A Brazilian man says he was misled into working illegally in Winnipeg based on the promise he would eventually get a work permit.
Ighor Santos, 27, says he was ordered to leave the country after blowing the whistle on the man who recruited him and other foreign nationals for a construction job in the city’s Leila North neighbourhood.
Santos said he came to Canada in March 2023 and worked at the site for nearly five months. He and his family first reached out to the authorities later that year.
On May 31, 2024, he went to the border crossing at Emerson, Man., to apply for a valid work permit through another company.
Santos said he provided Canada Border Services Agency officials with information indicating he’d been coaxed into working illegally, but after an interview that went on for several hours, a border agent told him he had to leave the country because he’d broken the law.
“I was, of course, sad because I tried to [do] the right thing … to avoid this to happen to me, because none of this was my intention,” Santos said in an interview from São Paulo.
He was unsatisfied, he said, “because at the end of the day, the wrong people, they’re still there.”
Gurwinder Singh Ahluwalia, 43, of Winnipeg pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized employment of foreign nationals in contravention of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act as part of a plea deal that avoided additional counts being brought up against him last week.
He admitted during a provincial court hearing on April 2 to hiring the foreign nationals to work at the Templeton Heights development in the Leila North area, which he managed as general contractor for a construction company during a two-year period starting in 2022.
Court heard at least 14 foreign nationals were illegally employed on the site.
Ahluwalia, who had been living in Canada since moving from India in 2010 and became a Canadian citizen in 2019, was sentenced to 20 months of house arrest and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine, as recommended in the plea deal. The maximum prison sentence for the offence is two years.
The Canada Border Services Agency said in a Tuesday news release that the investigation started in August 2023, after the agency received information about the employment and mistreatment of unauthorized workers. Search warrants for Ahluwalia’s home, truck, the construction site and an immigration consulting firm were granted in May 2024.
Last week, court heard that a Brazilian national had come forward to Canada Border Services agents with evidence Ahluwalia had advised him to come to Canada under a visitor visa and work illegally, after he’d asked about opportunities in the country.
Santos said he was the worker who contacted border services. He said he was in his last year of school in Ireland when he contacted Ahluwalia, after a relative told him Ahluwalia was looking for workers.
Santos said he liked the idea of coming to Winnipeg, a place where he had family and that he had visited years before to study English.
“I told him … could you just wait, like, for me to do my finals?” Santos said. “He was like, ‘No, we need people right now.… If you [have a visitor visa], just come today, because we need people.'”
Santos said he came to Canada with the expectation he would not work until he got a work permit through a labour market impact assessment. However, when Santos arrived with a friend who also wanted to work in Canada, Ahluwalia made it clear that he wanted them to start working immediately.
Santos said Ahluwalia told him he’d only have to wait two weeks for his permit. He said every time he complained, Ahluwalia made up excuses as to why he didn’t have permits yet.
“I wasn’t really talking to [the other workers] about this, you know, because from my point, I thought everyone had their own papers,” he said.
He only figured out others were in the same situation “when every week I saw something worse and worse happening,” he said, referring to how the workers were treated.
Crown prosecutor Matthew Sinclair said during last week’s hearing that many of the people working on the site were unaware of Canadian laws that would protect them, which made them vulnerable to exploitation.
Workers endured poor conditions, got low wages or missed payments, and lacked Workplace Safety and Health protections granted to those working legally, the prosecutor said.
Santos said Ahluwalia had offered $32 an hour while he was still in Ireland, but the promised wages kept dropping until he got his first payment, when he received $15 an hour for his work.
Ahluwalia bumped his wages up to $18 an hour after he complained, Santos said. He was paid in cash at first, but later on got e-transfers.
The Brazilian man said the payments were regularly late and the foreign workers — from Mexico and Brazil — were often asked to work overtime and were subject to verbal abuse.
Santos said he worked nine to 10 hours a day, mostly lifting heavy objects. He said he didn’t get protective equipment like gloves until he asked for them. Money for the gloves was taken from his pay, Santos said.
“I knew I was illegal. I was not feeling comfortable, but again, I left everything behind,” he said. “I left my college, I left my life and everything. And I was counting on the promised money.”
Canada Border Services said in a statement Wednesday it can’t comment on the specifics of Santos’s removal, because the details of individual cases are protected by the Privacy Act.
Anyone seeking entry to Canada “must present to the CBSA and may be subject to a more in-depth exam,” the agency said.
Their admissibility “is decided on a case-by-case basis and based on the information made available at the time of entry,” it said.
Crown prosecutor Sinclair told court workers at the site delayed medical treatments for job injuries out of fear of missing work, and some of the people working legitimately were also being underpaid.
Marty Minuk, Ahluwalia’s lawyer, said the construction company overseeing the Templeton Heights project had run out of people to work on the project, and Ahluwalia was at risk of defaulting on a loan arranged to build the project because no work was happening at the site.
“All of my family invested in the project,” Ahluwalia said in court. “About 50 families would have gone bankrupt.… This was the only option.”
The workers “enjoy all the benefits,” he said. “They get paid. They get money for the lodging, and here we are.”
Provincial court Judge Rachel Rusen told Ahluwalia part of the plea was for him to accept responsibility and express remorse about committing a crime.
“These are vulnerable people, sir,” she said. “They come here without the protections, they have no recourse, they have certainly fear of reprisal for things that can go wrong.”
Santos said “no one enjoyed” working illegally at the site.
“Winnipeg was in my heart because that was where I learned English, where I meet friends,” he said.
“I just went back there to try to … live the same memories [through] people that I thought I could trust.”
Canada Border Services said in an email Friday that no other individuals are facing charges at this time.
