Once-celebrated P.E.I. apple orchard faces no sanctions despite foreign worker abuse claims

When it broke ground on Prince Edward Island in 2014, Canadian Nectar Products had former high-profile politicians pitching a company with the potential to bring jobs and people to the small province.

It had a lofty goal: transform an island known for potatoes into the apple-growing capital of the world, as the local newspaper reported. Former B.C. Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal and former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps had shares in the business. Two successive Island premiers, Robert Ghiz and Wade MacLauchlan, also seemed eager to support the business.

But within a few years, the original company president, a controversial businessman who would later be found to have taken bribes in New Brunswick, had left the company. Grewal and Copps would also step away. 

Under a new president, the operation became mired in multiple allegations of worker abuse, with some former employees claiming their jobs didn't exist, that they were extorted for large sums of money and that some were expected to live in substandard housing.

"The whole experience was like a nightmare for me," said Yan Liu, who moved to Canada from China in 2021.

Liu said he was promised a job on P.E.I. and a path to permanent residency, but instead paid tens of thousands of dollars for a work permit for a job that didn't exist.

Liu is one of at least two dozen workers who have filed claims of abuse with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada against Canadian Nectar Products and a group of affiliated companies.

Canadian Nectar Products is at the centre of what federal authorities allege is a web of companies defrauding the government and foreign workers. 

One migrant workers' advocate on the Island says the company highlights systemic issues with oversight and accountability with Canada's temporary foreign worker program.

An investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate has found at least 31 temporary foreign workers, out of 217 Canadian Nectar Products and its affiliated companies were given permission to hire from 2017 to 2021, have come forward to the federal government with abuse allegations and received federal approval to be released from their work contracts as a result.

But The Fifth Estate has also found that despite complaints about the company's practices going back to 2018, Canadian Nectar Products and its affiliated companies have not yet faced federal sanctions, such as monetary penalties or being formally banned from hiring temporary foreign workers.

The companies did not respond to requests for comment from The Fifth Estate.

The temporary foreign worker program allows a business to bring in workers from outside Canada if the company can make the case that it can't hire locally.

The foreign workers are then provided closed work permits, which tie them to the company, leaving them unable to switch jobs once in Canada. Last year, a UN envoy called the agriculture sector's reliance on this system "a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery."