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Monday’s most interesting non-Post news item came to us from the Investigative Journalism Foundation’s Zak Vescera, who published details of a sweetheart deal that the garment maker Lululemon Athletica squeezed out of the federal government last year. Lululemon is building a new global headquarters in Vancouver, where it originated, and by strategic bullying it got the feds to allow it to bring in 116 high-wage temporary foreign workers (TFWs) without the usual mandatory efforts to hire local Canadians first.
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The TFW program has come under fire from all sides of the political spectrum largely because of its use in importing cheap low-skilled labour, driving down wages in agriculture, food service, and hospitality, and effectively creating licensed exploitation that would otherwise be illegal. (If you care a lot about economic inequality, you should definitely have misgivings about the existence of an Enormous Federal Inequality Machine.) Lululemon’s use of the program is less concerning from that point of view. The company brought in a modest number of key TFWs in high-paying roles to blend in with its Canadian workforce and help a big expansion go more smoothly.
It is easy to imagine that the decision to approve the permits was a no-brainer for B.C., Ottawa, and the federal ministers who quarterbacked the exemption. And, yes, Lululemon is a brand Canadians surely feel positive about, leaving aside that little blip with the terrible Olympics outfits.
But, you know, those positive feelings are surely strained just a tad when you hear about those jobs Lululemon couldn’t fill from the vast reservoir of educated and enterprising humanity that is the Lower Mainland of B.C. The company’s TFW exemption is allowing it to hire people for positions that no Canadian could conceivably fill, to wit: “graphic designers, advertising and marketing managers, computer systems managers, retail wholesale buyers, pattern-makers and industrial engineers.” This list includes some jobs I’ve seen friends move to Vancouver to do! Either things have changed a lot human-capital-wise out on the coast, or Lululemon just wanted a backdoor subsidy in exchange for maintaining its visible connection with Canada.
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To be sure, companies have to fight their corner ferociously against the perpetual efforts of governments to drink their blood, but Vescera’s story observes that Lululemon also battled his team’s efforts to obtain documents about the exemption through the province’s freedom of information law. The company half-successfully tried to invoke the “harmful to third-party business interests” provision that is present in B.C.’s FOI law, along with those of most provinces. This, to me, is genuinely irksome practice—made worse because, although the Investigative Journalism Foundation received redacted documents, nobody will explain what third party’s interests are being protected, or why.
Indeed, I cannot fathom a reason for any “business interests” provision in any FOI law at all. The inherent danger in all dealings between businesses and governments are an overwhelmingly important reason for freedom of information law to exist. Allowing suppression of information on the grounds that some teat-sucking client of the state might be embarrassed or compromised is simply a license for the concept of FOI to be nerfed to death
National Post
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