A Financial Post columnist says Rebel News should stay out of Tim Hortons' hiring decisions. 

The piece, written by Matthew Lau, argued that businesses satisfy their social obligations by providing the best products at the lowest prices — and that Tim Hortons has no moral obligation to hire local workers over foreign ones.

Lau also took a sideways swipe at Rebel News, noting that Tim Hortons employs far more Canadians than the outlet does.

On Wednesday's Buffalo Roundtable, hosts Sheila Gunn Reid and Lise Merle shared their rebuttal to Lau's argument.

Sheila said she agreed with the free market principle in theory — but argued the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is the opposite of a free market.

“I have a very difficult time trying to understand the free market argument for temporary foreign labour that artificially depresses wages,” she said. “That's not the free market. That's a government intervention into the free market.”

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With youth unemployment at record levels and summer jobs increasingly becoming a thing of the past, the hosts argued Tim Hortons' reliance on the program is a decision propped up by policy that shuts Canadian workers out.

Lise went further, taking aim at Tim Hortons' smile cookie charity drives.

The campaign, she argued, relies on unpaid community volunteers to decorate the cookies, with Tim Hortons then donating the proceeds back to the same local charities — while collecting significant tax benefits in the process.

“They aren't doing this because they want to be benefactors to the local community,” she said. "They do this because they get such insane tax cuts from the federal government.”

Both hosts were nostalgic for the Tim Hortons of an earlier era, when stores had in-house bakeries, overnight staff, and local teenagers behind the counter. That institution, they said, is gone.

What remains is a convenient symbol of a much larger problem.

“There's always going to be a market for inedible food and crap coffee,” Lise said. “But for the rest of us who are identifying Tim Hortons as the symbol of everything that's wrong, we're going to go somewhere else.”

Sheila and Lise did, however, find one point of agreement with the Financial Post columnist: the market will decide. Canadians who object can vote with their wallets.