Alexander Brown: No, Tim Hortons isn’t suddenly interested in hiring Canadians

The serial abuser of the TFWP claims to be turning over a new leaf, and is ready to "hire 10,000 locally." There's more to this story than meets the eye.

If you believe yesterday’s announcement that Tim Hortons plans to dial back its use (and clear abuse) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) to hire “10,000 people locally” out of the goodness of its heart, I have a below-sea-level basement apartment to sell you in Richmond, B.C.’s peat-based Delta soil.

Let’s start with the obvious: If those 10,000 positions suddenly exist now, they never should have been outsourced to begin with. And yet, Tim Hortons spent the better part of a decade lobbying the Canadian federal government to increase and maintain workforce percentage caps that directly impacted thousands of positions, and influenced the entirety of the Canadian labour market.

Rather than ever lobbying for a specific number of individuals (because, again, they didn’t have an actual need when the market was showing a perpetual 20+ percent youth unemployment rate), Tim Hortons and its parent company, Restaurant Brands International Inc., instead lobbied to manipulate the overall percentage (or cap) of TFWs allowed per restaurant. During supposed “pandemic-era shortages”, they successfully massaged wilful dupes in government to increase that cap, allowing up to 30 percent of a restaurant’s workforce to consist of TFWs.

When the federal government finally cut the cap back down to 10 percent to curb immigration numbers, Tim Hortons heavily lobbied through 2024 and late 2025 to raise the limit back to 20 percent or 30 percent. Up until yesterday, they argued that rural and remote franchises continued to face severe labour shortages.

What they actually face is competition from Dunkin’ Donuts, with the popular American coffee chain set to break ground on its first Canadian locations in 2026, under a plan to aggressively expand to 600-700 locations nationwide.

If one were to charitably take Tim’s sudden shift in labour strategy at face value, this framing of yesterday’s announcement from the Globe and Mail might be enough to let bygones be bygones.

“Tim Hortons was one of the biggest proponents of the TFWP, a controversial immigration stream that expanded in popularity during the pandemic and came to symbolise some of the failings of the Trudeau-era immigration strategy.

“Restaurant Brands International Inc., Tim Hortons’ parent company, is also pledging to stop lobbying the federal government to expand the TFWP, citing the high youth unemployment rate.”

But the devil, they say, is in the details; in this instance, in the lack thereof. That “10,000 people locally” includes foreign students, and TFWs already in the country, with both groups still on active and expired permits in the millions.

And that’s just the start: graduates on Post-Graduation Work Permits (PGWP), and individuals under the International Mobility Program (IMP) do not require a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). Meaning a single restaurant could be staffed almost 100% by temporary visa holders, but if those employees are international students or PGWP holders, Tim’s corporate metrics classify them as “local hires,” not TFWs.

That also means Tim’s supposed ‘cap’ on TFWs was never an inherently honest number.

The bigger picture

“We’re still not seeing the immigration exits we are hoping for,” a senior government official for the province of Ontario told me last week. “The data from the feds has been non-existent. Across multiple sectors, we’re seeing temps working illegally through co-ethnic hiring networks, claiming fraudulent asylum, converting to visitor status and claiming benefits not to work, or goal-hanging on expired papers hoping for blanket amnesty from the federal government. The amount of bad faith and scamming continues to be overwhelming.”

“[Tim Hortons] is still asking for TFWs,” say senior federal sources. “Not only is it right there in the article, this is merely an effort to scuttle the hiring pool for Dunkin’ and win back a little goodwill with the public, meaning they always knew these jobs were out there for Canadians. The programme should be abolished entirely at this point; this is more proof of that.”

For those interested in solving for Canada’s generational mass immigration woes, the timing of Tim’s brazenly dishonest comms exercise couldn’t have come on a more appropriate day. On Monday, Peel Regional Police announced the arrest of 17 individuals, the majority of whom have ties to an international criminal network known as ‘For Brothers’, which targeted Indian business owners and community members across the region, Canada, and the United States.

