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INVESTIGATION

False promises: Foreign workers

are falling prey to a sprawling
web of labour trafficking in
Canada
Making people pay for jobs in this country is illegal. It’s also a lucrative
business for some recruiters, immigration consultants and employment
agents who offer hope, but deliver exploitation. The Globe investigates the
dirty trade of human trafficking

KATHY TOMLINSON
PUBLISHED APRIL 5, 2019
UPDATED APRIL 6, 2019

PUBLISHED APRIL 5, 2019

This article was published more than 2 years ago. Some information in it may no longer be
current.

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Iran Jasmine gave $2,000 to a recruiter in Mexico who promised

her a $4,000-a-month job.

Instead, she cleaned hotel rooms along with other

undocumented workers who were crammed into filthy houses in
Barrie, Ont., like this one. When she complained, she wasn’t paid
for a week.

Filipino nationals Jonah Falgui and Edeline Agoncillo were told

that, if they enrolled in college courses in Alberta, it would get
them coveted long-term work permits. Instead, they ended up
thousands of dollars in debt and no closer to a life in Canada.

Rajbir Kaur’s father paid a B.C. fixer $15,000 in cash to get a

temporary permit to work on a farm, hoping to reach toward
permanent residency. The job never came. The family’s
struggling to get by.

From coast to coast, the stories are the same: Newcomers paid
thousands for the promise of a better life, and received nothing –
or worse.

But who sold them that hope to begin with? And who profits
from it?

FRED LUM, AMBER BRACKEN AND RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
AMBER BRACKEN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

As his former assistant puts it, Kuldeep Bansal preyed upon the weak and “had
them by the necks.”

Mr. Bansal is a Canadian immigration consultant and international recruiter known

for speeding around suburban Vancouver in a Lamborghini. Over the past decade,
his agency collected up to $5-million a year from thousands of people who wanted
a permanent life in Canada.

Eager recruits would borrow and scrape together as much as $15,000 apiece for a
chance at one of the “guaranteed” jobs Mr. Bansal advertised for his employer
clients. In recent years, those clients included such major fast-food franchises as
Subway and Fatburger, as well as Best Western hotels and Mac’s convenience
stores, among others.

Many recruits made initial payments to Mr. Bansal overseas in Dubai or India, in
cash, which his former assistant said he brought back to Canada in suitcases. Some
waited months for job offers that never materialized. Others got to Canada but
found the position they’d been promised didn’t exist.

Mr. Bansal kept their money anyway, and, in some cases, went after them for more.
It has made him a wealthy man. Along with his family, he now has a golf course, a
banquet hall and at least $15-million worth of real estate, according to public
records.

“It makes you feel disgusted. Totally sick to the bottom of my belly what had
happened and is still happening now,” Mr. Bansal’s former assistant, Arjun
Chaudhary, said. “I was a part of it, to be honest.”

Mr. Bansal is among the more notorious of

the thousands of job recruiters and
consultants operating both in Canada and
abroad. A four-month Globe and Mail
investigation probed 45 such agents, who
together have amassed scores of complaints,
lawsuits and charges against them in
Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and
Quebec. Along with employers and career
colleges who paid them to help fill their job
openings and classrooms, they collectively Immigration consultant Kuldeep Bansal.
stand accused of exploiting at least 2,300
people in recent years, from countries such as India, the Philippines, Mexico and
Guatemala, for their money, their labour or both.

The Globe conducted interviews with more than 80 people – foreign recruits, legal
experts, migrant advocates and industry insiders – across Canada and abroad, and
reviewed reams of lawsuits, formal complaints, investigative reports, government
data and online ads.

It is illegal to make anyone pay for a job in Canada. Even so, recruits of the 45
agents identified paid as much as $40,000 each – a fortune for most – in exchange
for the often false promises of a decent job or a place in a career college. Such
promises also frequently included the assurance of long-term work permits that, in
turn, would lead to the ultimate prize: permanent residency in Canada.

It can be a dirty business, dealing in human sweat and tears.

