October 1st, 2025 | Devon Kash

Three Garbage Gifts Left By Stephen Harper

His failures have left a lasting impact.

He's often touted by conservatives as a genius, or Canada's best prime minister, but Stephen Harper left us some shit sandwiches we are still digesting ten years later. His legacy, in fact, becomes one of failure when hindsight is brought into the equation. Not including his inability to positively transform Canada into a sane, unwoke country, these are three notable and highly consequential failures by Harper that conservatives need to remember.

Temporary Foreign Workers

They handed us a program sold as a pragmatic fix, an on-demand labour pool to plug shortfalls. What it actually became was a permanent substitute for hiring and training Canadians, a pressure valve on wages, and an extra set of bodies that strained housing and local services. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program, revived and expanded in fits and starts through the Harper years and after, was supposed to be a bridge. By 2025 the government had issued more than 162,000 new work permits under the program between January and October, including almost 34,000 in seasonal agriculture. Many of those permits were issued in low-wage sectors where Canadians might otherwise have been employed. Critics argue this depresses wages and reduces the incentive for employers to train young or first-job workers.

The regional concentration of the program matters. In places already struggling with tight housing supply, rental markets felt the pressure most severely. Reports emerged of overcrowded and substandard dwellings, often employer-provided bunkhouses or rented units, displacing long-term tenants under thirty. A national poll by Angus Reid found that two-thirds of Canadians believe the program has a negative impact on the housing market.

For young Canadians, the intergenerational challenge is sharper. Many of them find themselves competing for jobs in sectors where employers can legally bypass them if a Labour Market Impact Assessment shows no Canadian worker is available. Polling shows that more than six in ten Canadians believe the program hurts youth employment. Unemployment among Canadians aged 15 to 24 climbed to 14 per cent in April 2025, one of its highest levels outside of the pandemic years.

The program’s structure also makes foreign workers vulnerable, while undermining Canadians at the same time. Closed work permits tie workers to a single employer, leaving them with little ability to complain about abuse or poor working conditions. Between April and October 2024, twenty employers were banned for non-compliance, and eleven per cent of inspected employers failed to meet requirements. When exploitation combines with housing pressures and weaker job opportunities for locals, the “temporary fix” looks more like a permanent liability.

Immigration combined with large inflows of temporary workers has further strained an already limited housing supply. A Statistics Canada analysis in 2024 highlighted how population growth driven by non-permanent residents directly tightened rental markets. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported that Canada’s national rental vacancy rate fell to 1.9 per cent in 2022, down from 3.8 per cent just a year before, while average rents for two-bedroom apartments rose nearly six per cent in that single year. Additional demand from new arrivals intensified competition for scarce housing, and the result has been higher rents, higher purchase prices, and declining affordability for Canadians of all ages. Young workers, already disadvantaged in wages and savings, are effectively priced out of the housing market by a policy choice that prioritizes imported labour over domestic investment in training and housing supply.

Tax-Free Savings Accounts

The Tax-Free Savings Account was introduced as a universal tax-free way to save and invest. Ordinary returns on savings are indeed sheltered, but the reality is far less straightforward. The Canada Revenue Agency and the courts have interpreted the rules in ways that leave serious gaps. Most notably, the account cannot reliably be used for day trading or swing trading—or to really earn anything substantial. In 2023 the Tax Court ruled in a case involving a TFSA holder who had earned more than half a million dollars trading penny stocks that his gains were taxable, because the activity was deemed to be “carrying on a business”.

The problem is not just for hyper-active traders. The CRA looks at frequency of trades, holding periods, the size of the portfolio, and even the type of investments to decide if someone is earning too much. These criteria are vague and subjective, with no clear threshold. As a result, even moderate swing traders, or Canadians simply pursuing more active strategies, can face audits and heavy penalties. Under the Income Tax Act, any TFSA income deemed to come from “carrying on a business” is taxable. There is no broad exemption for qualified investments as there is in an RRSP.

The TFSA should have been designed as a true tax-free account in every sense. All investing activity inside it—whether long-term holding, swing trading, or day trading—should have been completely sheltered from taxation, with only the annual contribution limits serving as the constraint. Once exceptions were introduced, the promise of a tax-free vehicle collapsed into uncertainty. Canadians deserve clarity and protection, not the threat of audits years later for engaging in what they reasonably believed was investing. By failing to guarantee that all growth inside the TFSA would remain free from tax, the government left Canadians with an account that looks empowering on paper but feels like a trap in practice.

Thanks Stephen Harper.

Vacant Senate Seats

Harper often spoke in favour of Senate reform, suggesting elections or term limits. When the courts ruled that substantial reform required provincial consent, he stopped filling vacancies. By the time he left office in 2015, there were roughly twenty-two empty Senate seats. He defended the decision as a way of pressuring provinces into negotiating comprehensive reform.  Some critics also suggested it was a method of limiting patronage and reducing the government’s own leverage over appointments.

The decision carried serious consequences. Trudeau inherited a chamber with many vacancies and quickly introduced a new “non-partisan” merit-based process for appointments. By early 2025, all 105 seats were filled, and the Senate had been transformed. While the government framed these appointees as independent, the reality is that the vast majority were aligned with liberal values and progressive causes. This has shifted the ideological balance of the Senate in ways that make it far more sympathetic to the Liberal Party's legislative agenda.

Leaving seats unfilled was not just a symbolic gesture. Senators are responsible for reviewing, delaying, and amending legislation. Vacancies meant certain provinces lacked representation and weakened the chamber’s role. More importantly,  Harper’s refusal to make appointments ultimately handed the appointment power to Trudeau, who used it to reshape the institution.

Many of the new senators were not politically neutral figures but individuals with long careers in advocacy, academia, and public service closely aligned with progressive priorities. Marc Gold, appointed in 2016, became the government’s chief representative in the Senate, explicitly tied to the Trudeau government’s agenda. Kim Pate, a longtime advocate for incarcerated women, became a leading voice for justice reform. Ratna Omidvar, an expert on immigration and diversity, brought a strong pro-immigration stance into Senate debates. Wanda Thomas Bernard, an academic in social work, emphasized equity and social programming. Raymonde Gagné, later elevated to Speaker of the Senate, also came from a background deeply rooted in progressive education and community service.

Indigenous leaders such as Brian Francis added further voices committed to reconciliation and Indigenous rights. These appointees changed not only the composition of the Senate but its priorities. Committee chairs shifted, studies reflected progressive policy preferences, and legislative scrutiny increasingly approached issues through a lens sympathetic to Trudeau’s government.

Trudeau’s appointments were filtered through a so-called independent advisory board, with language stressing merit and expertise. But in practice, those choices still reflected the government’s ideological priorities. By leaving more than twenty seats empty, Harper surrendered his ability to balance the chamber and instead allowed it to be remade in a way that will shape Canadian politics for decades.

Harper

Harper left behind policies that looked clever or pragmatic at the time but shifted costs onto ordinary Canadians and future governments. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program strained housing markets and undercut youth employment. The TFSA promised tax-free investing but left Canadians vulnerable to audits and unexpected taxation. The vacant Senate seats gave Trudeau the opportunity to reshape an entire institution in his own image and to impact Canadians for generations. Each of these decisions looked like a short-term fix, but the bills came due later, and it is ordinary Canadians who continue to pay them. These were the garbage gifts, wrapped in the language of pragmatism but delivered at the expense of the very people they were supposed to serve.

It's time for conservatives to move on from Stephen Harper as a saviour and idol.