Good afternoon.
My name is Syed Hussan, and I am the co-founder and coordinator of the Migrant Workers Alliance, Canada's largest migrant worker rights coalition. Our members represent almost all the self-organized migrant worker groups in Ontario. I also help steer the Migrants' Rights Network, a Canada-wide national body that aims to represent all self-organized migrant and refugee groups in the country.
On behalf of our organizations, we want to make four key recommendations that we believe this committee has not heard yet.
First, Canada must create permanent immigration programs for workers in low-wage streams. Specifically, care workers, farm workers and other temporary foreign workers in low-wage streams deemed low skilled must be allowed to come to Canada with permanent immigration status. Migrant and undocumented people already in the country must be given permanent immigration status. Levels and mixes of immigration must be revamped to ensure this change.
Second, Canada must immediately halt all deportations to Haiti and place a moratorium on deportations to countries that Canada has a travel advisory for.
Third, Canadian immigration and refugee policy must account for Canada's and its corporations' role in forced displacement, including the impact of Canadian mining companies, Canadian arms exports, and Canadian emissions on creating the conditions for migration.
Finally, we urge all political parties to not criminalize or politicize migration. We specifically call for an end to divisiveness and pitting migrants, refugees and citizens against each other.
Let me elaborate on these four recommendations.
First, it is important to note that there is nothing temporary about the temporary foreign worker program. The seasonal agricultural worker program is over half a century old. Women have been coming to perform care work in Canadian homes since Canada's very inception. So-called low-skilled work is a permanent need and part of our economy, particularly in the absence of a national care strategy. To deny permanent residency status to workers performing the essential work of raising our families, taking care of our sick and feeding our communities, and to assert simultaneously that they are temporary, is both inhumane and factually incorrect.
The caregiver program is expiring. It is a program where a pathway to permanent residency exists but is largely inaccessible. According to a study conducted by care worker organization members, which I'm submitting to the committee, the vast majority of migrant care workers are facing wage theft, labour exploitation, human rights violations, lack of dignified living arrangements, and physical and mental health deterioration due to family suppression.
A pathway is not available to many of the other migrant worker streams. This is not the case of a few bad employers. The structure of the program is such that abuse takes place. This is why care workers are calling for a federal care worker program.
A few weeks ago, director general Philippe Massé of ESDC presented to you an outline of steps taken by them to expand migrant worker rights. In my last meeting with the director general, I received information about a group of migrant Jamaican women who had been working for three straight months without a single day off, for over 12 hours a day, without full meals, working toilet facilities, breaks or livable sleeping arrangements. Upon asking for their basic rights, the employer drove them to the airport, handed them tickets, and watched them cross into customs.
Despite my sharing this information directly with the director general and his support staff, something almost no migrant worker can do, ESDC was not able to provide us with any basic guarantees or assist the workers, most of whom left. This is because the very principle aligning the temporary foreign worker program is to provide workers, deemed commodities, to employers, rather than to uphold worker rights.
The temporary foreign worker program cannot be fixed by minor tweaks or rights education. We need a fundamental restructuring away from temporariness towards permanent resident status upon arrival.
Second, Canada currently has a travel advisory issued for Haiti due to civil unrest, yet deportations to Haiti continue. This has put tremendous numbers of people at great risk. The federal government halted removals in November, but has since reinstated them. The same is true for removals to Somalia and other countries facing unrest. Canada's deportation policies must be brought into alignment with actual geopolitics. No one should be deported to places where their lives will be at risk.
Third, the global compact on migration, as you know, is a toothless, unenforceable document. After years of meetings and tremendous amounts of money spent, we deserve a global agreement that works to end displacement and ensures rights for migrants in receiving countries. The GCM fails to do both.
It is essential that immigration and refugee policies be closely linked to questions of accountability and responsibility. We cannot separate the question of Haitian refugees from that of Canada's complicity in the removal of the democratically elected President Aristide in 2004. We cannot separate the question of Filipino migrant workers from the well-documented and oft-criticized record of human rights abuses carried out by Canadian companies like OceanaGold and TVI Pacific. Neither can we separate the question of Yemeni refugees from that of Canada's arms sales or Canadian support for the Honduran government, which has impelled the migrant exodus.
Decisions about migration and refugees must be situated in this regard, and Canada must do more to end displacement and educate its officials and the general public about Canadian responsibility to migrant refugees' rights.
Last, we've seen political parties pit inland and overseas refugees against each other. The Conservative Party, whose actions in regard to migrant workers are a matter of public record, issued a statement in August 2018 suddenly calling for a path to permanent residency for foreign workers but insisting that we deserve status more than the Roxham Road border crossers.
We want to be absolutely clear. As a group of organizations that actually represent migrant refugees, we reject this division. As people in precarious work, we understand the ways in which poor and low-wage workers in Canada feel stretched in living from paycheque to paycheque. People are suffering economically. They need real change, and not to be riled up with xenophobia. Immigrants and refugees are not to blame for low wages, job loss or precarity. Such politics are neither responsible nor welcome.
We strongly urge all political parties to assert unity, not division, particularly as we enter the election year in 2019.
Thank you.