Tim Hortons kicked off a national hiring campaign on Monday aimed at filling 10,000 positions with local workers, framing the drive as a deliberate step back from a Temporary Foreign Worker program the chain once lobbied hard to expand.
Of roughly 110,000 people working across the Tim Hortons system in Canada, about 4,000, approximately 3.6% of all restaurant roles, hold positions under the Temporary Foreign Worker program. The company says that share has been declining steadily since 2024. The campaign, running across TV, digital, paid social, and in-restaurant channels, is meant to push that figure lower still.
That context matters, because Tim Hortons’ history with the program is not entirely comfortable. In 2021 the chain lobbied the federal government to widen access to temporary foreign workers, citing labour shortages in the wake of COVID. The new campaign introduces no formal policy change or cap on program usage. It asks Canadian restaurant owners to prioritize local hiring and notes that anyone entitled to work in Canada is welcome to apply, making the campaign a cultural commitment and not a structural overhaul. Whether that distinction satisfies critics who have tracked the company’s workforce composition will depend on what the hiring data actually shows.
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The groundwork is already being laid. Restaurant owners hosted 400 local hiring events in March and April, with more scheduled throughout the year. About 45% of Tim Hortons’ Canadian workforce is between 15 and 24 years old, a demographic the company is leaning into as it courts young workers for both existing roles and the 80 new restaurants it plans to open across Canada this year.
Alongside the hiring push, Tim Hortons is pointing to its youth and community programs as evidence of deeper Canadian roots. The Tim Hortons Foundation Camps has launched a new in-school program delivering 10 hours of classroom instruction to 24,000 youth in grades 5 and 6, with plans to reach 55,000 students over the next two years. The Timbits Sports program supports more than 350,000 children aged 4 to 8 annually.
What remains an open question is whether a national ad campaign translates into a measurable, sustained decline in temporary foreign worker reliance — or whether it reads, a year from now, as a well-produced announcement that changed little.
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