Ottawa.In July of 2024, the United Nations published the findings of its special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, who had spent two weeks in Canada the previous autumn listening to the people who pick the country's food, clean its rooms, and staff its care homes. His conclusion about Canada's temporary foreign worker programs was not gentle and was not vague. He called them a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery. A year later Amnesty International, after its own investigation, reached the same place by a different road, describing the program as inherently exploitative.

It is worth sitting with the discomfort of those words applied to Canada, because the instinct is to assume they must be an exaggeration. They are not describing a feeling. They are describing the predictable output of a specific rule.

The rule that does the damage

Most of the workers in question come on what is called a closed, or employer-specific, work permit. The permit does not authorize the holder to work in Canada. It authorizes them to work for one named employer, and no one else. Lose that job, or leave it, and the legal right to be in the country can evaporate with it. Stated as policy that can sound like ordinary immigration control. Lived, it is a leash. A worker who is being underpaid, or worked past exhaustion, or housed in something unfit, or worse, faces a choice that is not really a choice: endure it, or report it and risk losing the permit, the income, and the right to remain, all at once. The employer holds not just the job but the visa. That is the power imbalance, and it is not a side effect. It is the structure.

The permit does not let you work in Canada. It lets you work for one employer. A person who cannot leave their boss without losing the country cannot safely report what their boss is doing. The abuse is downstream of that single design choice.

What gets reported, when reporting is safe

When researchers create the conditions for workers to speak without fear, the accounts that come out are grimly consistent: wages promised and not paid, hours far beyond what was agreed, documents, including passports, taken and held, protective equipment withheld, threats of deportation used as discipline. Women workers describe sexual harassment and worse, with the same impossible math behind their silence. None of this is hidden in the sense of being unknown. It is hidden in the sense that the people best placed to report it are the people the system has made least able to.

The part Canadians should not look away from

It would be comfortable to treat this as the story of a few criminal employers, and there are those, and they should be prosecuted. But the rapporteur did not point at a handful of bad actors. He pointed at the design. A country that wants the labour but ties the worker to a single employer has built a system in which exploitation is not an aberration but a temptation placed in every workplace, backed by the state's own paperwork. And Canadians benefit from it daily, in the price of the produce and the staffing of the long-term care homes, mostly without seeing the permit that made the price possible. This is the same logic we traced with international students: a person invited in for their usefulness, and granted something short of the rights that would let them refuse mistreatment.

The verdict

There is a straightforward fix that the experts, the advocates, and the workers themselves keep naming: an open, or at least sector-wide, work permit, so that a worker who is being abused can walk away to another employer without losing the right to stay. Canada has studied it, piloted pieces of it, and declined to make it the norm, because the closed permit suits the employers who rely on it. Until that changes, the country is choosing, with full knowledge and a UN report on the shelf to prove the knowledge, to keep a system a United Nations expert called a breeding ground for slavery. The workers are not asking for charity. They are asking to be allowed to quit a bad boss like anyone else. A country that will not grant that is telling on itself.

A retrospective published in 2026. Drawn from the public record: the September 2023 visit to Canada by the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, and his findings published in July 2024 describing Canada's temporary foreign worker programs as a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery; the role of closed, employer-specific work permits in creating that power imbalance; and a 2025 Amnesty International report reaching similar conclusions. Commentary, not immigration advice.