Restaurant owners: paying $100/hr not enough to entice Canadians to work in their kitchens

Published May 28, 2014

Even if restaurants offered $100 an hour for kitchen jobs, they’d still need to hire temporary foreign workers to fill the posts because Canadian workers just don’t want the jobs, the head of Canada’s restaurant association says. Garth Whyte, president of Restaurants Canada, made the comment during an interview Tuesday on CBC’s Power & Politics […]

CFIB: people with “a little bit of colour” may not be temporary foreign workers

Published April 28, 2014

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has an urgent message about diversity and the workplace: If you see someone working in a fast food restaurant who has an “accent or a little bit of colour,” don’t — repeat don’t — jump to the conclusion that they’re a temporary foreign worker. They could, in fact, be a Canadian […]

Leave scrubbing hotel toilets to TFWs: CFIB

Published April 25, 2014

Forget McDonald’s temporary foreign worker troubles and the leaked audio of its CEO talking about how his company is facing heat over the use of “disenfranchised” TFWs. The president of the lobby group representing small business has his own super-sized problem after his appearance on national television Thursday. Appearing on CTV’s Power Play, Dan Kelly, head of the Canadian Federation for Independent […]

Business group doubles down on temporary foreign workers

Published April 18, 2014

This week really wasn’t the best time to be defending Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Not long after CBC blew the whistle on a McDonald’s franchisee in Victoria bringing in temporary foreign workers (TFW) from the Philippines even though locals wanted the shifts, Canadians learned Thursday of serious allegations about the treatment of TFWs at a McDonald’s in […]

Does this Tory minister actually think Canada’s cities are lying?

Published February 26, 2014

Did a senior Conservative cabinet minister just imply that Canada’s cities aren’t telling the truth about their financial situation? Employment Minister Jason Kenney took to Twitter Wednesday to give a shout-out to a report authored by a business lobby group that says municipal governments are “consistently misrepresenting how much tax money ends up in their […]

CFIB wins LOL award for griping about temporary foreign worker “red tape”

Published January 31, 2014

A business lobby group on Friday awarded the federal government’s embattled Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) with its Paperweight Award for “ridiculous rules and red tape.” The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, representing small- and medium-size businesses, says the TFWP is “maddening at the best of times.” And now, the government “has added new requirements, […]