Ballsy Move by Tim Hortons’ President. Now Let’s See Whether The Food Professor Asks Him Real Questions.
Tim Hortons Faces the Storm
“Ask why Canadians are increasingly angry every time they walk into a Tim Hortons and wonder what the hell happened to the place.”
By Donald Best
The President of Tim Hortons is on The Food Professor Podcast this week. (link at bottom)
That is a ballsy move for Tim’s Axel Schwan, and for Duncan Fulton – Chief Corporate Officer of Restaurant Brands International, Tim Hortons’ parent company – who also appears on the show.
Credit where it is due. Tim Hortons is in the middle of a growing public-relations mess over temporary foreign workers, local hiring, the visible demographic transformation of customer-facing staff, declining customer confidence, and the growing perception that many locations are no longer the clean, reliable, Canadian coffee shops that built the brand.
The Food Professor (Dr. Sylvain Charlebois) says the interview will cover Tim Hortons’ “new growth strategy, store expansion plans, Canadian employees,” and whether Dunkin’s return to Canada represents a serious threat.
Good. Ask about growth. Ask about Dunkin’. Ask about the planned new stores and renovations.
Then ask why Canadians are increasingly angry every time they walk into a Tim Hortons and wonder what the hell happened to the place.
Because that is the real story.
Dunkin’ Isn’t the Threat. Tim Hortons Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
Tim Hortons does not have a Dunkin’ problem. It has a trust problem. It has a local-hiring problem. It has a franchise-accountability problem. It has a customer-service problem. It has a cleanliness and food-confidence problem. Above all, it has a Canadian-identity problem.
For decades, Tim Hortons wrapped itself in the flag. Hockey. Small towns. First jobs. Coffee on the way to work. A doughnut after the kids’ game. The friendly local counter. The familiar voice in the drive-through. The company sold Canadians not merely coffee, but belonging.
Now many Canadians look behind the counter and see something very different from the Tim Hortons they knew and loved.
They see stores staffed by recent arrivals, international students, temporary workers, former temporary workers, and new permanent residents. They see young Canadians unable to get entry-level jobs. They see order errors, language problems, dirty tables, messy washrooms, weaker service, and a chain that often feels less like a Canadian institution and more like a foreign-labour franchise machine wearing a maple-leaf costume.
That is the issue Tim Hortons does not want to discuss in plain English.
The 3.6 Percent Talking Point Doesn’t Answer the Question
The company’s preferred answer is that only about 4,000 of its 110,000 Canadian restaurant workers are currently employed through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Tim Hortons says that is about 3.6 percent. It also says about 45 percent of its Canadian restaurant workers are aged 15 to 24, and that it is launching a campaign to hire 10,000 local workers.
Those are useful numbers. They are also the beginning of the questions, not the end of them.
“Current TFW” is a narrow legal category. It says nothing about how many Tim Hortons workers arrived as international students, post-graduate work-permit holders, open or spousal permit holders, refugee claimants, or other temporary residents. It says nothing about how many arrived as temporary workers and later became permanent residents. And it says nothing about how many franchise owners rely on the immigration-labour pipeline while the company points to one number and says, “See? Nothing to worry about.”
Canadians are not stupid. They also understand something Tim Hortons should not ignore:
Many customers now perceive that a growing number of franchise operators, managers, and hiring decision-makers are themselves newer to Canada, and that some locations appear to hire heavily from their own ethnic, national, religious, family, student, or newcomer networks before hiring local applicants.
The religious element should not be airbrushed out. In real life, hiring networks often run through temples, gurdwaras, churches, mosques, community associations, family circles, caste or regional connections, language groups, student networks, and immigration contacts. Pretending that religion is irrelevant is evasion.
In some communities, customers perceive that certain Tim Hortons locations are staffed overwhelmingly from one identifiable community network – Sikh, Hindu, Punjabi, Gujarati, South Asian, student, newcomer, or otherwise – while other locations reflect a different but equally narrow hiring circle. The point is not that every customer can identify the religion or background of every worker. The point is that Canadians can see when a local workplace no longer appears to hire from the local community, but instead from a closed or semi-closed network connected to the owner, manager, recruiter, school, religious community, family, or immigration pathway.
That perception may vary by location and should be tested with real data. But it is real, and it matters. When a local teenager applies to the Tim Hortons down the road and hears nothing back, while the store appears staffed almost entirely by recent arrivals from the same background as the owner or manager, the public draws its own conclusion.
Maybe the company has an explanation. Maybe the applicants were unavailable, unqualified, or unwilling to work the shifts. Maybe the franchisee hired through friends, family, college networks, or word-of-mouth because it was easier. Maybe the local labour pool was weak.
But if Tim Hortons wants Canadians to believe that local hiring is real, it must provide more than national slogans and corporate percentages. It must show whether franchisees are hiring openly, fairly, and locally, or whether some stores have become closed ethnic, religious, or newcomer employment networks operating under a purportedly Canadian brand name.
