Cooper Institute - L'institut Cooper

Building Community: Temporary Foreign Workers in Prince Edward

 As I’m sure everyone is aware, there has been a significant increase in the numbers of temporary foreign workers in PEI in the past few years. These workers are working in more and more sectors, not only agriculture and food processing, but as Live-in Caregivers, Truckers, in food service, and hospitality.

 To provide a bit of context: There are two main programs that we are dealing with in PEI: The Mexicans working in agriculture are under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). These workers can work in Canada for up to eight months, and must return to Mexico for the other four months of the year.

Workers in PEI from Russia, China, Thailand, the Filipines, India, and Guatemala work in fish plants, food processing plants, trucking, nursing homes, hospitality, food service, and other jobs considered “low skill” and are simply called “low skill” Temporary Foreign Workers. Many of the so-called “low skilled” workers have university education. These workers have paid thousands of dollars to an employment agent in their home country to find them a job in Canada. This class of workers can work contracts in Canada for up to two years. This program has far fewer regulations than the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.

It is important to remember that the realities of these workers are not so different from the economic reality that Islanders could face. For instance, the Mexican agricultural workers come to Canada because of economic policies that, over 30 years, entirely eliminated the viability of farmers in rural Mexico. Mexican Workers are trying desperately to find a way to give their families a good quality of life, and this means leaving their families for up to 8 months of the year. I think that islanders can relate to this, since so many rural islanders have already lost their land and livelihood and go west to find work that will support their families. Islanders could easily be in the same situation.

This issue can’t be understood without putting it in a National context. Under this current government the temporary foreign worker program has been expanded to an extraordinary degree. The vast majority of this program’s growth takes the form of low-skilled wage laborers. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, in 2009 there were over 280,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. That is almost 30,000 more temporary workers than permanent residents who immigrated to Canada in the same year. This is a very important shift – away from welcoming individuals and their families, offering them equal legal rights and a path to citizenship, and towards a system that imports exploitable wage labourers with limited access to legal rights, and very limited avenues towards citizenship. This means no stability for temporary foreign workers and no long-term responsibility to these workers who are making considerable contributions to the Canadian economy.

On a provincial, community level, however, there is a desire for the workers, many of whom return year after year, to become permanent community members through permanent residency status. Rural communities in PEI are in need of young families. Not only are adults willing to work locally and work hard, but their children attending rural schools and churches can help to keep these communities alive. PEI is one of the better provinces for Temporary Foreign Workers to attain permanent residency, through the Provincial Nominee Program, in the Critical Labour Stream of the Labour Impact Category. If these workers can find a non-seasonal job and their employer will offer them a contract of at least two years, they can apply for permanent residency. Some low-skilled workers take this route, with the help of community members who can help them navigate the system.

United Food and Commercial Workers Canada (UFCW) has been doing a great deal of work with Temporary Foreign Workers across Canada. Their attitude is that if an individual is good enough to work in this country year after year, they should be allowed to live in this country and enjoy all of the rights and services as a permanent resident.

Locally, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is incredibly difficult to regulate. Since it is a federal program, run through Service Canada and Citizenship and Immigration, no one on the provincial level knows how many Temporary Foreign Workers are in PEI, who their employers are, and where they are living. As of yet, these federal departments have not provided all of this information to the provincial government. This has left the provincial Labour Relations Board, the organization responsible for inspections, to learn through word-of-mouth where workers are. This makes the temporary foreign worker program very hard to regulate. The labour relations board only conducts inspections if there is a complaint, and in that case, they call the day before to notify them that an inspection is forthcoming. There is also no staff person in the province whose job it is to serve temporary foreign workers or look out for their well being.

I’m going to say a little bit more about the vulnerability of temporary foreign workers. As we’ve seen recently in the well publicized case of the Mariner Seafood plant in Montague, workers complained about unpaid hours, breaches in their contract, and unjust pay deductions. 11 of the workers who complained were fired and kicked out of their housing. Most workers are not able to achieve a victory in this capacity, or wait the almost 2 years for the hearing to take place. Workers can be kicked out of Canada and prevented from coming back if they become ill, or if they raise concerns about any aspect of their work, housing, or safety conditions. They are very dependent on their employers for housing, and for good yearly evaluations. A poor evaluation means that workers may not be allowed back into Canada. Add to this that many workers have very limited English, and little knowledge of the system and their vulnerability becomes quite clear.

How many of these workers are in PEI? According to the provincial government’s estimates, there were about 600 Temporary Foreign Workers in PEI in 2009, and there are plans to increase this to 5000 by the year 2015.

We should also be asking questions about the impact of this planned 10 fold increase in temporary foreign workers in PEI. If 5000 seasonal wage labour jobs are carried out by temporary workers, industry in PEI will no longer have to rely on relationships with local workers and local communities to function. Wages will not be going into the local economy, but to families of workers who are not permitted to move to Canada. The reality that local food production depends more and more on temporary labour, raises serious questions about Prince Edward Island’s long-term food sovereignty.

Cooper Institute has recently started work on a project to learn more about the issues surrounding temporary foreign workers in PEI. At this stage we are conducting research in the form of interviews – with workers, co-workers, community members, employers, and agencies implementing the program. We will be producing a report, and holding interactive community workshops on the subject. Finally we will produce a series of policy recommendations directed at the government. In doing this project, we are valuing cultural diversity, food sovereignty, and labour justice, for both workers, and farmers.  Farmers are one of the main employers for migrant workers in PEI, and farmers need to be part of the conversation to find ways to make fair and sustainable regulations around hiring and retaining foreign workers. I’d like to express my thanks to the NFU for your interest and involvement in this project, and to Reg Phelan for his participation in the project’s reference group, as well as to the Campbell Webster Foundation for their financial contribution.