‘We’re like prisoners’: Concerns mount about the rapid increase in foreign workers on farms as Canada races toward almost $100-billion in food exports

“We’re like prisoners,” said Joshua (the Star has agreed to change his name for this story as he fears repercussions for speaking publicly).

Thousands of migrant workers like Joshua leave their homes and families each year to toil on Canadian farms, contributing to an industry that makes up more than seven per cent of Canada’s GDP. Ontario’s fruit and vegetable sectors alone generate more than $4.2 billion annually in economic activity, representing more than a third of Canada’s total production, according to the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association.

As Canada cements its place as the world’s fifth-largest agricultural exporter, the government expects to meet a lofty target of $95 billion in agri-food exports by 2028, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a $39-billion increase from 2016 when agri-food exports amounted to $56 billion.

This upward trajectory is shadowed by a looming labour crisis in the agriculture sector, with 40 per cent of Canadian farm operators expected to retire by 2033, according to a recent RBC report, raising concerns among experts and advocates who say the gap will increasingly be filled by temporary foreign workers who face precarious working and living conditions and no clear pathway to permanent residency.

“There’s a labour shortage because the conditions of work and the pay are terrible in the sector,” said Fay Faraday, a labour and human rights lawyer and professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

“So our agriculture industry depends on this precarious labour to fill those jobs.”

Foreign worker approvals up 68%

Thanks to an unprecedented labour crunch that saw the number of job vacancies in the country skyrocket to a record high of nearly one million, Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program — which allows Canadian employers to hire migrant workers to fill temporary jobs to address labour shortages — has been undergoing a massive expansion over the last year.

The majority of workers who enter Canada under the program work in primary agriculture (work performed within the boundaries of a farm, nursery or greenhouse), and the number of temporary foreign workers in food processing has steadily increased in recent years. The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), which is part of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, started in 1966 and ushers in migrant workers from Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America to help on farms for up to eight months a year before sending them home at the end of the harvest season.

Part of Canada’s strategy to grow the agriculture industry hinges on helping Canadian employers “hire temporary foreign workers to fill jobs, where labour shortages have been proven,” according to government officials.

Migrant workers comprised nearly one-quarter of all agricultural workers in Canada in 2021, according to Statistics Canada. More than 61,000 migrant workers were employed in Canada’s agriculture sector that year, an increase of almost 12 per cent from 2020.

Employers must undergo what’s known as labour market impact assessment (LMIA), when hiring foreign workers under the TFW program, to ensure there’s a need to fill the job, and they must receive a positive assessment from Employment and Social Development Canada to hire them.

Since 2016, LMIA approvals to hire temporary foreign workers have ballooned: in 2022, there were 221,933 approvals — an increase of 68 per cent from the year before.

According to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, farm workers in the program had 315,484 work permits issued from 2016 to October 2022, the highest number of permits among occupations.

And the expansion of foreign workers in the agriculture sector doesn’t seem to be slowing anytime soon.

In September, the federal government rolled out the Recognized Employer Pilot Program, meant to reduce red tape and make it easier for Canadian employers to bring in temporary foreign workers.

Federal Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Lawrence MacAulay said the new pilot will help secure Canada’s food supply chain.

“It is vital that Canadian employers, including farmers and food processors, are able to hire workers who are critical to food production and food security in Canada,” he said.

During consultations with industry stakeholders and provincial governments in 2022 on the development of a national agricultural labour strategy to address chronic labour shortages in farming, there was a “recognition that the sector will continue to rely on temporary foreign workers as a critical labour source.”

The consultations found that “employers are unable to find the workers they need and are having difficulty attracting employees to the sector due to challenges such as rural location, type of work and wages.”

Risk of worker exploitation

With thousands of farmers set to retire in the next decade, the RBC report found Canada will need 30,000 new immigrants to establish new farms and greenhouses or take over existing ones to keep the sector sustainable.

But farming, even for Canadian residents, is a precarious occupation, said Jennifer Pfenning, president of the National Farmers Union.

“There are a lot of people who are moving off farms because it’s hard to make a living,” Pfenning said. “Even if you work really hard, that doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to be able to succeed financially. It’s economically almost impossible in some cases,” she said.

“Within this society it’s a lot easier to find work that pays the bills in sectors other than farming.”

For their part, industry observers are warning that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is establishing a growing second tier of workers without the same rights and protections resident workers have, resulting in mistreatment of migrant workers.

In September, Tomoya Obokata, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, said Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker programs are a “breeding ground” for modern forms of slavery and that he was “deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared” with him by migrant workers during a two-week fact-finding mission to Canada.

