Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shed crocodile tears over the country’s use of low-wage temporary foreign workers, when he shared a podium with Benigno Aquino III, the visiting Philippine president.

“This country is not going to have a policy,” Harper began, “where we will have a permanent underclass of... people who are so-called temporary, but here forever, with no rights of citizenship and no rights of mobility.”

Hidden behind Harper’s words were the reactionary implications of the “reforms” his Conservative government made to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), and the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) in 2011. These programs are used by corporations, small businesses, and the affluent to import poverty-wage labourers on temporary work visas for menial, often degrading, jobs.