Fahim Ahmadi, one of the founders of the GTA restaurant chain Naan Kabob, believes the restaurant industry provides immigrants and newcomers to Canada with more than just a job.
“Once they start working for a few months they start building a network,” said Ahmadi, noting that his employees, many of them new to the country, receive job training as well as an education from coworkers about where to live, how to get a health card or how to learn to drive.
“Simple stuff like that.”
But Ahmadi thinks Canada’s recent immigration changes will have a devastating impact on his industry, making it harder for temporary workers to gain permanent residency through restaurant work and harder for restaurants — where more than one in four workers are immigrants — to find employees.
The federal government announced in November that it was cutting the number of temporary residents it will admit in 2026 to 385,000, a 43 per cent decrease from the 2025 target, as well as prioritize skilled workers for permanent residency.
The changes are part of the government’s goal to reduce Canada’s temporary population to less than five per cent, a change it said is necessary to ease pressures on housing, infrastructure, and services.
Meanwhile, the hospitality industry — which was already facing labour shortages — has increasingly relied on international students and temporary workers, say experts.
“New restrictions on immigration will make it even harder for us to hire reliable or long term staff,” said Ahmadi. “And fewer newcomers means less applications and longer hiring timelines, putting more pressure on the existing team.”
The labour gap in restaurants has existed for years, said Frédéric Dimanche, a professor at TMU’s Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, because it’s hard work with unpredictable hours, making it a difficult job for anyone with a family to schedule around.
In the last decade, Canadians have became uninterested in the hospitality industry as a career, said Dimanche, a trend that was largely hidden because international students filled the void, he said, accounting for as much as 80 per cent in some colleges.
During COVID, many restaurant employees found jobs in other sectors when businesses were forced to close, which has resulted in reduced operating hours due to a lack of staff or the elimination of lunch service altogether.
Restaurants Canada estimates that future immigration cuts could lead to an additional shortfall of 50,000 workers in the industry, bringing the total number of vacant job openings to almost 150,000 by 2027.
The shortfall is “incredibly concerning,” said Kelly Higginson, president and CEO of Restaurants Canada
Currently 40 per cent of restaurants — roughly half of which are run by people who came to Canada as immigrants — are “operating at a loss or barely breaking even,” said Higginson, up from 12 per cent in 2019.
The federal government opened the doors to temporary workers during the pandemic, said Pedro Antunes, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada, when the country was “desperate to find workers after two years of essentially shutting down.” In 2022, there were a million job vacancies throughout all sectors, he said.
“The federal government really enabled and facilitated firms to go out and hire non-permanent residents and they opened the gates to a lot of non-permanent resident inflows,” said Antunes, which were then blamed for rising house prices and a job market that didn’t keep pace with the number of new residents.
Canada’s population growth, typically at 1.1 per cent a year, increased by three per cent in 2023-24 and is now around zero, he said.
“These are wild swings caused by essentially, I think, too abrupt a policy change perhaps in both directions,” said Antunes.
Already, the number of new students who arrived in Canada from January to October this year is down 60 per cent compared to the same time period last year.
The government started capping international study permits in 2024. And new temporary workers have been reduced by 48 per cent during the same time period.
Higginson said employment in the restaurant industry is often a path to permanent residency, but her organization is hearing more recently of temporary workers being denied residency and sent back to their home countries after working here for two or three years.
The restaurant association wants the federal government to allow those temporary workers to stay.
“We’ve trained them. They’re growing their careers within food service and their path and their families’ are set here,” said Higginson. “So we’ve said grandfather the newcomers that are currently here.”
In an email, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the temporary foreign worker program “is designed to be responsive to changes in the labour market” and that it couldn’t “speculate about future policy decisions.”
The federal government recently announced that it would fast-track 5,000 foreign physicians, already here as temporary residents, to permanent residency in order to address the doctor shortage across the country.
Canada’s food-service sector employs 1.2 million people, of which about three per cent are temporary workers, according to Higginson.
Restaurants Canada would also like to see Canada’s immigration policy tied to the economic needs of rural areas in Canada, which Higginson said is where staff shortages in the industry are being felt the most because of an affluent, or aging population, that isn’t looking to get into the workforce.
“And that is a really big conversation,” said Higginson, to “tie those immigration needs not just to our sector but to Canada’s needs overall.”
For Ahmadi’s family, the restaurant industry became a lifeline, but it wasn’t the career he dreamed of growing up in Canada.
Ahmadi’s mother, a teacher, and his father, who was in the army, left Kabul in 1992 after the civil conflict that started in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan three years earlier. The family lived in Pakistan for 10 years before coming to Canada.
Like so many newcomers, Ahmadi wanted a part-time job and started working in a family-owned restaurant when he was 16.
But academia was his real passion. Ahmadi did a double major at York University in philosophy and law and society, followed by a masters in disability studies at York, and a Masters of Law at Osgood Hall Law School, with the hope of becoming a lawyer.
When Ahmadi’s father passed away in 2009 his life took a different path.
At his mother’s urging, Ahmadi agreed to help his brother Kadeer, a mathematics major at York University who wanted to have a business, buy a struggling restaurant in Toronto. Ahmadi thought it would be a temporary partnership.
That was in 2010.
Ahmadi, now 37, never left Naan Kabob. The restaurant now has 10 locations plus a central kitchen and Ahmadi’s four siblings are all involved in the business.
The government’s immigration cuts, however, could limit the company’s ability to expand and lead to higher costs to train and keep workers, expenses that many restaurants, which he said operate on “razor thin” margins, can ill afford.
Food costs are also consistently going up, said Ahmadi, noting that a box of lettuce has gone from $30 to $80 now that it is coming from the U.S. and not Quebec.
Looking ahead to 2026, Ahmadi said “all in all, I think it will be a much tougher year.”
