When he found out in 2011 that he was approved to come to Canada for a job as a seasonal agricultural worker, the 45-year-old was ecstatic.
He was unemployed at the time in his native Saint Lucia, an island in the eastern Caribbean, and thought "Canada came to the rescue" with the chance to once again provide for his family.
Clerking in a convenience store is a rite of passage for many Japanese university students: the classic part-time job. At retail group Lawson’s training centres, young recruits learn polite phrases to greet customers, before fanning out to its thousands of stores across Japan.
Canada may make it easier for temporary foreign workers to get permanent residency and eventual citizenship, Immigration Minister John McCallum said on Sunday.
Speaking on CTV television's "Question Period," a national politics talk show, McCallum did not give details, saying he was waiting for a parliamentary report on the matter to be introduced in September.
"Tolerance cannot come at the price of our security. We need to know who is crossing our borders. We will defend our borders with the new European Border and Coast Guard. We will defend our borders with strict controls on everyone crossing them." – President Juncker, State of the Union 2016.