Hundreds of migrant workers have won a class action lawsuit against Mac’s Convenience Stores and three B.C. immigration consultant companies after a judge found they had unlawfully charged recruitment fees for jobs that rarely materialized.

In a Thursday, May 28 ruling, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Sharon Matthews found Mac’s had entered into employment contracts with the three Surrey-based consultant companies to provide temporary foreign workers for stores across B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

The lead plaintiffs in the case were four workers, two from the Philippines and two from Nepal. They claimed that Overseas Immigration Services Inc. and Overseas Career and Consulting Services Ltd. operated as a single entity to charge them illegal fees in exchange for the promise of a job.

The workers were among roughly 880 migrants who paid up to $8,000 to secure employment in Canada. Only about 125 of those workers ever made it to the country, said Susanna Quail, a lawyer for plaintiffs.

“A lot of people, they paid and they just got ghosted,” said Quail. “Almost none of them got jobs in Mac’s Convenience Stores.”

In Canada, recruiters are prohibited from charging workers fees for a job placement. Quail said employers can legally hire third-party consultant to recruit foreign workers but that any associated fees must be paid by the companies—not the workers themselves.

Company sought to draw on pool of foreign workers

In court, a Mac’s representative testified that in 2012, it was having problems recruiting both store employees and dealers, who are hired to run the convenience stores and directly employ staff.

That year, the company started working with Overseas and its principal, regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant Kuldeep Bansal, to recruit people to the company’s dealer training program.

Under the rules of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, Mac’s could only bring workers to the country as employees for a two-year period, during which they could apply for permanent residency.

Because prospective dealers had to be citizens or permanent residents, Mac’s used Overseas to recruit employees on the theory that they might later be able to train as dealers, the ruling found.

“What Mac’s wanted to do is bring workers to Canada without any specific intention to employ them, and then when job opportunities came up, they could draw on that pool of workers,” said Quail. “That’s obviously advantageous to Mac’s but also highly exploitative to workers.”

“This was the plan all along.”

The recruitment eventually relied on blanket labour market impact assessments, a document meant to prove no Canadian citizen or permanent resident is available or willing to do a job category.

Worker says he was detained, ended up in homeless shelter

The plan targeted hundreds of migrant workers who had previously come to Dubai from places like the Philippines, Nepal, China or India.

Prakash Basyal, a lead plaintiff from Nepal, was working at a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop in Dubai when he attended a job fair at the Flora Creek Hotel.

At the time, he testified that he was using his earnings to support his parents, grandparents and four siblings back home. He wanted to come to Canada because he heard he might be able to bring his family with him.

Baysal testified that he was told to pay a $2,000 fee for a promise that Overseas would find him a job. Three months later, he got an offer to work as a cashier at a Mac’s Convenience Store at $11.40 per hour, plus overtime, the ruling says.

He signed the contract and paid another $6,000 in fees Overseas claimed was to cover immigration services. At the time, Baysal was “very happy” because “it was his dream job to provide proper support for his family,” wrote the judge in her ruling.

Baysal landed in Vancouver on a Friday in April 2014 and promptly received his work permit from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). On Monday, he went to Overseas with the expectation of receiving his cashier contract in Edmonton.

Instead, he was placed in a two or three-bedroom residence where seven or eight people lived, he told the court. Baysal said he spent two to three weeks there, before being told the original plan “was not working out” and that he’d be sent to work on a farm.

After the worker refused to do so, he was sent to work in a bottle recycling depot in Lethbridge, Alta. When CBSA officials later raided the facility, Baysal said he was handcuffed and taken away to a detention centre.

“The next day, the CBSA took him to a homeless shelter in Calgary where he stayed for a month. He got a bus back to Vancouver where he lived in a homeless shelter on Homer Street for three to four months,” wrote the judge.

‘Just surviving’

Bishnu Khadka, another Nepalese worker, testified that he was recruited to work in Kitimat, B.C. He eventually found an apartment to share with another worker. But after the company failed to provide him his contracted full-time shifts, they struggled to get by, he testified.

“They did not have enough money to eat, and the apartment had no furniture. They were sleeping on the floor,” wrote the judge.

Khadka testified that he eventually flew back to Vancouver with the help of a community group. When he arrived at Overseas’s offices, he claimed the company’s principal, Bansal, yelled at him and asked if he wanted to work on a farm or go back to Nepal.

Bansal, for his part, testified that the worker left and never came back after he offered him three job options, one of which was farm work.

Khadka said he went to a Vancouver homeless shelter where he was “just surviving” until a contact introduced him to a legal aid group that helped him file a complaint with Canada’s Employment Standards Branch.

Eventually, the worker eventually got jobs in a number of restaurants and is currently applying to be a Canadian citizen.

Both the Nepalese plaintiffs are now working in Canada as bus drivers.

Plaintiff Edlyn Tesorero, meanwhile, testified she was recruited from Dubai under the false pretence of guaranteed employment but was left with no jobs upon arriving in Canada. Stranded without an income, she resorted to illegal cash jobs to survive or ultimately left the country in distress, experiencing what was described as “one of the darkest times of her life.”

In her decision, the judge determined that none of the plaintiffs appeared to exaggerate their experiences nor skew evidence in their favour. On the other hand, Matthews found the testimony of management from both Mac’s and Overseas to be highly problematic, describing both primary witnesses as untruthful, evasive, and unreliable on contested matters.

She found that Mac’s was intentionally dishonest with the roughly 125 workers who made it to Canada and often failed provide the jobs they signed contracts for.

“I conclude that Mac’s created the false pretenses and by creating them and failing to correct them, it engaged in at least an obfuscation of the truth if not an outright lie,” wrote the judge.

Unlawful behaviour, unjust enrichment could lead to millions in damages

All of workers who testified said they were provided with inadequate housing while Canada, and none said they got help securing cell phones, social insurance numbers or medical coverage.

In some cases, Overseas directed the class members to pay fees to a third company, Trident Immigration Services Ltd. Both Overseas and Trident were found to have been “unjustly enriched” through the collection of “unlawful fees.”

Overseas Immigration Services Inc. has been dissolved while Overseas Career and Consulting Services Ltd. has changed its name to Sterling Immigration, according to the decision.

Business in Vancouver attempted to reach Overseas and Trident for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Mac’s parent company Couche-Tard has since rebranded the chain Circle K. A lawyer for the company said Mac’s is reviewing the decision and has no comment at this time. 

The defendants in the case have about a month to appeal the decision.

Should the ruling stand, it’s not clear how much the companies will be held liable for.

The lead plaintiffs asked the judge to order Mac’s, Overseas and Trident to each pay $15 million in total damages.

But Matthews ruled that any money owed—including damages—for each breached contract would need to be determined through individual assessments with the class members.

Any damages handed down by the court as a punishment to deter other Canadian companies from similar action will only be determined after the individual assessments are made, according to the ruling.

Quail said the court’s decision has allowed her clients to feel vindicated that they didn’t do anything unreasonable. Next comes tracking down all the class members to assess what they are entitled to—a process the lawyer said would take time as many may still be stuck in homeless shelters or have gone back to Dubai or their home countries.

“This guy got rich stealing $6 million from poor people in Dubai,” said Quail. “And we have to do everything we possibly can to get that money back for them.”