Human Resources committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today on behalf of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, a coalition of 27 migrant-led organizations and allies. I am also on the coordinating committee of the Migrant Rights Network, Canada’s national migrant justice alliance. The truth

Human Resources committee  I think the simple notion is that migrants know that their housing and working conditions, the way they're being treated, is unjust and unfair. People know when their rights are being broken. This is not about information. It's about power. If you speak up, you'll get deported. Y

Human Resources committee  I want to mention that we issued this report in which we have complaints about employers breaking the Quarantine Act, and I have offered personally to ESDC on three occasions to look at them, through the inspectors, and they haven't taken us up on the offer. Also, for most of th

Human Resources committee  These are perennial problems. Our report is called “Unheeded Warnings” because we've been raising these warnings for half a century. Migrant farm workers have been coming to the country for 53 years.

Human Resources committee  I'm sorry. I didn't hear the translation.

Human Resources committee  I'm sorry. I don't hear the translation anymore. I'm set at English. Let me try. Basically, yes, these are ongoing problems. This is why I brought to the committee its own decisions, its own recommendations from 2012 and 2016, and those of the Prime Minister. I'm going beyond

Human Resources committee  We are the only national coalition of self-organized groups of migrants, undocumented people and international students. Over the last three months, we have written seven different letters to various cabinet members. I've done hundreds of interviews and reports. We started with m

Human Resources committee  Yes, absolutely. I can do that immediately.

Human Resources committee  Yes. We're calling for the government to implement every recommendation in this report vis-à-vis farm workers, including social distancing, health care access and immigration status for all.

Human Resources committee  This is the first time I'm speaking to elected officials in government since March 15, which is when we started writing our letters. We wrote six letters, plus this report, and made multiple requests for meetings. Not a single.... We are the only organization that represents migr

Human Resources committee  Yes.

Human Resources committee  No, and we cc'd the federal cabinet committee on all of them. We have received no response. We have requested meetings and have heard nothing back from any elected official in government.

Human Resources committee  No elected officials have. We did speak to people from ESDC right before our report and after. Both times we offered recommendations. We also offered to give them the names of the employers, and we asked for them to put in writing what they would do with the information. I sent t

Human Resources committee  I'm just going to give you one much more recent example. We talked about these deaths and released this report, and Minister Marco Mendicino went on air and said, with regard to the agri-food immigration pilot, that they've heard us and that in fact it was the Liberals' idea and

Human Resources committee  Sorry, Mr. Chair. I don't—