B.C. court finds Mac's liable over Migrant Worker fees
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Sharon Matthews ruled Thursday, May 28 that Mac’s Convenience Stores and three B.C. immigration consultant companies unlawfully charged migrant worker recruitment fees. The class action covered hundreds of workers, with roughly 880 migrants paying up to $8,000 each for jobs that rarely materialized.
One lead plaintiff, Prakash Basyal, attended a job fair at the Flora Creek Hotel while working at a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop in Dubai. Three months after he paid a $2,000 fee, he received an offer to work as a cashier at a Mac’s Convenience Store for $11.40 per hour, plus overtime, and then paid another $6,000 in fees.
Matthews rules on Mac's network
The ruling favored four lead plaintiffs, two from the Philippines and two from Nepal, in a case against Mac’s and Overseas Immigration Services Inc. and Overseas Career and Consulting Services Ltd. The workers said the two Surrey-based consultant companies operated as a single entity and charged illegal fees in exchange for promises of work.
Mac’s began working with Overseas and its principal, regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant Kuldeep Bansal, in 2012 to recruit people for its dealer training program. Mac’s had used the consultants because prospective dealers had to be citizens or permanent residents, and the company’s representative testified that Mac’s was struggling in 2012 to recruit both store employees and dealers.
Recruitment fees and worker pool
Canada prohibits recruiters from charging workers fees for a job placement, and the court found the companies had crossed that line. Susanna Quail, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said, "A lot of people, they paid and they just got ghosted," and added, "Almost none of them got jobs in Mac’s Convenience Stores."
Quail also said, "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," and, "That’s obviously advantageous to Mac’s but also highly exploitative to workers." The court record said only about 125 of the roughly 880 migrants ever made it to Canada.
What the ruling changes
The decision gives the workers a class-action win against Mac’s and the three consultant companies, and it puts the fee collection at the center of any further compensation fight. The case now leaves those workers with a ruling that their recruitment costs were not part of a legitimate placement process, including the workers who paid thousands of dollars before any job in Canada appeared.
The class now has a legal finding to rely on: workers paid up to $8,000 to secure employment in Canada, but only a fraction reached Canada and even fewer got the Mac’s jobs they were promised. For workers who went through the same recruitment pipeline, the judgment turns their fees from an accepted cost into the basis for recovery.
