Mac's convenience stores liable for exploitation of 880 temporary workers
B.C. Supreme Court judge rules company charged workers thousands for jobs that didn't exist.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has ruled that Mac's Convenience Stores and two immigration agencies working for it systematically exploited hundreds of temporary foreign workers in what the court called an abusive scheme.
Justice Sharon Matthews found that Mac's, Overseas Immigration Services Inc., and Trident Immigration Services Ltd. worked together to recruit roughly 880 workers from overseas — many from Dubai job fairs — and charged them between $1,500 and $8,000 each for promised jobs at Mac's stores across Canada. The problem: many of those jobs did not exist.
Workers arrived in Canada to find themselves unemployed, underemployed, or reassigned to work not covered by their permits. One worker, Prakash Basyal, was promised a full-time job at a Mac's in Edmonton but ended up working at a bottle depot in Lethbridge for less than promised wages — work his permit didn't authorize. He was arrested by Canada Border Services Agency and spent months in a Vancouver homeless shelter before getting a new work permit.
Matthews called the companies' conduct "too obviously abusive to dismiss as simply careless" and found them liable for unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, and punitive damages. Mac's argued it was ignorant of how the temporary foreign worker program worked and acted without malice. The judge rejected that defence, ruling the companies "exploited" workers by making them believe jobs would materialize.
Damages have yet to be determined, though workers' lawyers have suggested a range around $45 million. The final figure will depend on factors including how many workers were directly affected and the degree of harm each suffered.
This ruling underscores the real human cost of immigration-recruitment schemes that prey on workers' financial vulnerability and desire to build better lives.