Good evening everyone.
My name is Lucio Castracani. I will be giving you a brief description of our association and addressing a number of issues we have encountered in the course of our work.
L'Association des travailleuses et travailleurs étrangers temporaires was founded in November 2013 to deal with the increase in this type of recruitment, but also to respond to requests for help we were receiving from temporary foreign workers.
According to statistics on labour market impact assessments in 2014, in Quebec, there were about 16,000 applications, of which 10,000 were from the agricultural sector.
Our association includes members who work not only in the agricultural sector, but also in slaughterhouses, industrial laundry facilities, and landscaping. These workers come from many different countries.
Our experience with members of the association has taught us that there are a good number of problems with the program. Take the case of Francisco, for example, for whom access to permanent residency is difficult. These workers face other problems, such as closed work permits and difficulty accessing health care, in spite of the fact that they pay taxes in Canada.
We also have Guatemalan workers hired as chicken catchers who were forced to continue working by their employers after a workplace accident, despite a doctor's advice to the contrary, which jeopardized their health. Furthermore, when these workers took steps to obtain medical care in Quebec thanks to our support, the employer threatened to deport them.
More recently, we had a case where a Guatemalan worker was deported and kicked out of the program because his employer had decided to grow magic mushrooms. He found himself back in his home country and also in debt, because he had borrowed money to pay the agency in order to come to Canada, when he simply could have changed employers and kept working legally in Canada.
In conclusion, I would say that these stories are not bad apples. They are an expression of structural problems with the program. We think that to resolve these issues, all of the workers need to be given open work permits and permanent residence.
Thank you.