Obokata specifically expressed concern for “low-wage and agricultural streams of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as the workers at the higher risk of labour exploitation, which may amount to forced labour or servitude.”

Osgoode law school’s Faraday said temporary labour is far from a sustainable solution for growing labour gaps in the agriculture sector, and creates barriers for much-needed talent to put down roots in the country.

“There are agriculture workers who’ve been migrating to Canada for decades and for their entire working careers, who have no status in the country,” she said. “But the minute they get sick, the minute they’re injured, they’re out of here.”

Leroy Thomas worked as a seasonal farm worker in Canada for 16 years, leaving his family in Jamaica for months at a time. But when the 48-year-old fell off a wagon in 2017 while working on an Ontario tobacco farm, he dislocated his spine.

Thomas said he was repatriated after the injury because it prevented him from continuing to work on the farm.

The injury left him in deep financial distress. Once back in Jamaica, he said he could not afford to continue medical treatment because the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board stopped long-term income-loss benefits after 12 weeks.

“It has been devastating,” Thomas said, adding that his marriage fell apart under the financial pressures.

Agricultural workers face multiple health and safety issues and because their status in the country is tied to one employer, they often fear complaining about injury or illness, says Chris Ramsaroop, an activist with Justicia for Migrant Workers.

“Workers deal with spraying of pesticides and chemicals, working in extreme heat, the pace of the work which affects their well-being,” Ramsaroop said.

Although the federal government conducts investigations of employers using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, employers are given notice before the inspection takes place. Last year, more than 2,100 inspections were carried out but only 116 workplaces were found non-compliant.

Of the 766 employers on a public registry of employers who broke the rules over the past seven years, the most frequent violation was wage theft — not providing the pay promised in the contract. Only seven employers were banned even temporarily from hiring migrant workers through this program and 23 were given warnings.

At the Vancouver farm where he is currently employed, Joshua said workers are being made to do dangerous construction and maintenance work on a greenhouse without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), even though it’s not part of their contract.

Several workers have been injured, he said.

“When I asked the supervisor for some gloves and PPE, he said we had to work with our bare hands,” Joshua said. “The supervisor said, ‘If you want to go home, you can go. We don’t need you.’ ”

Keeping employers in check

While the government often deems the work migrant workers undertake as essential, the ways for workers to get permanent residence are limited. Economists and activists say as the foreign worker program balloons, it’s creating a surge of cheap labour which disincentivizes companies from raising wages and improving conditions.

“We don’t have a labour shortage. We have a wage shortage because people aren’t being offered the wages they are looking for to take certain jobs,” said Sheila Block, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“It’s rather ironic that it’s a temporary program and they’re considered temporary workers, but we’ve been needing them to come for over 50 years,” Pfenning said. “Not very temporary, is it?”

Granting migrant workers permanent status is beneficial to the economy and keeps employers in check, Faraday said.

“It ensures that employers follow the law because workers who have status and who have rights can assert those rights and can walk away from jobs that are exploitative,” she said.

“It will ensure that employers are held more closely to the law and that there is the kind of security that allows people to put down roots and ensure that there’s sustainable growth in the country.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald said in an email that changes have been made to the program to protect workers. He said that as of 2019, foreign workers with an employer-specific work permit are able to apply for an open work permit — which is not tied to a single employer — if they are being mistreated by their current employer.

MacDonald pointed to several pathways for temporary workers to gain permanent residency status including the agricultural worker pilot program.

“Anyone can apply for permanent residence in Canada provided they meet the qualifications,” MacDonald said, when asked whether the government plans to make permanent status more accessible.

Yet these qualifications are often impossible to obtain for workers, requiring them to have a certain level of education and get a letter from the very employers that exploit them, said Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

Other programs MacDonald listed, like the Express Entry program, only grant permanent status for “high-skilled occupations.”

“The immigration system divides workers into low- and high-skilled and only grants permanent residency to people who are deemed to be high-skilled,” Hussan said.

“But these are in no way low-skill jobs — it is incredibly skilled work to plant, harvest, trim, pack and prepare food. There is heavy machinery and incredible use of pesticides. There’s large chunks of area that are managed by migrants themselves.”

For Joshua, who has been thinking of leaving Canada for good after being mistreated as a migrant worker, getting status would mean he could safely build a life here.

“The fact that we’re being brought here from miles away means that we, and our work, is needed,” he said. “The work that one of us does here is equivalent to three people. We have to work 10 times as fast, 10 times as hard and they (employers) get way more production and have to pay less for it.”

“So it’s not too much to ask for a bit of decency and justice.”

Correction - Nov. 6, 2023: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Leroy Thomas’ age and how long he had worked as a seasonal farm worker in Canada.