A Coder Built a Job-Posting Website. Conservatives Turned It into a Weapon against Foreign Workers

Conservative member of Parliament Michelle Rempel Garner, the shadow minister for immigration, has been on a social media tear. From August 26 to September 26, the member for the Alberta riding of Calgary Nose Hill posted on X about temporary foreign workers (TFWs). Nearly every day, she’d pluck a job listing from the jobwatchcanada.com website and imply it was fraudulent.

Her September 19 entry, for example, called out a posting in the Ottawa area for six cooks at Boston Pizza. These were full-time jobs paying between $17.20 and $23 an hour, around the range for that position in the Ottawa area based on government figures. Her accompanying commentary states that Ottawa’s unemployment rate currently sits at 6.7 percent, and that 206,000 young people are unemployed in Ontario. The implication is that the posting must be fraudulent because the unemployment rate is above the 6 percent threshold, which, under the new rules governing the Temporary Foreigner Worker Program (TFWP), should disqualify restaurants like Boston Pizza from hiring foreign workers, and that there should be enough unemployed youth in Ontario to fill those positions.

The point Rempel Garner is trying to make is that the TWFP is taking jobs away from young people in Canada, whose unemployment numbers have spiked over the past few years. The source of her information—jobwatchcanada.com—is a newly-minted site, registered on July 27, 2025, to a registrar based in Phoenix, Arizona, with the self-proclaimed goal to track “which employers frequently rely on the TFW program” and provide Canadians “with the information needed to make informed decisions about where to spend their money.”

It’s a clever bit of political framing. It’s also a classic case of scapegoating: blaming temporary workers, rather than the broken system that governs them. Temporary work, in all its varied forms in Canada, needs to be reformed. Instead, it is being turned into a polarizing wedge issue using a dangerous brand of nativism dressed up as concern for Canada’s struggling youth. This kind of outrage politics can deliver votes. But as the US has shown, it can also unleash violence.

Tyrel Chambers, a thirty-three-year-old software developer living north of Toronto, said he built jobwatchcanada.com as a tool to help Canadians keep watch over companies applying for Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIA), the approval process businesses generally need to go through to hire a foreign worker. “The goal,” Chambers told me in a recent email exchange, is “to show the companies who have applied for a LMIA and those who are currently wanting to hire a TFW.”

The site offers multiple tools, including a searchable database of all businesses in Canada that have posted jobs and either have LMIA applications pending or already approved, as well as a map feature that offers up the precise names and locations of businesses that currently hold approved LMIAs.

Early on, the site failed to get much traction. Chambers said he still has not received a single donation to his buymeacoffee.com page, and the site remains a one-man labour of love. But when Rempel Garner took it under her wing, it blossomed, surprising Chambers himself. “In the last 2 weeks I have gone more viral than any other time in my life,” he wrote on his LinkedIn account on September 10. Chambers’s Reddit community, r/jobwatchcanada, which he set up alongside the website, now attracts some 32,000 visitors a week.

Chambers told me he doesn’t know how Rempel Garner came across his site, but from day one of her campaign on August 26, she boosted it to her approximately 175,000 followers on X. “This handy dandy site shows all the jobs that will be available to TFWs: jobwatchcanada.com/jobs,” she wrote on that first day. In every subsequent post during her campaign, she led with: “Day [X] of posting jobwatchcanada.com/jobs data!”

The problem is, the data does not actually belong to jobwatchcanada.com. It is Government of Canada data that has been freely available to the public for many years. Chambers admits all of the LMIA-linked job postings on his site come from daily “scraping runs” it performs at the Government of Canada Job Bank website. “The site just represents the data that anyone could find on the Government of Canada’s website,” Chambers admitted.

The reason for building it, he told me, was to give Canadians a more digestible way to understand the TFWP and the ways in which it is abused. Multiple government websites, poorly designed and weighed down by cumbersome detail, do the same thing, but the focus for Chambers is narrower: his working premise is that all LMIA applications are potentially fraudulent. Subsequently, the only contextual information his site provides is the ways in which businesses break the rules.

Many of the scams he lists are real, but the lack of context is worrisome. Chambers’s website fails to point out, for instance, that a lot of the scams target prospective workers who never actually reach Canada. He lists loopholes in the temporary work system but provides no context on how these loopholes came to be. Poorly implemented policy during the pandemic years was a major factor in increasing the presence of foreign workers; it receives no mention from Chambers. The end result is a site with a vigilante edge. If all of these businesses are potentially committing fraud and hurting Canadians, how should the public react?

