Tim Hortons says it will hire about 10,000 local workers this year while opening 80 new Canadian restaurants and renovating 400 cafés.
Tim Hortons is pledging to hire about 10,000 local employees and reduce its use of temporary foreign workers as the coffee chain expands its Canadian footprint.
The company says it has already held 400 hiring events in March and April and plans to continue recruiting local restaurant staff through the year. The shift comes as Tim Hortons says it will open 80 new restaurants across Canada by year’s end and renovate another 400 cafés.
The announcement lands at a sensitive moment for Canada’s labour market. Youth unemployment rose to 14.3 per cent in April, according to Statistics Canada, while the overall unemployment rate was 6.9 per cent. Tim Hortons says it used the temporary foreign worker program after the COVID-19 pandemic, when restaurants faced labour shortages, but says that lobbying for expanded access to the program is now “no longer necessary.”
Michael Oliveira, Tim Hortons’ communications director, told CBC News by email that restaurant owners have remained focused on hiring from the communities they serve. “We think one of the biggest misperceptions about Tim Hortons is how the TFW program has been used,” he said.
According to the company, about 4,000 Tim Hortons employees — 3.6 per cent of workers in restaurant roles — are employed through the temporary foreign worker program, and those workers are hired in communities with documented labour shortages.
The federal government expanded the share of temporary foreign workers some employers could use in 2022, including higher limits for food service, before reducing the cap back to 10 per cent in 2024. CBC reported that lobbying records showed Restaurant Brands International, Tim Hortons’ parent company, had been lobbying the federal government on immigration policy tied to the program as recently as 2025, but that recent records no longer list immigration policy as a topic.
Tim Hortons’ expansion plans also come as competition in the coffee market is set to intensify. Montreal-based Foodtastic said earlier this month it had reached a deal to bring Dunkin’ back to Canada after the U.S. chain exited the market in 2018, with its first location expected within six months and more to follow. For more on that return, see BetaVoices’ coverage of Dunkin’s planned Canadian comeback.
Tim Hortons said its store growth is part of a longer-term investment rather than a response to Dunkin. Oliveira said opening a restaurant requires leases, permits and construction that take more than a year, and described the plan as “part of our long-term investment in Canadian communities.”
Ontario is slated to receive the largest share of the new Tim Hortons locations, with 26 planned, followed by 17 in Alberta and 14 in Quebec. The company’s hiring push will now test whether local recruitment can meet its expansion goals in a labour market where young workers are looking for jobs and restaurants are still recalibrating after years of staffing pressure.
Comments (0)