Evidence of meeting #26 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 39th Parliament, 2nd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was worker.
Parkdale Community Legal Services
Yes. I do those cases, and I know how many hours they take and how much it would cost, and they're basically not an appeal.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
In addition, if you have a hearing, you're entitled to have the Federal Court have a look at it. Now, with the refugee appeal division coming into place, you actually have the opportunity, in addition to all of that, to appeal the decision of the first board.
Parkdale Community Legal Services
No other country in the world that has a respectable refugee determination system does not have an appeal on the merits--
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
My question was simple. In addition to all those others, could you appeal?
Conservative
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Having said that, would you not agree that at some point you need an end to the process?
Parkdale Community Legal Services
Our Parliament passed the RAD. We agreed to a refugee appeal division in Parliament in 2001, and we do not have an appeal.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Yes, but the appeal is.... It's in the Senate, and when it receives royal assent, you will have--
Conservative
Parkdale Community Legal Services
I think it will make a huge difference if we do have an appeal.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Do you think there should be some change or reform to the system to ensure that somehow you have one process that's appealable, as opposed to a series of four or five different processes, which can take sometimes four, five, six, or even seven years?
Parkdale Community Legal Services
I think that if the resources are there, the process that we have can work properly and efficiently and fairly, and when we're talking about lives at stake, I don't think one or two years in a process is something that we can--
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Do you think after eight years it's a bit long?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
I want to give Mr. Bellissimo a chance to have a word on this, because he's been trying to respond.
Certified Specialist, Barrister and Solicitor, As an Individual
I just want to back up what Geraldine is saying.
I agree with you that there needs to be an end to a process, but a process is defined by what you are engaging in at certain points. If you had a meaningful appeal at one point in the process, you wouldn't have four or five steps later to deal with pieces of the pie. That's one thing.
Second, if you're going to attack the agency, that's the safety valve of the system. The overseas agency--
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Are you saying, then, that if you have a RAD implemented so that there is an appeal, you don't want the others?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
I would love to keep up the debate, but we do have a panel that we have to hear.
I want to thank all of you for your submissions here today. I apologize if some people got a little bit hot under the collar today, but sometimes that's the way it goes in a partisan forum, unfortunately.
We're making great progress, I believe, and you're helping us tremendously. We will be making recommendations based upon what you are telling us here today. Thank you.
We will break for a moment to let our next committee witnesses come to the table.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
The committee will now come to order. This will be our last panel for today.
We have Chris Ramsaroop, national organizer of Justicia for Migrant Workers.
From the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, we have Navjeet Sidhu. He's a researcher. We have Zenia Castanos, intern. And we have André Lyn. Welcome.
Alberto Lalli is with the Industrial Accident Victims Group of Ontario. You have a cheering group at the back. And we have Consuelo Rubio, community legal worker, Centre for Spanish Speaking People, Industrial Accident Victims Group of Ontario.
Welcome here today.
We have about an hour. Try to ignore, as best you can, all the noise in the background. We have a committee room that's adjacent to a lot of activity, so we're getting a lot of competition.
I invite you to make opening comments. It will be seven minutes from a representative of the group.
You are first, Chris, and then we will go to Zenia.
Chris, go ahead.
Chris Ramsaroop National Organizer, Justicia for Migrant Workers
Good afternoon.
I want to thank this committee for providing Justicia for Migrant Workers with the opportunity to present to you about the conditions of migrant agricultural workers in Canada.
Many members of Justicia have been organizing the fields of southern Ontario for more than seven years. In one sense, it is ironic that you are giving us the equivalent of one minute for each year we've been organizing workers but to also note the disparate discussion that has occurred among both policy-makers and governing officials to engage with workers employed under the most precarious conditions.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Norman Doyle
Chris, could you slow down a bit for the translation people in the booth behind us?
National Organizer, Justicia for Migrant Workers
All right.
To put it simply, we are not interested in you, the elected officials, using this as an opportunity to expand indentureship and exploitation. Nor are we here to support the expansion of employer-driven programs, which by their very nature lead to the countless testimonials of abuse and injustice that have been reported to us hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
You are here today to question us about the conditions. I'm here to challenge you to listen to the demands of these migrant workers. Engage in discussions with these workers. Respect their demands for fairness and inclusion, which is something no governing party has afforded to these men and women in the over 40 years that this program has been in operation. To simply treat these workers, their families, and their communities as silent, expendable, and invisible foreign labourers denies their humanity--something that has manifested itself in deplorable living and working conditions across this nation.
