Number of temporary migrant workers in Quebec has more than doubled in 5 years
CBC
The number of temporary foreign workers in Quebec has climbed more quickly than anywhere else in Canada, but experts say resources to prevent exploitation haven't kept up, leading to more workers deserting farms for illegal work elsewhere in Quebec or across the border.
The provincial government under Coalition Avenir Québec's François Legault, who is seeking re-election on Oct. 3, has refused to increase immigration, despite a critical labour shortage set to only get worse in a booming economy with an aging population and declining birth rate.
Instead, it has struck deals with Ottawa to allow Quebec employers to triple the number of migrant workers by 2023 — a notoriously precarious workforce whose well-being depends on the goodwill of their employers.
"It's deeply problematic because you're solving structural economic issues and structural issues in the labour force with a program that brings in people with a very clearly secondary set of rights," said Edward Dunsworth, an assistant professor of history at McGill University, whose book Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Canada's Agricultural Workforce has just been published by McGill-Queen's University Press.
From 2017 to 2021, the number of permits the federal government issued to Quebec employers for temporary foreign workers increased 133 per cent, from 13,030 in 2017 to 30,340 in 2021.
By the estimate of one migrant workers' advocacy group, that number could rise to 90,000 by 2027.
Prince Edward Island was second to Quebec in terms of growth, going from 605 permits issued in 2017 to 1,115 in 2021 — an 84 per cent jump. In comparison, 33,920 permits were issued in Ontario last year, up just 18 per cent since 2017.
While temporary foreign workers remain the backbone of eastern Canada's agricultural sector, they are now propping up all kinds of industries, in jobs that are not just seasonal, from furniture manufacturing to food processing to health care.
Despite the program's meteoric expansion, resources in Quebec have hardly kept pace. Some researchers say that is pushing a growing number of workers into going underground, and increasingly, paying smugglers thousands of dollars to take them across the border into the United States.
"Quebec has fewer aid organizations and networks to help workers than what you can find in Ontario," said Guillermo Candiz, an assistant professor at Université de l'Ontario français in Toronto who has done extensive field research in the Quebec City region and in Mexico, where he spent seven months with migrant workers' families.
Candiz sits on the board of directors of a migrant farm workers' support network, the Réseau d'aide aux travailleuses et travailleurs migrants agricoles du Québec (RATTMAQ), which recently opened new offices in Sherbrooke, Quebec City and Rivière-du-Loup and is planning to open another soon in St-Jérôme.
Though its network has grown, RATTMAQ is struggling to take on every complaint.
Co-founder Michel Pilon said the increase has been "staggering." RATTMAQ took on 76 legal cases related to migrant worker complaints in 2020-2021. In the following 12-month period, that number jumped to 578.
"The demand is enormous compared to the amount of resources we have," Pilon acknowledged. "More and more, we have to choose."
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