Tim Hortons’ U-Turn on Hiring Foreign Workers

A woman walks past a Tim Hortons in Toronto in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Doug Ives

Commentary

Tim Hortons set Canadian social media ablaze on May 25 with a press release promising to hire locals over foreign workers. Behind the drama and hot takes is an important question: If our national coffee icon can do without foreign workers, why does any restaurant or retail employer need them?

The press release heralded a major expansion of storefronts, with 80 Tim Hortons restaurants set to open across the country this year, and affirmed a “strong, ongoing commitment to hire locally, whenever possible, in every community we serve.” Specifically, the restaurant chain is pledging to “hire 10,000 new local team members.”

Going even further, Tim Hortons declared that it will no longer lobby Ottawa for greater access to foreign workers, saying that “in 2026, with high youth unemployment nationally, lobbying for expanded access is no longer necessary.” This followed a blunt admission that it had lobbied for this very thing in the past, particularly in the period after the pandemic when there were “acute labour shortages across the country.”

This announcement by Tim Hortons comes less than two weeks after American chain Dunkin’ Donuts revealed on May 12 that it will be returning north of the border as soon as late 2026  to “open hundreds of Dunkin’ locations across Canada.” Is the Tim Hortons foreign worker U-turn an opening salvo in the coffee war now brewing up as Tim’s and Dunkin’ vie for the hearts, minds, and palates of the discerning Canadian coffee drinker?

While it is impossible to say for sure, we do know that Tim Hortons is aware that its status as an icon of Canadiana has been tarnished by its reliance on foreign labour, and is seeking to reverse this negative association.

In December 2025 the company released a statement trying to clear up a “misunderstanding” on the part of Canadians that the restaurant hires huge numbers of temporary foreign workers (TFWs). The statement explained that 95 percent of Tim Hortons workers are “hired locally”—though it explicitly defined “local” as including temporary residents like international students.

Tim Hortons is doubling down on this line, with its official corporate account on X posting on May 25 that “one of the biggest misperceptions about Tim Hortons is how the TFW program has been used.” The post went on to argue that TFWs are hired for “positions in communities where restaurant owners faced documented labour shortages and went through the full government approval process before hiring.”

In any case, Tim Hortons is now citing changing economic conditions—specifically “high youth unemployment”—as the reason it is reducing its hiring of foreign workers. It would logically follow that all businesses drawing from the same subset of lower-skill, lower-wage workers that Tim Hortons hires would also no longer need TFWs.

A study in April from the Fraser Institute found that “437,000 young people between 15 and 24 years old in Canada looked for a job but could not find employment” in 2025. This figure is up 57 percent from 2022. The study describes this as an “unprecedented surge in youth unemployment for an economy not in recession.”

The 10,000 new local jobs promised by Tim Hortons would soak up only a small proportion of the nearly half a million young people in this country who looked unsuccessfully for a job last year—and this does not even include the unemployed in every other age demographic.

A September 2025 report from Desjardins outlines the mechanics of how summer and after-school jobs became an impossibility for so many Canadian youth.

After the pandemic, “work restrictions for non-permanent residents, notably international students, were relaxed” to “satisfy surging demand for labour.” While this met the immediate desire for workers from employers, the long-term outcome was that “this deluge of available labour well outpaced demand, putting upward pressure on the youth unemployment rate.”

Other than Tim Hortons, no prominent businesses in Canada have drawn the conclusion that rising youth unemployment should translate into fewer foreign hires. And while Tim Hortons has promised to stop lobbying government on foreign worker policies, the most prominent business lobbies in the country are clearly not on the same page.

In a May 12 post on X, Restaurants Canada, the national foodservice lobby, said that “labour shortages are hitting the restaurant sector hard” and called on provinces to opt in to the Carney government’s easing of foreign worker restrictions for rural employers. They were referring to the federal government’s decision to raise the foreign worker cap for rural businesses if requested by a province.

Prime Minister Carney has been open about advocacy from the business sector to ensure access to temporary foreign workers.

In response to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s call to end the TFW program in September 2025, Carney referenced significant pressure from employers on the issue. “When I talk to businesses around the country, their number one issue is tariffs and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers,” he said. That same month, Canada’s youth unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent, the highest rate since September 2010 excluding the pandemic years.

The principal duty of businesses is to make a profit; it makes sense that they will continue to use foreign labour if it is allowed and helps their bottom line. As the case of Tim Hortons shows, this is often more a desire than a need. As youth unemployment swells, there is no justification in continuing to grant this desire.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.