at whatever job might keep them in Canada.

Over the next two years, caps to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program could deprive thousands of foreign workers of that possibility. They won’t be able to renew their closed work permits, and they’ll be forced to go home or roam the globe in search of other paycheques.

“These are people who came here legally under one set of rules, and then we go and unexpectedly change the rules on them,” Foster said. “That’s the fundamental injustice that exists in the nature of this program.”