Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today. We have been before this committee in the past, and we appreciate the opportunity for you to hear our concerns again.
For the last roughly 10 years, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has been in the forefront of advocating on behalf of temporary foreign workers, primarily in the agricultural sector. We currently have eight centres across the country, from B.C. to Quebec. The services we provide are free to seasonal agricultural workers and temporary foreign workers.
We do a number of different services on their behalf, which include English as a second language, French as a second language, health and safety training, and know your rights advocacy and training. For example, last year our eight centres received more than 30,000 phone calls from individual seasonal agricultural workers and temporary foreign workers.
We are primarily a trade union; therefore, one of our main initiatives is to unionize, organize, agricultural workers, foreign or domestic. We have currently a number of legal challenges before different provincial governments, in Quebec, Manitoba, and Ontario regarding the right to be able to unionize agricultural workers from Canada or foreign countries. In most cases, primarily in Quebec and Ontario, those rights have been denied both to Canadian workers and to foreign workers.
We are challenging, using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in Quebec and Ontario. Our legal appeal in Ontario will begin on May 20 before the Ontario Superior Court, which follows on behalf of the Dunsmore decision that came out of the Supreme Court of Canada.
We will be using the B.C. health care Supreme Court decision as part of our argument, which clearly states that the freedom to associate under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms not only is a right, but also, attached to that, the right to bargain collectively needs to be applied to that right in the provinces.
The case we bring before Ontario will be the first following the B.C. health care workers decision. So we're expecting a positive result from that, which will force the provincial government to change the law in Ontario.
We were successful in another legal challenge in Ontario around the occupational health and safety rights of agricultural workers. For the last 27 years, every other worker in the province of Ontario was covered by the Occupational Health and Safety Act, but not agricultural workers. We prepared a Charter of Rights and Freedoms argument before the Ontario courts. The Liberal government declared it was going to move in support of agricultural workers to be covered under the act.
Currently, as of June 2006, that law is in effect. For the first time ever, agricultural workers—Canadian and foreign agricultural workers in Ontario—are covered under that act.
There's still a lot of work to do in that area, but we feel confident that the steps taken to date will continue to move in a positive direction.
Another statistic in our legal challenges is with regard to the Employment Insurance Act. Seasonal agricultural workers under the temporary foreign worker program are denied the premier benefit of the employment insurance program. Because they are non-residents, when they are laid off they are not entitled to collect the premier benefit.
However, we did start a legal challenge in that direction. The federal government fought us for three years on standing, saying we didn't formally represent seasonal agricultural workers. We argued that it was illegal to represent them; therefore, the best representation we could present was through our centres and the advocacy we did.
The Ontario court did recognize that and provided us standing. We withdrew, due to costs and other considerations, after the standing agreement was won.
At our centres in support of seasonal agricultural workers we have been able to secure parental benefits on behalf of seasonal agricultural workers through the unemployment insurance program. Most of the $22 million that we have secured for seasonal agricultural workers in the last five years has been under the parental benefits program. That way, when seasonal agricultural workers have finished their contract, they can actually go back to Mexico, Jamaica, Thailand, or wherever, and take care of their newborn children and collect unemployment insurance in the sending country. That is one of the main reasons we withdrew our legal challenge.
In regard to lobbying, we have been very vocal and very forceful in our lobbying efforts, not only with provincial governments, municipal governments, and the federal government, but we've also done numerous presentations in Mexico, Jamaica, and Barbados, encouraging sending countries to lobby the federal Canadian government to make appropriate changes to the program and to actually start to advocate and lobby for appropriate changes to the program to secure basic human rights and labour rights when they're in Canada.
You can see from our speaking notes and other materials we've provided to the committee a number of documents, including The Status of Migrant Farm Workers in Canada 2006-2007 and every...[Technical difficulty--Editor]
Recommendations and points we would like to highlight include an appeal process for repatriation of workers. Currently workers have been repatriated within 24 hours, unable to even document their complaints. It becomes a huge problem. They're usually put on the first plane. They include sick and injured workers and workers who are trying to advocate for their own rights. Talking about housing conditions or other things means employers can repatriate them for just about any reason under the sun.
As well, there are arguments around freedom of association, bargaining collectively at the provincial government levels, equal pay for foreign workers compared with Canadian agricultural workers, and housing conditions. Monitoring and enforcement has been passed down from the federal government to the provincial government to the municipal government, and now to the consulates, where little enforcement and monitoring, if any, is going on.
We advocate that there should be some residency. That they're employed in Canada year after year without having a path to status, some of them for as many as 27 or 28 years, is discriminatory and wrong.
The practice by employers of retaining documents is illegal. We're currently working on a human rights complaint in Quebec, and the commission will be issuing a statement within the next couple of weeks.