My name is Stan Raper. I'm the national coordinator for the agricultural workers program of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
We have been active in lobbying and trying to organize and assist agricultural workers nationally across Canada and primarily in the two provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which have the majority of the population of seasonal agricultural workers, under the seasonal agricultural workers program administered by HRSDC.
I have a couple of comments that I want to make.
We have been actively trying to organize agricultural workers across Canada for a number of years. Before I was employed with the UFCWU, I was the Canadian coordinator for the United Farm Workers of America and was trained by Richard Chavez and Dolores Huerta, co-founders of the United Farm Workers of America.
I don't know if any of you were involved in the grape boycotts and the struggle to organize agricultural workers in California and other parts of the United States, but we watched with great interest the amnesty movement in the United States.
People always come up to me to ask where Canada's amnesty program for invisible migrant workers is and why we aren't out on the streets. I think the answer falls under the mandate of this committee.
I say that because most of the agricultural workers in Ontario, for example, don't have the right to unionize. Farmers are in mandatory association affiliations. As to the balance for farmers and the balance for workers, there is no organization for agricultural workers in Ontario or across Canada for the most part.
What happened was this. We had a piece of legislation, we organized workers, and that bill was revoked by the Harris government in Ontario. Farmers were ordered into mandatory affiliations to three organizations in the province: the Ontario Federation of Agriculture; the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario; or the Canadian Farmworkers Union. It was mandatory, and they could opt out only by written submission to the minister.
Agricultural workers have no real right to collectively bargain in the province of Ontario. You see an invisible group of workers, in the hundreds of thousands, that basically has no organization to represent them or to speak on their behalf.
It gets worse, because on top of that, we also have seasonal agricultural workers from Jamaica, St. Kitts, Trinidad and Tobago, and Mexico. These workers have been coming into the country and come for eight months of the year. For the most part, 80% are in Ontario.
These workers have been coming for over 40 years, and have no right or no opportunity to apply for immigration status at all. They have temporary work permits. They come here to work anywhere between January 1 and December 15. They have to go home for 15 days, and then they can come back. There are between 15,000 and 16,000 agricultural workers under the SAW program in Ontario alone.
These workers are separated from their families for eight months of the year and work in fairly isolated situations in rural Ontario, rural Quebec, or rural B.C. They have language barrier problems, limited understanding of their rights, and very little orientation. Consulate officials, who are supposed to represent them, are basically maintaining their contract with the employer, the farmer. And they live on the farms, so if they have problems, they go to their employer. If they have a good employer, they're lucky; if they have a bad employer, they're in big trouble.
On top of that, we now have a new program, the foreign workers program, which is supplying workers to the agricultural sector as well.
I just want to give you one example before I start. The mushroom industry in Ontario has been trying for a long time to be covered under the seasonal agricultural workers program, but with no success. The federal government, to their credit, recognizes that the mushroom industry is the high end of the agricultural sector and has not allowed the mushroom industry to get seasonal agricultural workers. Most of the workers in the mushroom industry are new Canadians or Canadians who have come within the last 15 to 20 years—Cambodian, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Chinese, a lot of whom have language problems still—and who find themselves harvesting mushrooms at a piece rate in order to survive.
What is happening now is that the industry in Ontario is about 50% foreign workers under the low-skilled workers program. What employers are doing is forcing new Canadians out of their jobs—fairly decent-paying jobs that they could survive on—in order to get foreign workers under the low-skilled workers program at $9.10 an hour.
We wrote to the Minister of HRSDC, to the Minister of Agriculture in Ontario, to the Minister of Labour in Ontario, with no response—no response whatsoever, no investigation into how these migrant workers, who live in Canada, in Ontario, are being displaced by foreign workers coming in from Thailand and Jamaica.
I just heard last night that more workers are coming into the Belleville area. More workers are being displaced who live in Belleville, and there's still no response from either government. I'm ashamed, because some of these workers have been in the industry for 16 years.
We'll have testimonies of individuals coming forward in the next couple of weeks. Sixteen years: he came from Cambodia, got a job in the mushroom industry and has been in that industry ever since, and was displaced and replaced by a worker from Thailand who just came in and is working for $9.10 an hour. That goes against everything the immigration program under ARPA is about, and against why these programs were put in place.
I understand work shortages. I don't understand displacement of Ontario-resident agricultural workers in order to appease a cheap labour force from another country in order to exploit them, and that is what's happening.
I want to address, on page 16, repatriation under the seasonal agricultural workers program. When migrant workers raise issues or concerns to their employers they're at very real risk of being sent home under the SAWP repatriation provisions. They are removed from the country within a day or two and may not be allowed to participate in the program in future years.
This ability to repatriate workers, allowing them no opportunity to appeal, is a fundamental inequality of the SAWP that must be remedied. Until there is a fair and equitable process of appeal, the provisions of the SAWP contracts are meaningless for the workers. There is little supervision or enforcement of the contractual obligations, and a worker risks repatriation if he tries to ensure that the contract is honoured.