What: Press Conference
When: Friday, 23 January, 10:30 a.m.
Where: 110-4755 Avenue Van Horne, Montréal, QC H3W1H8
Spokes-persons:
- Three ex-workers of the IRIS agency
- Manuel Cardona Salamanca (community organizer, Immigrant Workers Centre)
- Ramatoulaye Diallo (treasurer, Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain – Confédération des syndicats nationaux)
Tio’tià:ke (Montreal), January 23, 2026. While the federal and Quebec governments have multiplied restrictions since 2024, exclusively focusing on reducing the number of migrants and immigrants, migrant workers are facing harsher abuse and more complex difficulties. In the first month of the year for which both governments have decided to further limit issuing immigration status, victims of an abusive private agency, are gathered together to share their experience and denounce the abuse as well as immigration policies producing precarity and injustice.
Ex-workers of the recruitment and placement agency IRIS are still following long, complex and complicated legal processes with the CNESST to recover more than 100 000 dollars of unpaid salaries and illegal recruitment fees charged by this agency and its owner M. Dieudionne Nidufasha.
However, the abuses were not only pecuniary or related to forbidden practices and reprisals. This agency and its manager did things such as administrative control, fraud, sending workers to non-authorized workplaces, hiding their documentation, manipulation of information, charging illegal fees, bad consulting on immigration, and others. Part of the consequences of these practices were the financial and immigration precarity of workers and in some cases the loss of migratory status.
Many of the mentioned practices are present in labour trafficking cases. This situation strongly questions the lack of control of the federal and provincial government for the private intermediaries of the labour market such as temp agencies, recruitment agencies and immigration consultants.
Despite having obtained an Open work permit for vulnerable workers more than a year ago, mostly in 2024, the legal processes are so long and dilated that these permits and status have expired, showing the inefficacy and limitation of this resource to protect workers. Now in their immigration precarity, these workers have submitted last year Temporary Resident Permits (TPR) to the Federal Government.
These workers demand the federal government to fix what they created with their immigration policies. It is worth to remember that it is the federal government who gave the IRIS agency the authorization to hire temporary foreign workers, so giving the agency the power and control over these workers, without assuring the compliance of the work conditions established by law, and allowing the agency to place them in different workplaces.
Now, in order for workers to continue to stay in the country and get the justice they need and to recover their salaries, they need their TRP demands treated and accepted in an expeditious way.
According to the workers, the practices of private intermediaries should be effectively regulated and measures should be put in place to protect workers against their abusive practices. They also reiterate their demands that the federal government abolish the closed work permit, which continually exposes migrant workers to situations of exploitation and trafficking. In addition, the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) notes that more and more migrants are losing their migratory status as a result of such abusive situations, and reiterates the urgent need for a comprehensive and inclusive regularisation programme for non-status migrants.
“We are doubly victimised: firstly by the IRIS agency, and secondly by the immigration system, which keeps us in a precarious situation,” says Christian, who prefers using a fictitious name because of the fear of reprisals. “Immigration authority is turning a blind eye and doesn’t want to accept that this situation is the natural consequence of a dysfunctional system” added another anonymous worker.