The arrested:

Iqbal Singh Bhagria, 25, of Brampton, ON
Akashdeep Singh, 24, of Norval, ON
Ravinder Singh, 25, of Surrey, BC
Jashanbir Singh, 21, of Surrey, BC
Dilawarpreet Singh, 26, of Brampton, ON
Mandeep Singh, 21, of Brampton, ON
Prabhdeep Sohal, 22, of Brampton, ON
Partapbir Ghuman, 22, of Brampton, ON
Ajaydeep Singh, 29, of Brampton, ON
Navroop Singh, 24, of Brampton, ON
Rajan Singh, 28, of Barrie, ON
Amritjot Singh, 22, of Brampton, ON
Jashanpreet Singh, 22, of Brampton, ON
Guneet Guneet, 27, of Brampton, ON
Sukhwinder Singh, 32, of Brampton, ON
Mohinder Singh, 30, of Brampton, ON
Gautam Gautam, 22, of Manteca, CA

None are Canadian citizens, and according to early reports, it is believed the majority are on temporary status, be it expired, or nearly so.

On the same day, Jamie Sarkonak of the National Post reported on the case of a foreign worker from India, a ‘student’ turned permanent resident, who received only five-and-a-half months of house arrest for abusing her position as a Walmart cashier to help friends steal $7,000 in merchandise.

And this follows a week in which Canada’s newfound problem of low-quality foreign recruits bringing co-ethnic blood feuds and disrespect towards women into the Canadian Forces reached an American audience of millions, and where, back at home, even independent thought-averse legacy outlets such as CTV News have woken up to the foreign narco-trafficking networks that have infiltrated Canada’s airports and baggage handlers under dangerously lax hiring practices.

Not to be outdone, Teamsters Canada has sought to highlight the continued use of foreign workers in a trucking industry now responsible for dozens of innocent Canadian deaths per year, with bridge strikes and jackknifed trailers now a weekly expectation on our roads and highways.

Quite frankly, it’s all the same problem, and the blame lies at the feet of all the usual suspects: from white-collar criminals in government and business, to some of their blue-collar criminal recruits from the dodgiest outskirts of the Global Village.

The real problem is that for every day that we don’t get serious about enforced exits, Canada diminishes itself more than any trade threat or tariff ever could. Countries don’t normally decide to hand-wave in anyone who asks, including scores of sub-70 IQ trigger-men and murder-truckers, who are so hated by their former fellow countrymen, many moved to Canada to get away from them in the first place. Now, all Canadians, new and old alike, suffer the consequences of a decision to pivot our labour force into something cheap, replaceable, and implicitly less Canadian.

As I said on stage at Without Diminishment’s panel that helped kick off the proceedings at Canada Strong and Free in Ottawa, “temporary needs to mean temporary,” and “Canada needs an exit strategy and a reset, back to the Harper years, on an immigration standard that actually supports our young people and their future.” But what it also needs is a reckoning for an entire lobbying model grown so rotten that a government’s own consultants often represent the very clients being brought in to beg for more, more, more, without giving a damn that ‘more’ is the problem.

We need fewer low-skilled foreign workers and temporary residents. We need fewer problems, imported conflicts, schemes and designs. We need fewer networks that have taken food off the table for both Canadians and worthy, talented permanent residents (PRs), by widening price-to-income ratios, further disincentivizing the best and brightest from staking a claim here, or sticking it out.

And for serial abusers of the TFWP, PGWP, and IMP, like Tim Hortons, who helped kick this whole mess off, they need fewer customers—and not just because of the quality of the food in their private equity era.

Beyond the ability of their farmer’s wrap to turn stomachs, this shift is necessary to enforce a basic rule of consumption: if crap goes in, it needs to come out.

The original version of this piece was first published in Without Diminishment.

Alexander Brown is the writer and editor of Acceptable Views, Managing Editor of Without Diminishment, Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a contributor to Project Ontario, and a former host on Juno News. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Hub and the Toronto Sun.