A Nigerian asylum seeker in Canada, Taofeek Olajide, said he’s stunned by what he described as systemic corruption in Canada akin to Nigeria’s after an employer allegedly scammed him and other workers of over $100,000 in unpaid wages despite gruelling working hours.
In an interview memoir with Toronto Life, Mr Olajide narrated that he arrived in Canada with $200 in October 2023 and immediately applied for asylum due to what he claimed as the danger of living in Nigeria as a queer man.
He was then placed on $730 monthly allowance by the Canadian government as a refugee to settle in Toronto.
However, Mr Olajide disclosed that the situation quickly turned exploitative upon landing his first job at Sunrise Caribbean, a local restaurant chain shortly after he was granted a work permit.
Due to his eagerness to work, the victim alleged that he unknowingly agreed to a $12 hourly minimum wage instead of the then $16.55 per hour rate in Toronto, which later suffocated his financial stability.
“As soon as I received my work permit, I began looking for a job. An acquaintance referred me to his employer, Sunrise Caribbean, a local restaurant chain. He told me to text one of the managers, a woman named Shanny, who replied that I could start immediately.
“I just had to attend two days of unpaid training at a branch of the restaurant. She promised to pay me $12 an hour to work in the kitchen — I didn’t realise until much later that the minimum wage was then $16.55 per hour. I was just grateful to have a job offer so quickly after arriving in Canada,” Mr Olajide said.
The 56-year-old narrated that he only realised the gravity of his situation after starting the job in December, when he was forced to jostle between the restaurant’s three locations that are several kilometres apart, while working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, which negatively affected his health, causing constant headaches and disrupting his religious practice.
“At that point, I had constant headaches from the long hours. I told my manager that, in addition to back pay, I needed at least one day off a week. I asked for Friday because I’m Muslim and I wanted to start going to a mosque again,” he said.
Despite the tedious nature of the job, Mr Olajide said that his employer constantly owed him salaries, leaving him unable to fend for himself or send money to his family in Nigeria and made him become very angry.
He stated, “Things began to go awry after that. I kept working gruelling hours every day, but the rest of January came and went without me seeing another cent of wages. I messaged the owner, but he was evasive. I got a cheque in early February, but it again covered less than a third of what I was owed, which was almost $3,500 at that point.”
Mr Olajide narrated that he and other employees of Sunrise Caribbean in collaboration with workers’ rights non-profit, the Workers’ Action Centre, eventually launched a series of protests against the restaurant in late 2024 that garnered attention offline and on social media but received no response from the restaurant’s management.
In November 2024, a complaint was subsequently filed with the Canadian Ministry of Labour, which ruled in favour of the plaintiffs in February 2025 and determined that the Sunrise Caribbean owed the thirteen former employees nearly $115,000 in wages plus $133,000 in damages, totalling $248,000.
Mr Olajide also said that his share of the money was $10,000 in wages and $20,000 in damages.
He stated that he thought corruption was only prevalent in Nigeria, adding that his view changed in Canada following his experience with Sunrise Caribbean.
Mr Olajide added, “My share came to more than $10,000 in wages and $20,000 in damages. It felt so validating to have the official documentation in front of me. When I fled Nigeria, I believed that I had left behind a corrupt state that rendered laws meaningless and enabled the abuse of its most marginalized residents: refugees, recent immigrants, the poor. But this experience in Canada has made me afraid for the future of my adoptive country — and less sure that I’ve left all that behind.”
