For those who love to grow food at home, spring in southern Ontario is a time to draw up plans for their garden. Perhaps small tomato plants (started from seed in March) are already as tall as a teacup. For professional farms, it means the arrival of workers, primarily from Mexico and the Caribbean, brought to Canada through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program stream of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Farming is hard work that most Canadians do not want to do. From spring to fall, SAWP migrant farm workers are paid minimum wage, without overtime. In Ontario, they are covered by OHIP, but as they live on farms without personal transportation, they’re often unable to access health care. They pay into Canada’s Employment Insurance, yet cannot draw on those benefits when needed; they are sent back home after the harvest season and are unable to file an EI claim from outside the country. And because their TFWP status is tied to the employer who brought them here, they face repatriation for speaking up against unfair or illegal work or living conditions.
These issues are illustrated in The Canadian Dream, a short documentary premiering this spring at the Hot Docs festival. “It is like a prison,” Alberto Moreno Sartorius tells his daughter, filmmaker Ilse Moreno, about working on a tomato farm in Leamington. He recounts an experience of using pesticides unsafely: His skin turned red and burned, and he contacted the office that had hired him in Xalapa, Mexico. Later, his crew boss pulled him aside to discuss the emailed complaint, which had circulated back to his employer. “She showed it to me and laughed at me.” After he sought support from the Ministry of Labour in Ontario, his employer presented him with a letter of resignation for him to sign. In a rare twist, Moreno refused to leave, found help from the organization Justice for Migrant Workers, sued his employer, and won. This is not how it goes for most migrant workers.
In his recent memoir, Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Worker in Canada, Gabriel Allahdua recounts a long career in agriculture and education in St. Lucia, followed by his experiences in the tomato greenhouses of southern Ontario: 14-hour days/seven days a week sharing a 300-square-foot, florescent-lit room with seven other men, risking termination for objecting to unsafe conditions, such as pesticides being sprayed nearby.
Now a Canadian citizen, Allahdua works for the Neighbourhood Organization, supporting migrant workers. At the start of the farm season, I spoke with Allahdua about farm work, new policies, and what needs to change moving forward.
TVO Today: What advice do you have for workers now arriving to Ontario farms for the first time?
Gabriel Allahdua: You’re seen as a unit of production and not a human being. Be prepared for difficult working and living conditions. Most of the time it’s overcrowded — the bedroom and kitchen situation. There’s always competition for the limited appliances that are there. Be prepared for very difficult, exploitative conditions. Be prepared to face conditions where you’re not treated fairly, equally, like a Canadian. Be prepared to face conditions that dehumanize you.
TVO Today: Can you be more specific?
Allahdua: Workers are being surveilled and monitored for work performance. They would have you run, run, run. Most farms have a piece-rate system, and they put up a chart to show the amount people are running. If you find yourself at the bottom, they will question you, sometimes caution, or it could escalate to termination. I get calls from workers who have been terminated. They say every week the workers who find themselves on the bottom of the chart are penalized by staying one or two days in the bunkhouse without working. And without working, there’s no pay.
TVO Today: How is the start of the farm season different from the rest?Allahdua: It depends on the farm. In an apple orchard, in the springtime there will be lots of pruning. However, in the open field with vegetables being cultivated, there’ll be a lot of transplanting. In a greenhouse, at the beginning of the season, some workers would come up as early as January. Because it is short daylight, they learn basic agronomic practices.
TVO Today: What about crops that are sown from seed directly into the soil?
Allahdua: A lot of the vegetable farms I’ve been to, there’s a lot of transplanting. And the direct seeding, like with carrots — that was done by machine.
TVO Today: Southern Ontario has a huge agricultural sector. Yet most of the population has never been to a commercial farm. What should the average Canadian know about how migrant farmers work and how they live?
Allahdua: A lot of the laws that are designed to protect workers in Canada, migrant workers are excluded — overtime pay, minimum wage, statutory holidays, rest period. Migrant workers have a work permit that is tied to the employer, so they are at the employer’s mercy. We live on the farm. We are the farmer’s property. The more urbanized Canada becomes, the more disconnected people are from how their food is grown. The people who profit from this system in Canada, they continue to push the idea of the family farm. The current food system has gone long past that. During COVID, with unemployment so high, I thought Canadians would go to the farm to produce their food. But even during crisis, Canadians do not want to learn.
TVO Today: Canada introduced the Recognized Employer Pilot, which enables employers who meet certain standards to import workers for the three years of the pilot without having to apply for a new Labour Market Impact Assessment each year. What do you make of that policy?
Allahdua: It’s just more power to the employer. It makes it easier for them to satisfy their labour requirements. That does not address the vulnerabilities of the worker.
TVO Today: A common complaint about the current system is the status of workers in Canada being tied to a single employer. This puts workers in a precarious position, afraid to criticize working conditions for fear of being terminated and repatriated. What do workers tell you about the situations they face?
Allahdua: The issues are very abusive working conditions. In 2019, the government came up with the Open Work Permit for vulnerable workers, for workers who are in abusive conditions. But you can only get it for a maximum of one year. And to get out of this abusive situation, the workers have to get their own house and their own job. Think of how the cost of living has gone sky-high in Canada. To get your own housing in this current market of housing crisis, is that practical? And to get housing relatively close to your workplace?
What the workers want, at the end of the pay cycle, is a chance to support their family, which is what really drives them to come to Canada. They will not do anything to risk being sent back home. So where the government will tell the public that migrant workers in an abusive situation can apply for an Open Work Permit, that sounds nice on the surface, but the devil is in the details. And this is what workers are telling me. They would like to do it, but they cannot do it.
TVO Today: What would you like to see change about Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program?
Allahdua: The number one thing is the power imbalance. And status is the way to address that. It's not a case where the workers can say: things are difficult in Canada, or I am in an abusive situation, so let me go back home. No. Our economies back home are contracting. To a migrant worker, if I have status, I’m not afraid of speaking up. It takes care of our immigration vulnerability. It takes care of our labour vulnerability. If my employer knows I can work for anyone willing to employ me, they will create the conditions to attract and keep me.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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