‘It was only a temporary need’: Economist says demand for TFWs has dropped significantly

Economist Colin Mang discusses calls to end the temporary foreign worker program as Tim Hortons looks to cut back on TFW workers and hire 10,000 local workers.

The need for temporary foreign workers has dropped precipitously in Canada over the last few years, according to an economist, who says more companies are likely to focus on hiring Canadians in the near future.

“The temporary foreign worker program really started to expand back in 2022, when unemployment was very low,” Colin Mang, assistant professor of economics at McMaster University, told CTV News Channel on Monday.

The unemployment rate among Canadian youth was particularly low at the time, Mang explained, and the federal government decided to fill some of Canada’s persistent labour gaps with temporary foreign workers.

“Of course, it was only a temporary need,” he said. “You fast-forward four years and what we now have is not enough jobs for Canadian youth.”

Mang’s comments came hours after Tim Hortons announced a new campaign aimed at recruiting 10,000 “new, local team members” as the number of temporary foreign workers it employs continues to decline.

Of the 110,000 Tim Hortons employees across the country, the coffee chain said roughly 4,000 were hired through the temporary foreign worker program, representing about 3.6 per cent of its restaurant workforce.

The company said the number of temporary foreign workers it employs has been on the decline since 2024.

In September of that year, “several measures were implemented to reduce reliance” on the temporary foreign worker program, according to the federal government.

Those measures, which prioritized local hiring and increased penalties for program misuse, led to “a 50 per cent reduction overall in applications to the program and 70 per cent in the low-wage stream,” the government said.

“So, Tim Hortons making the decision that they’re going to now start to rehire Canadian youth and focus on that market rather than hiring temporary foreign workers, that’s going to be a good thing for the Canadian youth right now who are struggling to find work,” Mang said.

Earlier this month, Statistics Canada reported that the unemployment rate increased among those aged 15 to 24 by 0.5 percentage points to 14.3 per cent in April.

Mang said that amid the weakened labour market, large companies like Tim Hortons have seen a lot of pushback from the public about their hiring practices in recent months.

“I think there is a lot more pressure coming from both consumers and elected officials for companies that relied on temporary foreign workers to make the switch back to hiring Canadian workers,” he said.

With files from CTVNews.ca’s Elianna Lev