‘Overtly racist’: Lawsuit challenges Canada’s migrant farmworker system
Al Jazeera
Canada’s half-a-century policy of tying migrant workers to their employers denounced as modern-day slavery.
Montreal, Canada – “It would be contrary to the whole Canadian belief in freedom of the individual.”
The year was 1952, and Canada’s then-minister of immigration, Walter Harris, was rebuffing the idea of tying immigrant farmworkers from Europe to their Canadian employers.
“It would, of course, be possible to take steps which would ensure that the man who says he is coming to Canada as a farm worker remains a farm worker. We could even hold the possibility of deportation over his head,” Harris said.
“However, it is my opinion that the Canadian people would be entirely opposed to any such practice.”
Fifteen years later, however, government officials were singing a different tune. Continuing to face labour shortages in the agricultural sector, Canada began bringing in Black and Indo-Caribbean seasonal farmworkers.
