Thousands of undocumented construction workers to get legal status in Canada

An unfinished housing development is seen in Belleville, Ont., on Friday, March 1, 2024. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)

Thousands of undocumented construction workers will be able to apply for legal status in Canada under a new immigration pathway. In a Friday announcement, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said up to 6,000 undocumented workers will be accepted to combat Canada’s housing crisis and fill severe labour shortages in the construction sector.

“We’re reserving space for up to 6,000 undocumented workers across the country to participate in a new construction pathway that will help bring these workers up from underground into the light,” Miller said at a news conference.

Some of these workers, Miller explained, came to Canada legally but continued to work here after their status expired. “These workers, often called undocumented or out-of-status workers, can be in precarious positions, exploited by their employers, exploited by other actors in society, and forced to work for lower wages and take unsafe jobs and aren’t treated with dignity,” Miller said.

The immigration minister also seemed to push back against the notion that such migrants were being rewarded for overstaying their visas to illegally live and work in Canada.

“I want to be clear: no one should stay longer than they’re legally allowed in Canada,” Miller said. “Those who do may face serious consequences. But it would be shooting ourselves in the foot to ask people that are working in these critical infrastructure projects to leave when they’ve been contributing to Canada.”

Thousands needed to fill construction jobs

According to a 2023 report from RBC, Canada’s construction sector was short 64,000 workers. A 2024 report from industry organization BuildForce Canada said that recruitment gap could swell to 85,000 construction workers by 2033.

“While the construction industry will always prioritize the recruitment of domestic workers, the changing career preferences of Canadian youth and rising retirement levels have made it more challenging for the industry to keep pace with accelerating construction demands,” BuildForce Canada chair Sean Strickland previously said in a news release. “Aligning immigration priorities more closely with the current and future needs of Canadian industries is therefore imperative.”

An April 2024 RBC report moreover said that the job vacancy rate in the construction sector reached 5.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2023, making it among the highest across Canadian industries. The same report said 330,000 retiring construction workers will also need to be replaced over the next 10 years.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) says approximately 1,365 out-of-status construction workers and their dependants have already been granted permanent resident status through a similar pilot project in the Greater Toronto Area.

“It makes sense compared to where we are right now as a country, and it’ll make sense for the future of the country if we want to actually build the things that we’ve said ambitiously we’re going to build over the next ten years, including the houses that we want people to live in,” Miller said of the new measures.

Details on timelines and eligibility criteria were not immediately made available. Miller said an advisory council made up of government, union and industry representatives would help develop and guide new construction-related immigration policies.

In a news release on Friday, IRCC also said that foreign apprentices in construction programs would temporarily be allowed to complete their studies without a study permit.

According to IRCC, estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in Canada range widely from 20,000 to as many as 500,000 people.

“Historically, Canada has not recorded when people leave the country, so there is no reliable data on the number of individuals whose temporary resident status has expired,” an IRCC spokesperson told CTVNews.ca. “As well, people who are out of status are difficult to survey as they are unlikely to come forward for research given their precarious status.”