The “Report a Company” page is arguably the most disturbing. It is dedicated to exposing businesses flagged as hiring too many foreign workers by the site’s own users. Chambers says he does his best to vet most of the submissions, but it doesn’t seem like he does it very rigorously. All of the twenty-five claims listed so far are each based on a single complaint. More alarming is the reason given in almost every instance: “User-reported High TFW Presence.” In other words, one person thought there were too many Brown or Black people at a business and posted it as a potential violator of Canadian law.

The lack of diligence on Chambers’s part is perplexing. He himself admits that not all the postings listed on his site are fraudulent. “I believe there are legitimate usages of the LMIA/TFW program,” he told me, “and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that ‘all’ applications are fraudulent.”

On that front, Rempel Garner’s use of the site also raises red flags. Some of the listings she posts could very well be legitimate. The Boston Pizza listing, for instance, may not be as suspicious as Garner makes it out to be. The restaurant sector has struggled for years to hire and retain staff, in part because of poor working conditions, low pay, and high stress. Even before pandemic support gave restaurant workers the financial security to find other, more satisfying work, owners were struggling to fill jobs and retain employees.

The unemployment figure Rempel Garner provides is also misleading. According to the federal government’s guidelines for LMIA applications, the current unemployment rate for the Ottawa metropolitan area is 6.4 percent, still above the disqualifying threshold rate of 6 percent, a number updated every three months for LMIA applications. In the two preceding periods (January 10 to April 3 and April 4 to July 10), it was 5.4 percent and 5.3 percent respectively, below the threshold.

Such fluctuations make it difficult for restaurant owners and operators to predict if the TFWP option will be available to them. Hiring a foreign worker can be time consuming (the LMIA application process can take over a month, after which the foreign worker must obtain a work permit, which can also take weeks). Businesses must plan well in advance if they believe they will need a foreign worker.

Under those conditions, it’s possible Boston Pizza mistakenly relied on the old unemployment figure when applying for the LMIA (the job posting was listed on July 30, not long after the rate jumped above 6 percent). Or they may have been hoping the rate would drop again to below 6 percent while their application was in process.

Regardless, at the time Rempel Garner posted the listing, the LMIA application was still being evaluated. Specifics were unclear, but the broader context of restaurant sector shortages pointed to it being a legitimate application.

Nonetheless, it made for a perfect smoking gun.

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The contours of Rempel Garner’s campaign suggest something else is going on here. On September 3, the Conservative Party issued a press release announcing its goal to end the TFWP, blaming it for Canada’s high levels of youth unemployment. Since then, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has called on the program to be dismantled, blaming the Liberals for sustaining a monster that is devouring the futures of Canada’s young people. “Carney’s government has issued 105,000 new Temporary Foreign Worker permits in the first six months of 2025 alone,” Poilievre claimed in the release.

What Poilievre failed to mention was the 105,000 figure also includes permit renewals and new work permits issued to people already in Canada. The actual number of new TFWs approved to enter Canada in the first six months of 2025 was 33,722.

Other right-wing leaders have since jumped on Poilievre’s bandwagon. “What we need is to stop mass immigration, send the millions of temporary workers back to their country, and deport all illegals,” Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, posted on his Facebook account on September 15, channeling a convincing impression of US homeland security adviser Stephen Miller.

The Liberals, meanwhile, are on defence, and like the ’94 Ottawa Senators, they’re doing it badly. Immigration minister Lena Metlege Diab has looked unconvincing and, frankly, unsure of herself during her responses to Rempel Garner’s data-defying questions on the House floor. Her stumbling and awkwardness provide mountains of fodder for social media users who can now post devastating takedowns of the new minister.

Rempel Garner, though, as well as her boss in Ottawa, are right in one narrow sense: youth unemployment in Canada is startlingly high, even when taking into account overall increased unemployment and US president Donald Trump’s destabilizing tariff frenzy. That’s nothing new, nor is it specific to Canada: youth unemployment in most countries has historically remained well above core-aged unemployment (that is, the rate among people aged twenty-five to fifty-four), and it is more sensitive to economic shocks.

But it’s a familiar Conservative refrain—turn a complex labour issue into a simple moral one, complete with villains. “The Liberals have to answer,” Poilievre said in September, “why is it that they are shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage, temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited?”

The exploitation afterthought aside, Poilievre’s sentiment comes alarmingly close to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the far-right view that white people are being deliberately replaced by immigrants. The Liberals, Poilievre implies, are in league with a cabal of businesspeople helping rich friends increase profits by stacking the Canadian job market with cheap Brown and Black newcomers, at the expense of “full-blooded” Canadian youth.

But a September analysis by Desjardins, a financial co-operative based in Quebec, disputes that perspective. It seems true that poor policy making during the pandemic allowed many international students to work more hours, the report notes. And a Toronto Star investigation from 2024 found that a COVID-19-era streamlined process for hiring foreign workers did approve questionable LMIA applications.

