Citizenship and Immigration committee  Do you mean undocumenteds, or do you mean the migrant workforce?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The mushroom farm that we organized in Kingsville, Ontario, is a good example of the high-end agricultural sector, and it has roughly 85% migrant workers. The greenhouse sector is almost 100% seasonal agricultural workers, foreign workers. The foremen and lead hands would be Cana

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think you're exactly right. Visitors, foreign students, temporary workers, SAWP AWOL workers—if you want to find undocumented workers, you don't need to only go to Toronto. You can go to any agricultural sector anywhere in Canada. There are numerous workers. In fact, they did

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Do you want to take a shot at that, Avvy?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The agricultural workers don't qualify. They're usually low-skilled. They have low education and low literacy levels. There's no queue for them to jump. Unless the employer is sponsoring them, there's no way they're going to get close to having any points to be able to qualify. S

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The appeal process.... You'll see in Quebec and Manitoba we've just unionized the first seasonal agricultural workers in the history of the program, and we'll see how we get through the labour board hearing process on that. Ultimately, a grievance procedure and representation on

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I won't speak on behalf of the employers. I think they do a very good job for themselves. I'll speak for the invisible workers. We're not advocating for the banning of the program. It's fairly well entrenched and there is a system in place to make sure that employers are access

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, they do have an official role. Their role is, one, to represent the people from their country; and two, to make sure the contracts are supervised and maintained appropriately. They're in a conflict of interest situation. They can't do both, and that's the problem. What we'

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, they're vital. Sending workers from your home country to Canada is a multi-million-dollar industry. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I forget the exact total, but Mexico's biggest industry now is shipping workers around the world. When you think about that.... I

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We launched a legal challenge against the federal government. We fought for three years just to get standing. I guess the federal government thought both UFCW and the work we had done were not credible, and they refused to give us standing. We had to fight for three years in the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  When we initially did our lobby efforts after the conference, we did meet with HRSDC program officials. We were supposed to meet with someone from CIC, but they cancelled at the last minute. We did send formal letters to the Minister of HRSD to meet with Diane Finley, who comes

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's a great question, and the answer is it varies, depending on the employer. We have known workers who continued to work while they were sick because they're impoverished people and they need the money and they will not even report to an employer that they're sick. We have em

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's correct. There are number of documented cases. In fact, we put out this report each year; we have five reports of documented statements from individual workers and the problems they have around the health care issues alone. The British Columbia government is not even provi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll fast-track my other points.