Tim Hortons’ Axel Schwan (L) RBI’s Duncan Fulton (R)
Who Paid Whom to Get the Job?
Tim Hortons already knows that foreign workers have been abused inside its own restaurants. It has happened. A Tim Hortons franchisee was stripped of his two stores after an RCMP investigation into foreign workers who said they had been cheated out of overtime pay and threatened with being sent home if they complained. So the company cannot pretend the next question is theoretical.
And the next question is worse, because it is about money flowing the other way. Has any Tim Hortons franchise owner, manager, recruiter, immigration consultant, related company, or middleman ever taken money from a foreign worker in exchange for a job? In exchange for a Labour Market Impact Assessment, the federal document an employer must obtain before it is allowed to hire a foreign worker? In exchange for work-permit support, a promotion, a better schedule, housing, or a path to permanent residency?
Start with what is already on the record. In 2024 a joint investigation by CBC News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation found an open black market in Canadian jobs. Reporters tracked more than 125 online ads across 17 cities offering LMIA-approved jobs and work permits for cash. The price ran from $25,000 to $45,000. One seller asked an undercover reporter whether she wanted the job with the LMIA, or just the LMIA without the job. The schemes came two ways. A real position, or a fake one… complete with forged pay stubs and tax slips to fake Canadian work experience.
Charging a foreign worker for one of these documents is illegal. It is fraud. The sellers were doing it in the open anyway, on Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace, because the demand is enormous.
Desperation creates a market.
For a young person overseas, a Canadian fast-food job can be the door into Canada. It can mean a work permit, Canadian experience, and a possible path to permanent residency. Families in India and elsewhere have reportedly paid ruinous sums for that door. They sell property, borrow from relatives, and empty savings to get one person into Canada.
And it has already landed inside a national restaurant chain. In Oakville, Ontario, a foreign worker said he paid his own wages for a cook job that did not really exist. He had arrived from India through a licensed immigration consultant, on a permit tied to a government letter approving his employer to hire two cooks. When he got here he was given almost no hours. Instead, he says, he was told to hand his employer about $3,000 a month in cash, which was then run back through the books as if it were his pay. The Canada Border Services Agency has a name for the trick. They call it payroll cycling. The restaurant was a franchise of a company that owns more than fifty Canadian chains. When the company was shown what was happening, it gave the franchisee ninety days to leave the system.
That is one worker, at one franchised restaurant, found because a reporter found him. Nobody at head office caught it.
Now bring it to Tim Hortons by name. A Toronto-area recruiter was fined in 2025 for charging foreign workers thousands of dollars to place them in Canadian jobs. Two of her former employees told the Globe and Mail she charged the workers for the entire process, and that she recruited foreign workers for Tim Hortons and A&W. She denied it. She was fined anyway.
She is not a special case. A Burger King franchisee who owned eleven outlets in British Columbia told the same newspaper he gets calls every week from consultants offering him money in exchange for giving their clients jobs. One offered to charge workers $25,000 a job and hand him a cut. He said it is done everywhere.
The recruiter who got caught is the symptom. The system that makes her useful is the disease.
Because Tim Hortons corporate does not have to charge a worker a dollar. It does not even have to know that anyone did. The recruiter charges the worker. The consultant charges the worker. And the franchisee, the independent owner who does the actual hiring and holds the work-permit paperwork, can take his own cut quietly, in his own store, with his own recruiter, on books head office never sees. That is exactly what the Burger King operator was offered. A cut. The franchisee is where the money changes hands. He is also the one place corporate has arranged never to look.
That Tim Hortons hiring arrangement has a name. It is called plausible deniability.
It works in layers. The worker pays a recruiter, so corporate can say it charged no one. The franchisee pockets the cut, so corporate can say it knew nothing. The store is independently owned, so corporate can say it is not responsible. Each layer covers the one beside it.
And here is the part that should bother people the most… Head office can sit on top of all of it and be telling the literal truth when it says it had no idea. The ignorance can be completely real. It is also completely built in.
The rule already closed that door. An employer is not only forbidden from charging a foreign worker. It must also ensure the people recruiting on its behalf do not. So “we use independent recruiters” does not protect the company. Under that rule, the company is responsible for what those recruiters do whether it looked or not.
Tim Hortons owner Restaurant Brands International – The Record
The chain does not stop at Tim Hortons. It is one of four brands owned by Restaurant Brands International, the Toronto company that also owns Burger King, Popeyes, and Firehouse Subs. Tens of thousands of franchised stores, the same model, the same recruiters working the same pipeline, the same wall of independent owners between the workers and the parent corporation that collects the royalties. When a Burger King operator says the kickback offers arrive every week, he is describing the system Restaurant Brands International built and profits from.
