Though Canadians have long supported a robust immigration system, cracks in that support have been growing over at least the past year.

And as Parliament returned Sept. 15, it became clear that the system — and in particular the TFW (temporary foreign worker) program — will be under scrutiny from the Conservative Opposition.

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis shared in an interview with The Catholic Register why he, as a Catholic, can get behind his party’s effort to curb migration levels. He suggested the TFW program, in particular, “would really fail the social justice lens.”

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“It’s a program that brings people in on a temporary basis and in many cases has left people quite vulnerable and not having the agency that permanent immigration provides,” said the 38-year-old representative of Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan. “When it comes to immigration numbers overall, Catholic teaching provides us with key principles and also with the obligation to make prudential judgments.”

While endorsing the principle of helping the “vulnerable the best we can” in situations of critical need, Genuis said “it is a prudential consideration to say ‘okay, what is the appropriate number relative to the capacity of our society to absorb people who are coming into the country.’ ”

Genuis suggested the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper handled immigration “in a way that aligned with our employment, housing and health care capacities.” He then stated that “the mismanagement of the system we have seen under the Liberals leads me to the prudential consideration that the numbers are higher than our country can sustain right now.”

In recent years, the Liberals have opened Canada to immigration, vowing to bring in some 500,000 migrants a year. This pledge came without any corresponding plan on where to house these people and that has exacerbated Canada's housing crunch. It has also overburdened the public health system, critics say. And though the Liberals said they would cut these numbers back dramatically, indications are that hasn't been the case. 

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Examining Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) data on TFWs alone compiled on immigrationstatistics.ca, in the first half of 2025, more than 105,000 TFW permits have been issued, surpassing the 82,000 goal outlined for the whole year in the IRCC’s 2025-2027 Immigration Levels Plan released in October 2024.

In the House of Commons, Shadow Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Michelle Rempel Garner took the lead in the Conservative efforts to scrutinize the Liberal Party’s handling of the immigration system and to call into account the ongoing existence of the TFW program.

Rempel Garner noted that “we are in a health care crisis and a housing crisis, but the Liberals still issued record numbers of TFW permits this summer. They continue to allow the asylum system to be abused, and they still have not removed countless non-citizen criminals.” 

Minister of Jobs and Families Patty Hajdu responded.

“Temporary foreign workers make up less than one per cent of our total workforce,” claimed Hajdu. “In fact, this is a program where employers must demonstrate that they vigorously and actively looked for Canadian workers because Canadian workers come first. If an employer is found to have violated this program, there are severe penalties.”

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Genius, the Shadow Minister for Employment, said getting the immigration system reformed is an acute concern given that youth employment fell to its lowest percentage — 53.6 per cent in July 2025 — since November 1998, not counting pandemic years. The youth unemployment rate also jumped from 10 per cent in 2022 to 14 per cent this year.

Genius called for an emergency debate to discuss the youth unemployment crisis. Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia turned him down.