Thank you for the invitation to participate in these hearings. Unfortunately, we received the invitation last Thursday, so we didn't have an opportunity to present any briefs, but if the committee wishes we will be glad to comply if we have time.
With me is Consuelo Rubio. She is going to speak too. She is well known to migrant workers. Actually it was through her legal challenge that they are now receiving parental benefits through EI.
My community legal clinic specializes in worker compensation law, so my submission will refer to that particular area concerning migrant workers.
Our involvement began in about 2006 with Justicia. We started to visit different farms in southwestern Ontario during the summer, with the intention of explaining and giving workshops to workers about their rights under workers' compensation legislation. We visited different farms during the day when we were allowed--at night we were not. We went to malls, and improvised workshops in parking lots and church basements. So what we say will reflect that experience.
We also had a series of meetings with senior management at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board to get some changes in policy that affect migrant workers. We had some meetings with the Mexican consulate, because we are Spanish-speaking, in order to get some sort of help from them specific to migrant workers.
You more or less know from other depositions what the situation is with migrant workers. We agree with all of them. We feel that the main recommendation is to allow them to apply to become Canadian citizens, because that alone will prevent many of the problems they are facing now.
We have a number of recommendations that I would like to read into the record, based on our experience with migrant workers. First is to stop the unilateral repatriation and deportation of migrant workers for medical reasons, as Chris mentioned, especially when those medical reasons stem from accidents or illnesses related to their work.
Injured migrant workers are entitled to benefits and services from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and those benefits and services, in addition to financial assistance, include regular medical attention and necessary treatment for as long as the doctors feel that those workers cannot return to work. If the contract ends in December, many of these workers are sent back to Mexico, in this case, where they don't get medical attention. Medical attention is geared to income there, so if you don't have money, you don't get any. Here they have medical attention.
We feel it's the federal government's obligation, because these people are working here and get injured here, so the least we can do is to make every possible effort to cure them before we send them back. For that reason, allow for extension of contracts when migrant workers are injured at work. This would permit the board to continue providing benefits and services, including any appropriate rehabilitation they would give to any Canadian worker.
Furthermore, if the worker is left with a permanent impairment, because they are not here and cannot be assessed by doctors they either lose the money they deserve and would get here, or it's years before the board can do something about it.
Another recommendation is to create mechanisms to guarantee the return of migrant workers injured at work if they can perform light-duty labour. That's an important thing, because many workers get injured here, are sent back, and are never recalled. People who are injured here are not allowed any extra benefits that they would be allowed if they could return, because the board has a policy in legislation based on that.
Lastly, the federal government should ensure that migrant workers receive information in their own language regarding their rights and responsibilities in a neutral, uncomplicated, and uncompromised manner. This task is currently left to foreign consulates, which, in addition to the country of entry, or perhaps because of it, provide information that is quite minimal and incomplete.
For example, this is the little pamphlet that the Mexican workers get from the embassy. There was nothing in 2006 indicating they could apply for workers' compensation benefits if they have an injury at work. We had a meeting with them, and the pamphlet for 2007 had a little thing saying that there is a WCB possibility. It is the responsibility of the federal government to inform the workers about their rights. This is not enough.