So the question is not whether one recruiter charged fees. One did, and was fined. The question is how many recruiters, consultants, and agents the Tim Hortons system relies on, how many of them charge workers behind the company’s back, and what Tim Hortons and its parent have ever done to find out. A company that audited its recruiters, demanded disclosure, and asked its own workers what they paid could answer that in an afternoon. A company that prefers not to know cannot.
Define “Canadian Employees,” Mr. President
Start with the phrase itself.
How many of your Canadian restaurant workers are citizens? How many are permanent residents, international students, post-graduate work-permit holders, or current and former TFWs?
How many stores have more than half their staff drawn from temporary residents or former temporary residents?
How many Canadian teenagers applied to Tim Hortons last year and were never hired?
How many franchisees use the TFW program, immigration consultants, or recruiters, and how many provide housing to the workers they employ? Does Tim Hortons require franchisees to disclose every recruiter, overseas agent, and related-party business involved in hiring foreign workers?
These are not “gotcha” questions. They are the questions that matter if Tim Hortons wants to keep marketing itself as a Canadian community institution.
Tim Hortons’ own recent behaviour shows that the company understands the danger. It did not announce a national campaign to hire 10,000 local workers because everything was fine. It did so because public anger was growing. The company was being mocked, boycotted, and accused of selling out Canadian young people.
“When a brand that built itself on local first jobs suddenly has to reassure the country that it still hires locals, something has gone badly wrong.”
Food Trust Is Intimate. Tim Hortons Is Losing It
The labour issue is only half the problem. The other half is customer confidence.
Food service is intimate. People eat what your employees prepare. They drink what your employees pour. They must trust your staff to wash their hands, keep washrooms clean, avoid cross-contamination, handle food properly, report illness, clean surfaces, maintain equipment, and understand customer requests about allergies, substitutions, and mistakes.
Once that trust goes, the brand goes with it.
Tim Hortons now faces a widespread perception that many locations are dirtier, sloppier, less friendly, and less competent than they used to be.
Social media is filled with complaints and videos about wrong orders, language barriers, filthy washrooms, dirty tables, poor service, and staff who appear poorly trained or indifferent. Some customers blame corporate cost-cutting. Some blame weak franchise owners. Some blame understaffing. Many directly connect the decline to rapid demographic change in staffing and ownership.
The politically correct response is to pretend this is all racism. That is lazy, dishonest, and dangerous for the brand. Customers do not need an ideology lecture when the washroom is filthy, the table is sticky, the order is wrong, and the employee at the counter cannot understand a basic question.
Culture Does Not Disappear at the Airport
Tim Hortons should not pretend that culture does not matter. Culture matters everywhere, in everything, all the time. It shapes assumptions about cleanliness, public behaviour, hierarchy, customer service, food handling, language, authority, illness, sanitation, and what is considered normal.
No serious person believes that every worker from every country arrives with identical cultural standards or hygienic habits. No serious food company should behave as if a short training session and a uniform magically erase two decades or more of hygiene assumptions, habits, and culture formed in a country where open defecation, polluted water, corruption, and low-trust public behaviour remain normal for hundreds of millions of people.
India is central to this discussion because it has become one of the major source countries for Canada’s international students, temporary workers, and new permanent residents.
India also has a recent and well-documented sanitation history that is dramatically different from Canadian expectations and standards.
India’s own government launched the Swachh Bharat Mission because open defecation is a national crisis involving hundreds of millions of people.
International agencies describe the campaign as affecting nearly 500 million people and so far providing toilet access to more than 100 million additional rural households. This campaign is still in place and has a long way to go.
Nor was the problem merely a matter of plumbing or poverty. India itself knows that sanitation is still a behavioural and cultural issue requiring an ongoing massive public campaign.
This is not an argument that every Indian worker is unhygienic. It is an argument that Tim Hortons and its franchisees have a duty to recognize reality. When a company rapidly employs large numbers of recent arrivals from countries with very different sanitation histories, language environments, and food-handling assumptions, the company must prove that training and supervision are real and ongoing.
A food-handler certificate is not enough. A checkbox training video is not enough. A manager saying “we trained them” is not enough. Tim Hortons should be able to show store-level enforcement of handwashing, glove use, washroom cleanliness, food-temperature control, illness reporting, cleaning routines, pest control, cross-contamination prevention, allergen communication, and customer-service language ability.
If a company wants the benefit of imported labour, it also owns the burden of training, testing, continual supervision, and discipline. That burden is greater, not lesser, when workers come from cultures and environments with materially different sanitation and service norms.
One Viral Hygiene Video Can Destroy a Million Dollars in Advertising
This is where the Tim Hortons brand has real exposure. A single viral video of disgusting food-handling conduct can do more damage than a million dollars in advertising can rectify.
