Kanchi Uttamchandani | Assistant News Editor
Featured image: Leamington, known as North America’s greenhouse capital, was the town featured in the film Migrant Dreams. | Courtesy of Windsorite
Migrant Dreams, an award-winning documentary by York PhD student Min Sook Lee, was screened at a graduate students’ symposium last week. The film exposes the hardship of migrant workers in North America’s greenhouse capital, Leamington, housed in rural Ontario.
While Leamington is agriculturally successful, the documentary reveals the dark underside of the billion-dollar industry of greenhouse production by putting a spotlight on the dismal labour conditions of foreign migrant workers.
“We wanted to highlight both the ways in which migrant workers are exploited in Canada and the ways in which they resist that exploitation,” says Mark Thomas, director of the Global Labour Research Centre.
Guliz Akkaymak, a political science postdoctoral fellow, says the movie sparks pressing questions such as why foreign workers, despite filling Canada’s labour gap and working in the country for up to four years, aren’t given the opportunity to become permanent residents.
Akkaymak acknowledges that the federal government has prioritized a review and reform of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program, or TFWP. However, she believes the recent report of the standing committee on TFWP falls short of calling for the entire program to be completely reformed.
“The agricultural streams of the program, for example, are addressed only in one of the recommendations listed by the committee. Yet, what we need is a complete reform of the program and not a creation of exceptions for certain sectors,” asserts Akkaymak.
Work and labour studies professor and transnational community organizer Evelyn Encalada comments that migrant farmworkers are made invisible in Canada, and that Canadians need to pay closer attention to the people who grow and cultivate our food.
“Many Canadians have no idea that migrant workers have been coming to the country to work for 50 years, and during all this time in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program, they have not been able to access status and labour rights,” she says.
“An overhaul of labour policy is required, one that truly puts the rights of workers at the forefront rather than employers and the demand of capital.”
She envisions reforms in the immigration policy to grant residency and mobility to workers and their families and to treat them like skilled workers.
“Right now, their skills are considered as being low-skill, but the work in the farms and greenhouses is tough and specialized work that not everyone knows how to do,” adds Encalada.
Other changes she hopes to see include a migrant worker’s right to labour mobility to avoid getting tied to one employer, and that the government should immediately grant status upon arrival for migrant workers. This would mean ending the workers’ disposability when they get injured, sick or assert their rights.
