- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor
There are at least 1.7 million migrants - 1 in 23 residents in Canada - who do not have the basic rights the rest of us accept as just. On Sunday, September 18, people in the largest cities across the country joined their voices to call for change.
Amaris Terner, a high school student, signed on to organize support for migrant workers in the smallest community taking part in the national Day of Action - Clarksburg Ontario. Many of our Grey County fruit workers live in that community, coming from Mexico, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, some for 8 months a year and some for the six-week harvest, to send money back home to their families.
Amaris was inspired by a course at school, "Equity and Social Justice: From Theory to Practice" to act on behalf of the people she knew were working on the farms around her.
Some of these workers on our Grey County farms have been coming to Canada every apple season for as many as 40 years with no legal status in the country. Migrant workers pay Canadian taxes, and contribute to EI, from which they can never collect. They are tied to one employer, dependent on them for housing, trusting them to keep them safe. Migrants are excluded from healthcare and social services and cannot unite with their families. Lack of permanent resident status makes it difficult, and often impossible, for migrants to speak up for their rights at work or access services, including those they may be eligible for, because of a well-founded fear of reprisals, termination, eviction and deportation. Under the Seasonal Worker Program,if a worker makes a complaint, the employer can have them deported within 24-48 hours and of course they will not be chosen to work in Canada again.
The recent death of a farm worker from Jamaica, the fourth in Ontario in the past month, according to Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), moved a group of workers to take the unprecedented action of writing an open letter to the Jamaican government, asking for support. “As it currently stands, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) is "systematic slavery”, they say in the letter.
Farm workers are not the only migrant workers in our communities.
Most migrants in low-waged work do not have access to permanent residency so eventually they are forced to either leave Canada or stay in the country undocumented.
According to OXFAM Canada, when Covid began 25,000 migrant workers, mostly racialized women, were in Canada as caregivers. 1 in 3 lost their jobs during the pandemic with no ability to receive income supports. "These women care for our loved ones, and we reward them with poverty wages and precarious working status."
As many as 500,000 workers are undocumented, Many are unable to return to sending countries because of war, discrimination, lack of economic opportunities and/or because they have built relationships in Canada.
As parliament begins for the fall session, over 480 civil society organizations have already endorsed this call for immigration justice – regularization, Permanent Resident status and rights, and a path to citizenship, if the worker wants to remain in Canada.
sources include backround from the Migrant Workers Network