Vancouver sportswear company Lululemon Athletica told government officials it might halt a planned expansion in Canada if it didn’t get an exemption to more easily hire temporary foreign workers, according to documents obtained by the IJF.
In February 2023, the Canadian and British Columbia governments gave Lululemon permission to hire certain foreign workers on short-term permits without the usual requirement of first trying to hire Canadian residents.
The IJF has now obtained Lululemon’s 2022 application for the exemption, which suggested the company might not go ahead with construction of its global headquarters in Vancouver or could move jobs to the United States if its request wasn’t approved.
“One of the key considerations of the final decision to green light our expansion [in Vancouver] will be whether we receive the necessary immigration approvals so that we have the talent to guide our global growth,” reads the application, which the IJF obtained under freedom of information legislation. The application is partially redacted.
“Our goal is to continue to grow, expand and invest in Canada rather than the United States,” the document later says.
Lululemon says it has since hired 116 temporary foreign workers in Vancouver under that program, which lasts until 2026.
The company’s application casts new light on previous comments from federal officials who hinted Lululemon may have left the country if they rejected its request.
“If we did not act, Lululemon’s headquarters may not have been in Vancouver anymore,” Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne said at a May 2023 press conference.
Champagne’s office declined an interview and did not respond to written questions.
Lululemon did not make a spokesperson available for an interview. In an unattributed response, the company said the exemption lets it “identify and employ high-skilled global talent to support our employee base in Canada.” The company did not answer direct questions about whether it would have moved jobs or operations from Canada if it did not receive the exemption.
B.C. Minister of Municipal Affairs Anne Kang — whose ministry represents the provincial government in the agreement — also declined an interview. Her office did not answer a direct question about whether Lululemon threatened to halt its planned expansion in Vancouver if the company’s request was not granted.
“The ministry supports Lululemon in expanding their footprint across Vancouver and further diversifying their workforce,” Kang’s office said in an email. “Their investment is bringing economic benefits and well-paying job opportunities to British Columbians, including the opportunity to work alongside talented professionals from around the globe.”
But critics argue the exemption is an example of a powerful company successfully intimidating governments into giving it a carveout in a controversial program.
“It is patently unfair to hold governments over a barrel and [threaten] to pull out if you’re not getting your way,” said Bea Bruske, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress. Bruske’s group, which represents more than three million unionized workers in Canada, has long argued the temporary foreign worker program exploits workers by putting them in closed contracts with employers.
Other experts questioned why Lululemon needed the exemption in the first place.
Véronique Sioufi, a researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said some of the company’s comments in its application “raise red flags.”
“I don’t see how they can be so confident about the local labour market not being able to fulfill these jobs if they’re not taking time to post the ad or the salary,” Sioufi said.
The application
Lululemon, founded in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood, is a global athletic wear company with a market capitalization of more than US$31 billion and more than 9,000 employees in Canada.
The company has previously hired workers under the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which lets businesses use foreign workers if they can prove they tried and failed to hire a Canadian resident for the role.
In December 2022, Lululemon applied for a “significant investment project” designation under a Canada-B.C. immigration agreement.
That designation allows a company undertaking a large project — in this case, Lululemon’s planned Vancouver headquarters — to ignore usual requirements of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Such an exemption had only been granted once before for Microsoft in 2014.
This is the first time Lululemon's application for an exemption has been made public.
When the IJF requested a copy under provincial transparency laws, Lululemon intervened, citing a legal provision about “disclosure that would be harmful to the business interests of a third party.” The company did not reply to a question about why it believed that.
The company’s appeal eventually went to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, which ordered Lululemon to give the IJF redacted records.
In its application, Lululemon said the exemption was necessary because “the local talent pool does not have the specific skillset we need to grow.” It said the existing program was cumbersome and complained about stipulations like needing to publish job postings and salary ranges.
The exemption allows Lululemon to hire a range of workers, including graphic designers, advertising and marketing managers, computer systems managers, retail wholesale buyers, pattern-makers and industrial engineers.
Lululemon, in its statement to the IJF, said the 116 employees it has hired so far comprise just three per cent of its corporate office-based employees.
It is difficult to compare that to other companies because the most recently available federal data ends in April 2024, whereas Lululemon’s figures stretch from February 2023 to late August 2024.
However, available figures suggest Lululemon is one of the largest employers of temporary foreign workers in British Columbia for the “high-wage” stream of the program, which includes workers whose hourly pay exceeds the median wage. Between January 2023 and April 2024, the company with the most approved hires under that stream was allowed to retain just 87 workers.
Lululemon declined to say how many temporary foreign workers it planned to hire over the course of the three-year agreement.
Kang’s office also refused to provide that information, but said it “monitors” Lululemon’s requests to ensure the project is “creating job opportunities for British Columbians without displacing workers from the job market.”
In its application, the company said it would gradually decrease its reliance on foreign staff over time. Lululemon also said the expansion would create a total of 2,600 jobs, a figure echoed by provincial and federal government officials when the exemption was officially announced in May 2023.
In its application, though, Lululemon said it didn’t know where those workers would come from.
“We do not know how many of these hires will be TFW (temporary foreign workers) versus local hires, it will depend on the domestic talent pool,” the application said. “We will continue to try to hire locally but if we can’t identify the talent needed, we will have to source the roles from our global talent pool.”
‘Lululemon might not have been in Canada’
It is not the first time Lululemon has threatened to leave the country because of its frustrations with the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
In 2016, the company penned a report to a House of Commons committee hinting it may leave Canada if the program requirements were not changed.
“Canada currently does not produce enough skilled, specialized experienced workers in our required areas to meet our demand,” Lululemon wrote in that application.
This time, the company’s CEO appears to have directly lobbied Champagne, the federal innovation minister.
At the May 2023 press conference, Champagne said Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald had texted him regarding the company’s application. Champagne said he contacted then-immigration minister Sean Fraser, whose department approved Lululemon’s request.
“Without the quick action of Minister Fraser, we would probably not be here today, and Lululemon might not have been in Canada for the future,” Champagne later said.
Neither Champagne’s office nor Lululemon responded to questions about the veracity of Champagne’s account or the substance of his communication with McDonald.
Lululemon has retained a lobbyist to speak to officials about temporary foreign workers, but there is no official record on the federal lobbyist registry about McDonald’s alleged exchange with Champagne.
The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has been under intense scrutiny in recent months because of alleged abuses of low-wage employees and concerns that business reliance on cheap foreign labour is displacing Canadian workers and making the country less economically competitive.
Christopher Worswick, an economist and professor at Carleton University, said some of those critiques wouldn’t apply to Lululemon’s project. He said he typically supports hiring highly skilled immigrants to work in Canada.
“If Lululemon is talking about bringing people in who are going to work and earn high salaries and pay Canadian taxes … then that seems like a pretty good thing for us, even if they don't end up staying,” Worswick said. But he prefers such immigration to be permanent, not temporary.
Sioufi, though, worries Lululemon’s exemption might encourage other companies to seek similar carveouts.
Both she and Bruske said that even though Lululemon’s jobs include higher wages, temporary foreign workers are still in a precarious position where their status in Canada depends on their employment status.
“That is very bad policy that leaves the door open for exploitation,” Sioufi said.
Bruske said the program already lacks adequate guardrails and argued that no company should be allowed to bypass existing requirements. She encouraged governments to take a firmer hand with similar demands.
“No one wants to see good jobs leave. But we have to demand better from these companies that are seeking to take advantage of a program that is not designed to meet their needs,” Bruske said.