BURST
Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. and two immigration agencies working for it were abusive and callous in their treatment of hundreds of temporary foreign workers recruited abroad, a B.C. Supreme Court judge has ruled.
Justice Sharon Matthews has yet to determine damages for a scheme she judged “too obviously abusive to dismiss as simply careless.”
It could cost the companies millions in restitution to an estimated 880 temporary foreign workers. They were charged up to $8,000 each for the promise of jobs at Mac’s convenience stores in Canada.
During a trial last fall, Matthews heard Mac’s hired Overseas Immigration Services Inc. to recruit workers and handle paperwork under Ottawa’s temporary foreign worker program.
In a ruling in the class action lawsuit released Friday, she said the companies worked together to implement a “scheme” of Mac’s offering jobs that didn’t or may not have existed.
Overseas, with involvement from a subsidiary and Trident Immigration Services Ltd., set up job fairs in Dubai to recruit workers for Mac’s, charging them an initial fee of $1,500 to $2,000 and an additional $5,500 to $6,000 once the workers got visas and a job offer, Matthews wrote.
Charging people for jobs is illegal, but Overseas argued they were lawful fees for immigration and settlement services.
The judge disagreed, ruling them unlawful. She found Overseas and Trident liable for damages for unjust enrichment and breach of fiduciary duty toward all of the workers.
But some of the workers could get higher damages because they arrived in Canada to find the jobs they were promised didn’t exist, according to the judgment.
The four representative plaintiffs testified they were told Overseas arranged a job for them at Mac’s, but they instead found themselves unemployed and even homeless in some cases.
One, Prakash Basyal, told court he was working for a Baskin-Robbins in Dubai and using his earnings to support his parents, grandmother, three sisters and brother back home in Nepal. He said he was offered a full-time job at a store in Edmonton.
He was issued a permit to work at a Mac’s store in Edmonton. But then, Basyal told court, Overseas told him he would instead be working on a farm. He refused.
He was then offered work at a bottle depot and given a bus ticket to Calgary. After spending a night In Calgary, he was taken to Lethbridge and lived in a room in a couple’s house. He worked at a bottle depot eight hours a day, six days a week, without getting paid the promised $11 an hour, he told court.
Then, Canada Border Services Agency agents arrested him because his work permit did not cover Lethbridge.
After some time in a detention centre, he was bused to Vancouver, where he lived in a homeless shelter for three to four months before later getting a new work permit, in 2014.
Mac’s and Overseas took advantage of the “financially vulnerable circumstances, work ethic and drive to work” of the recruits to implement their scheme, Matthews wrote.
“Mac’s had a pool of potential employees it could call upon. It only had to pay Overseas the recruitment fees when the person came to work, and it only had to pay those employees to whom Mac’s provided work.”
Mac’s acknowledged it made mistakes because it was ignorant of how the temporary foreign workers program worked, but argued it was not malicious and it did not intend to cause harm to the workers, she wrote.
But Matthews wrote the companies “exploited” those whose jobs didn’t materialize “by causing them to believe they had jobs that Mac’s would not or could not provide except by happenstance.”
She also found Mac’s and Overseas liable for punitive damages. These are extra damages on top of the workers’ actual losses, “awarded to denounce the conduct of a defendant that is characterized as malicious, oppressive and high-handed misconduct,” she wrote.
The lawyers for the workers have suggested total damages in the range of $45 million, but Matthews called that “almost pure speculation.”
She said the amount to be paid will be determined later in the case. The final figure will depend on a number of factors.