In Sharp Reversal, Canada Donut Icon Tim Hortons Will Hire Locals To Fill Youth Employment Hole

Canadian coffee and donut icon Tim Hortons will limit its reliance on foreign workers as youth unemployment has soared in the country, after spending years lobbying the government for more imported labor. Internal critics see the move as an attempt to address a major hole in the labor market, which comes only in response to the incipient re-entry of American mega-chain Dunkin’ Donuts, later in 2026 or early in 2027, after leaving the country eight years ago. A conservative Canadian commentator, Elliot Daigneault, wrote on X that Tim Hortons’s announcement was “ONLY HAPPENING because Dunkin Donut[s] is coming to Canada.”“Now that an American is coming to town, consumer/domestic focused policies are being deployed,” he said. “Timmies could have done that since the start. But they chose not to. Cause they didn’t face meaningful competition.”The company said on Monday that it plans to sprinkle in local workers and says it will hire 10,000 local employees and reduce its reliance on temporary foreign workers to serve up Timbits (think north-of-the-border donut holes) and its hallmark two-cream, two-sugar coffee orders. In April, unemployment for Canadians aged 15 to 24 rose to 14.3 percent, down slightly from the 14.6 percent rate in September 2025. The youth unemployment rate has hovered at highs not generally seen since the 1990s, with the exception of the pandemic years. The adult unemployment rate hit a six-month high of 6.9 percent in the same month. Dunkin’ Donuts shuttered its operations in Canada in 2018. But a Canadian restaurant operator, Foodtastic, is planning to bring the Massachusetts-based coffee chain back, with its first store opening in late 2026 or early 2027. The founder of Foodtastic, Peter Mammas, said he thinks he can open as many as 700 Dunkin’ locations. Tim Hortons, by contrast, operates roughly 4,000 locations in Canada. Tim Horton’s has a sticky history with the use of imported labor; it backed and then made use of a pandemic-era policy by Canada’s federal government to double the allowed percentage of temporary foreign workers businesses could hire from 10 percent to 20 percent–and spent more than a year pushing to get that cap back to the higher level after it dropped back to 10 percent in August 2024. The alarming youth-unemployment picture likely explains both the chain’s reversal on the issue itself — the chain said it was no longer “necessary” to ask the government to increase the TFW cap — as well as its efforts Monday to glaze over its reliance on the program, saying that 4,000 of its employees, or about 3.6 percent of its workforce, are employed through the TFW program. A member of Parliament from the Conservative Party, Michelle Rempel Garner, echoed Daigneault’s acerbic post. Garner said that the TFW program should be abolished and that the government should improve its “labor mobility strategies” and “skills training” to “make it easy to facilitate Canadians to move to where the jobs are.” She also said the government should create a standalone program to help fill “seasonal agricultural labor that’s legitimately hard to fill.” Garner had previously said that the reliance on foreign workers was taking job opportunities away from young workers, adding that she could not “believe that there aren’t Canadians across the country that won’t do these jobs.”Other Conservative lawmakers in Canada previously criticized Tim Hortons for relying on foreign workers. In December, the then-interim leader of the New Democratic Party, Don Davies, told reporters, “Companies like Tim Hortons and others are ignoring market signals.”“If they can’t find people to work there, maybe it’s because they’re not paying sufficient wages and they don’t have good enough working conditions. So they should be addressing that first,” he said. Canadians have boasted of their acceptance of and support for immigration. But some polls have found that their attitudes on the matter may be getting significantly less sweet.In October 2025, a poll from the Environics Institute found that the number of conservatives who believe there have been too many immigrants entering Canada doubled from 41 percent in 2020 to 82 percent in 2025. Meanwhile, a Nanos Research poll released in September found that roughly three-quarters of Canadians said they want to see less immigration. If Tim Horton’s hopes to avoid the political and commercial fallout by jamming on local hiring, the effort may be far too little, far too late: A professor of economics at Concordia University, Moshe Lander, told Global News that given the sky-high youth unemployment rate, hiring 10,000 workers is not going to make a significant difference. A half-baked solution, in other words.

In Sharp Reversal, Canada Donut Icon Tim Hortons Will Hire Locals To Fill Youth Employment Hole

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