But, according to the Desjardins report, other factors are at play: the rise of gig work, the decline of the brick-and-mortar retail sector, and the introduction of AI technologies that are devastating entry-level positions—ones most often filled by youth. Moreover, pandemic-era policies are being reversed, and the effects of those policies, including the federal government’s downward targets on population growth, should bring some balance back to the job market. Not surprisingly, according to the report, “the youth population is likely to be especially impacted.”

Unfortunately, I doubt many young people read the Desjardins Economic Viewpoint newsletter. Many do, however, spend a lot of time on social media, where politicians like Poilievre and Rempel Garner have made a science out of pushing their emotional buttons.

This is the magic sauce in Trump-style outrage politics: take a real issue and force it into a shape that will elicit maximum indignation in whichever demographic you are targeting. For Gen Z, the job market does indeed look bleak, and blaming foreigners for stealing jobs hits all the right notes and resonates in the shrill corners of the outrage-sphere, from Reddit to X to TikTok.

The outrage vibe is a powerful motivator, particularly for young people weaned on algorithms engineered for the attention economy. But if you look more closely, the conspiracy theory disintegrates; the numbers just don’t add up. Canada may currently be home to a record number of temporary workers, but the TFWP is only a tiny part of the total. At the end of 2024, 3.1 million people held temporary permits allowing them to work in Canada; among them, the number of those who obtained permits through the TFWP was a little over 236,000, fewer than 8 percent of all temporary permits, and a mere 1.1 percent of total employment in Canada.

In fact, the spike in TFWs over the past three years has little to do with the TFWP and its associated LMIAs. Instead, it is the International Mobility Program (IMP) and international students, neither of which require an LMIA, who have pumped up those numbers.

Many Canadians might be wondering what the difference is. The TFWP was envisioned to be a nimble and adaptive tool giving employers the ability to temporarily fill holes in staffing, whether the cause of those gaps was seasonality or a lack of Canadians willing, or qualified, to fill those jobs. The program was set up in 1973 as industries reliant on high-skill technical workers faced labour shortages. In 2002, the Liberal government under Jean Chrétien expanded the program to include low-skill workers. Four years later, the Harper Conservatives expanded the low-skill stream.

The IMP, meanwhile, was supposed to be part of a reform package to the TFWP introduced by Employment and Social Development Canada in 2014. It allowed for hiring temporary workers without an LMIA for labour streams that provide “broader economic, social and/or cultural goals or reciprocal benefits for Canada.” These permits could be awarded to spouses of foreign workers already in Canada, people in the performing arts, or French-speaking workers.

The IMP is strategic; the TFWP is tactical. Both can be misused, but the IMP raises an entirely different set of labour market questions. It has nothing to do with the exploitation of low-wage labourers and stealing entry-level jobs from Canadian youths, or law breaking in the LMIA process. What the IMP’s massive growth suggests is that Canada’s education system is out of step with its labour market needs. We are failing to give young Canadians the tools they need to succeed in a rapidly changing job market.

Instead of treating the issue as a problem that needs to be solved, the Conservatives have instead extracted a politically salient data point—youth unemployment—and used it to rile up young people against an imagined enemy, with unsurprising results. Rempel Garner’s followers on X have been searing in their comments to her posts, with some calling for boycotting any businesses that use foreign workers and one instance where a commenter calls for “remigration,” a far-right euphemism for ethnic cleansing through mass deportation.

This, of course, is Elon Musk’s X: racist vitriol in the comments section comes with the territory. But the Conservatives’ strategy looks much broader than simply tossing red meat to the trolls among their own supporters. They’ve sensed an opportunity: young men in particular are shifting rightward in large numbers almost everywhere in the world. A Nanos poll in the lead up to the April federal election showed a similar trend in Canada, with 49.3 percent of voters aged eighteen to thirty-four saying they support the Conservatives.

Chambers is not bothered by the way his site is being used in the Conservative Party’s campaign. “I see their focus as less about blaming TFWs and more about holding businesses accountable for exploiting the TFWP,” he said, “with government oversight appearing insufficient.”

The campaign also has become popular among the far right, including with influencers like Jasmin Laine. But, again, Chambers seems serene. “I don’t control how people react to the data, nor do I think it’s my role to judge what’s fair,” he told me. “Public reactions, including strong opinions, predate jobwatchcanada.com and would exist regardless of the site.”

Still, it’s hard to reconcile Chambers’s stated goal of creating more constructive dialogue around the TFWP that deepens Canadians’ understanding of temporary workers with the website he has built, one that flattens the issue so that any business that applies for an LMIA is made to seem like a suspect in a grand conspiracy. That may not have been his intention but that is the direction the public discourse is taking, with help from politicians like Rempel Garner, Bernier, and Poilievre.