Customers do not wait for peer-reviewed studies before deciding where to eat. They look at the washroom. They watch the counter. They notice the employee handling food. They hear the language barrier. They see the filthy, sticky table. They make a judgment and leave.
So The Food Professor should ask whether Tim Hortons tracks hygiene and language complaints by store, franchisee, and staffing model, whether it requires customer-facing employees to meet a minimum English or French standard before working the drive-through, whether stores with heavy temporary-resident staffing are audited more often, and how many franchisees have been disciplined or terminated for repeated cleanliness or food-safety failures.
Those questions go directly to corporate responsibility.
The Franchisee Dodge Won’t Cut It
Tim Hortons will no doubt say that restaurants are operated by franchisees. That answer should not be allowed to stand unchallenged. Tim Hortons corporate cannot take credit for the brand when it wants to sell hockey nostalgia, charity campaigns, and Canadian community values, then hide behind franchisees when the public asks about labour practices, dirty restaurants, housing arrangements, language barriers, and food-safety standards.
If the sign says Tim Hortons, the public holds Tim Hortons responsible.
Tim Hortons Evicts Canadian Tenants For Temporary Foreign Workers
Foreign Labour, Worker Housing, and the New Company Town
The housing issue is another serious area requiring direct questioning. There have been credible reports of franchise-linked housing arrangements for temporary foreign workers, including a widely circulated Prince Edward Island case in which a Tim Hortons franchisee was reported to have evicted Canadian tenants to make room for temporary foreign workers.
Tim Hortons should be asked about that PEI case directly.
Does corporate know which franchisees provide or control housing for foreign workers? Does it prohibit owners from profiting from housing, audit the accommodations, and require disclosure of ownership and rent deductions? Are the workers free to leave without risking their jobs? Have any long-term Canadian tenants been displaced to make room for them?
If the answer is “we do not know,” that is not good enough. A company that sells itself as a Canadian community brand cannot be indifferent if franchise owners are using foreign labour and worker housing in ways that damage local communities.
There is an ugly phrase from the old labour world: the company town. Work for the company, live in company housing, buy from the company store, and never get far enough away to be truly free. Canadians are right to recoil at any modern version of that model, especially when it is tied to low-wage foreign labour in a country already suffering a housing crisis.
Growth Into What, Exactly?
Tim Hortons should not be permitted to bury this issue under talk of “growth strategy.”
Growth into what? More stores staffed through immigration pipelines while local kids stay unemployed? More maple-leaf advertising while the community connection it sells quietly disappears?
These are the questions serious journalists should be asking.
The Food Professor Has the Right Guests. Now He Needs the Right Questions.
The Food Professor is well placed to ask them. He understands the food industry, retail, supply chains, margins, labour costs, franchise operations, and consumer confidence. That is why this interview matters. It should not become a polite corporate fireside chat in which Tim Hortons’ president recites talking points about expansion, renovations, Dunkin’, and “Canadian employees.”
“Canadian employees” must be defined. “Local hiring” must be measured. “Temporary foreign worker” must not be allowed to exclude every other temporary-resident category. And “franchisee responsibility” must not become the escape hatch through which corporate accountability disappears.
Tim Hortons has every right to defend itself.
If the company has real numbers, let Canadians see them. If franchisees are being disciplined, say how many. If local hiring is the priority, define what “local” means. And if the 3.6 percent figure is not a distraction, provide the full immigration-status breakdown of the workforce.
Canadians have a right to ask because Tim Hortons made itself part of the national story. It did not market itself as just another foreign-owned fast-food chain selling coffee-like beverages from anonymous franchise outlets. It marketed itself as ours.
That is why the anger is sharper. People are not merely disappointed in a restaurant. They feel conned by an institution that took their loyalty, wrapped itself in their flag, and then quietly adopted labour practices many Canadians believe work against their own children and communities.
Dunkin’ may return to Canada. It may succeed or fail. That is a business story.
The Tim Hortons story is larger. It is about what happens when a national brand trades on nostalgia while its customers no longer recognize the reality behind the counter.
So yes, the President of Tim Hortons going on The Food Professor Podcast is a ballsy move.
Now let’s see whether The Food Professor has the stones to ask him what Canadians are actually asking:
Who is working in Canadian Tim Hortons stores? Who is not being hired? Who is being housed, and by whom? Who is disciplining the franchisees?
And what, exactly, is still Canadian about this purportedly Canadian coffee shop?
Donald Best
Article Links
The Food Professor: Dr. Sylvain Charlebois
NOTE: Author Donald Best provided a draft of this article to Dr. Charlebois on Wednesday, June 10, 2026 at about 745pm ET.
As of the posting of this article, Best has not listened to the podcast interview, which was pre-recorded some days prior to writing this article.
Best has written publicly “Looking forward to listening to the whole interview. I greatly admire The Food Professor and his work. We will see whether he covers all of the areas in my article.”