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The Trudeau government is well aware,

from being told repeatedly in consultations,
that some recruits are ending up in dismal
situations. Working under intolerable
conditions for meager pay. Crammed into
wretched temporary housing. Holding a
useless career-college diploma and no work
permit. Toiling away at odd jobs for cash
A look at the conditions where Mexican
under the table. Fearing and facing workers lived in a Barrie, Ont., home where
deportation. they waited for shifts cleaning hotels.
Twenty-eight to 30 people were crammed in
small spaces, where there were bedbugs and
All the while, many of them remain at the not enough heat.

mercy of the immigration consultants and THE GLOBE AND MAIL

job recruiters – with one person or company

often filling both those roles. The agents speak the migrant’s native language, and
often, as well, keep them on the hook by dangling another job offer or the promise
of a visa, but only if they keep paying more fees.

A key problem, according to people who see this repeatedly, is that the work visas
are temporary and most allow migrants to work only for one designated employer.
Because of that, those who are exploited can’t just seek out another better job on
their own.

“What we have is a class- and race-divided system, but there is not the political will
to change that,” said Fay Faraday, a Toronto legal expert in migration. “We –
groups, lawyers, experts – have gone through numerous consultations with the
current government, but it is not reflected in law or in policy change.”

Ottawa, meanwhile, has done nothing to stop the proliferation of unscrupulous

international recruiters who continue to entice and mislead people into thinking
Canada is a country with open arms and opportunities aplenty. The number of
licensed immigration consultants has doubled to more than 5,000 in the past five
years. They are subjected to a lack of government oversight, answering only to a
national self-governing body.

According to several organizations advocating for migrants, exploitation is far more

prevalent than has been reported, primarily because most victims are reluctant to
go to the authorities for fear that they will be deported.

Enforcement is lacking. Federal figures obtained by The Globe show the number of
leads that immigration authorities recorded about employment fraud by agents
doubled in the last five years – from 153 to 301 – while, inexplicably, the number of
investigations went down, to 27 from 38.

There were four convictions in 2018. In all but a handful of high-profile cases in
recent years, offenders got fines and house arrest but no jail time, even though they
initially faced serious charges.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Juliana Dalley, who wrote a submission to recent

parliamentary hearings on human trafficking, says that exploitation by consultants
and recruiters is entrenched and systemic.

“If the public were aware and really understood how the system operates to allow
widespread exploitation and trafficking, they would be shocked,” Ms. Dalley said.

EMPLOYMENT FRAUD BY AGENTS (Jan. 1, 2014 to Dec. 31, 2018)

Leads Investigations
Of the 200 investigations between 2014
301 and 2019, there were 29 convictions; 18 of
279 those convicted served no time in jail.
253
Convictions

153 144

38 46 43 46
27

2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 No jail time

SOURCE: CANADA BORDER SERVICES AGENCY

There is no limit on the amount of money licensed consultants can charge. Online
ads and videos show how some agents lure prospects by promising connections to
Canadian employers and career colleges. Recruits say the huge fees come later,
ostensibly for “immigration services.”

When pressed, consultants and recruiters will insist they aren’t charging money in
exchange for jobs. However, several recruits told The Globe they would never pay
the large sums just for visa applications. They pay, instead, for the promise of good
work and a future in Canada, which often do not materialize.

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The Globe found hundreds of current online postings by immigration consultants

for jobs with most of the best-known fast-food franchises, as well as at large
corporate farms, and in the construction and trucking sectors. One consultant
posted ads for counter attendants at a fast-food outlet, specifying that the jobs were
“for international grads/students only.”

Some of Mr. Bansal’s former corporate clients are among those whose franchisees
are still using immigration consultants to recruit workers. The Globe asked those
companies why they were doing so, but only Fatburger responded.

The fast-food chain said that it has “partnered with several" licensed consultants
over the years, but that it now uses them to recruit foreign workers from the ranks
of international students already in Canada, as opposed to recruiting overseas.

Consultants also bill the employers and colleges seeking to recruit workers or
students, which is legal. Mr. Bansal testified at a hearing over an employment-
agency licence that Mac’s paid his company $100,000 for recruitment services over
a two-year period. When consultants recruit foreign students for career colleges,
they get a cut of as much as 25 per cent of the tuition those students pay.

In Canada’s largest provinces, next to nothing has been done to rein this industry
in.

Mr. Bansal is still in business even though B.C. and Alberta have taken his
employment-agency licences away. He has been charged with hiring foreign
nationals illegally, has fought numerous court battles and is facing a class-action
lawsuit from former recruits as well as a disciplinary hearing with the immigration-
consultants’ regulator.

He still has his immigration-consultant’s licence, however, and his Surrey, B.C.,
businesses are advertising job openings. Mr. Bansal declined The Globe’s request for
an interview.

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