Nandita Sharma, an academic at the University of Hawaii, eloquently argues that temporary programs and regulations such as the non-employment industrial authorization program render migrant workers socially and politically powerless here in Canada. Their non-immigrant status is used to deny them the civil, political, and social rights normally associated with citizenship.
I'm now going to go through our demands. After our demands, I'll be highlighting three points associated with our demands, and then I'll conclude.
We have 15 points that we'd like to raise with you today.
First is respecting and implementing the recommendations of the Arthurs report. Some of you might remember the report on federal labour standards from about two years ago. Section 10 deals with vulnerable workers and goes into detail, at some point, on temporary workers.
Second is more transparent and accountable reporting mechanisms accounting for detailed information pertaining to workers' repatriation, deportation, medical repatriation, as well as information pertaining to death, injuries, and reasons for deportation.
Third is redefinition of the jurisdiction of migrant labourers under the provisions of the federal labour code. As migrant workers come to Canada under a federal labour program, they should be under similar jurisdiction.
Fourth is immediate regularization and status now, not only for current participants of the program, but for previous agricultural workers and their families. We also support broad-based status, as many of the other organizations have called for.
Fifth is an end to unilateral repatriation and deportation of migrant workers. This is the crux, I think, of the problem we're seeing: the fact that these workers are being unilaterally repatriated or deported back to their home country.
Sixth is enforcement of Canada's health care act. We hold that each province violates aspects of the act in the area of protection for migrant agricultural workers. Some of my colleagues have spoken before about this as well.
Seventh is the abolition of employer-driven programs. No worker should be indentured to one site of employment, or one employer, or one sector.
Eighth is revision of their social entitlements to ensure that migrant workers receive equal access and equitable access to employment insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, and other benefits, which I'm sure some of my colleagues will also speak about as well.
Ninth is termination of employer-sanctioned organizations such as FARMS, the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services. It is a conflict of interest for employers to run, govern, and administer a program where workers are voiceless.
Tenth is an increase to minimum wage--which we hope would also come under both the federal or any type of provincial jurisdiction.
Eleventh is greater enforcement of working and living conditions under which migrant workers are housed.
When persecution of bad employers occurs, every necessary step needs to be taken to ensure that workers' rights are protected and that they're neither deported nor face reprisal.
The last thing I want to raise is the fact that migrant agricultural workers here cannot access our educational institutions. Those barriers that deny them this access also have to be eliminated. They should be allowed access to education here.
I want to highlight three things: one, the fact that workers do not have the right to regularization; two, the repatriation process, which I talked about earlier; and three, health care.
From the provincial jurisdiction of HRSDC--the Ontario office of HRDC--we've been able to get the following statistics:
We know that during the period of 1996 to 2008, there were over 2,510 workers sent home for “breach of contract”; over 1,006 workers were sent home for medical reasons; and over 3,002 workers were sent home for “domestic reasons”. Because we do not have more information about this, we know that many of these workers are basically going home and not receiving adequate representation here to appeal their processes, or they're getting injured or sick on the job, and in many cases they're going home to die.
Because of the conditions on some of these farms, we know that close to 3,000 people have gone so-called AWOL. We have received various testimony saying that because of poor working conditions and because there is no access to health care, these workers are being forced to run from their farms to make sure they get adequate support or the health care they need.
You've heard my colleagues speak about the repatriation. The repatriation clause of these contracts acts as a form of coercion. It basically makes sure that workers are voiceless. We've heard so many different reasons that workers are being sent home: complaining about bad housing conditions and pesticides; trying to have a social life; breaking curfew. At the end of the day, so many injustices are being accorded to this unilateral form of repatriation.
The suggestion for you, once again, is to end these repatriations--end these unilaterally. Make sure workers have a chance to have representation, and make sure there's an appeal process for them.
I could answer a lot more around health care issues during the question and answer period, but we're seeing that because of the visa process and the fact that many workers have to leave by December 15, they're not being provided with access to a proper health care system. Once again, as in the cases of Alberto Garcia and so many other workers before that, they're going home and they're dying. That's basically the burden on each one of us here today, to make sure they have a just system. That's what we want to talk about, to basically put it on record.
I want to assure you that even if we are ignored today, we'll be back tomorrow and the day after, and we will continue to pressure this government and subsequent governments until our demands are met. Workers and their allies will collectively work toward full emancipation and liberation of these workers.
We understand your limitations and the bureaucracy of workers. As such, we'll help you in pushing this agenda for a just society through any means known to us, with direct action to challenge the legitimacy of your legal framework or by disrupting the very nature of the unequal relation between labour and capital.