Employers non-compliant with TFW program are penalized

Jan 22, 2025

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) is reporting that an employer in the farming sector was fined $75,000 and banned from the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program for five years for failing to provide required documentation to inspectors, being absent from a scheduled meeting with inspectors, and failing to demonstrate they were operating a legitimate business. This penalty was laid in the period spanning April 1 to September 30, 2024.

The Government of Canada monitors employer activity through a strict employer compliance regime. It has taken additional steps in recent years to combat program misuse, improve the quality and reach of inspections, and increase penalties for non-compliant employers.

Recent inspection data highlights the reach and impact of these improvements. Between April 1 and September 30, 2024, ESDC conducted 649 employer compliance inspections, of which 11 per cent were found to be non-compliant. Penalties for non-compliant employers have increased in comparison to the previous year. During this six-month period, ESDC issued $2.1 million in Administrative Monetary Penalties (AMP), more than double the amount in the same period in 2023. Inspections during this time resulted in 20 employers being banned from the TFW Program, a fivefold increase from the same time span last year.

Banned employers range from a seafood product preparation and packaging operation to an employer in janitorial maintenance.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.