By Jeff Carter

In 1974, I began working on a tobacco farm a few miles east and north from Woodstock. When I drive along Highway 401 today, I think of the days in August and September I spent there among the deep sand fields.
My uncle talked about his own experience with the flue-cured tobacco harvest. In his day, the work was completed by labourers walking through the fields, bundling into canvas wraps the lower sand leaves first and, as the harvest progressed, moving their way upwards.
The leaves would be then sewn on sticks and hung in the tobacco kilns for drying. In the fall, following the harvest, the cured tobacco was graded and shipped to one of several processors operating in Ontario at the time to be made into cigarettes and other products.
By the 1970s, labour-saving technologies had been introduced. Rather than walking through the fields, harvesters were provided with equipment to ride. In my first year, there were little, single-person, self-propelled units equipped with a leading, guidance arm.
The following year, a five-man, self-propelled unit was used, harvesters seated in close proximity to each other. If you were lucky, there was a driver as well but typically the crew relied upon a guidance system similar to those used in single-person units.
At the end of the rows, the hand-packed, canvas wrapped bales of tobacco would be loaded onto a flatbed truck – the ‘boat’ – driven by a fellow I knew as Fast Eddy who was perhaps not particularly fast but at least steady. The harvesting crew lead was a rawboned young man from Gobles who evidently had an issue with the yellow hard hat I wore, hammering it with the flat of his hand a few times each day until I indicated this was not acceptable – tearing plants from the ground and threatening violence. The hammering decreased perceptibly but not completely, my adversary successfully judging the limit of my tolerance.
I was paid $28 a day the first year, $30 the next and $32 in year three. There were ample dollars for frivolities, cases of beer, and other substances.
I worked alongside a number of migrant workers during this experience, domestic migrants who traveled from Quebec for the harvest and three young people from the British Isles, a soft spoken Irishman and a pair of somewhat annoying English twins who arrived through an experiential program.
A great deal has changed over the past 50 years. In the 1970s, there were far higher numbers of Canadians filling the farm jobs. There were more farms, hence more farm-raised young people with a taste for hard work and some of the villagers were “no slackers” as well. With enough weeks of employment – as little as eight at one time – Canadian workers became eligible for unemployment benefits. On top of that, the money earned on farms back then went a great deal farther than it does today.
In stark contrast, seasonal jobs on today’s farms are often filled by temporary migrant workers coming to Canada through several programs including the Seasonal Agricultural Program (SAWP) that was launched in the 1960s along with several other programs that have been introduced over the subsequent decades.
In Chatham-Kent, they arrive from the Caribbean, Mexico, several countries in Central and South America, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos and so forth. Government policy has also shifted. While the SAWP allows workers to stay in Canada for up to eight months in any given year, most of today’s temporary workers employed in low-wage occupations are here for consecutive years and many plan to stay despite the government policy of temporariness.
What the federal government has created though its confusing hodgepodge system of immigration programming is the means for people to come to Canada, outstay their employment tenure, and enter the underground economy. Some estimates put the number of “illegals” now living in Canada at more than 500,000.
The policy shift appears intentional, an “ends-justify-the-means” approach, an attempt to build a competitive advantage for Canada, mimicking the U.S. system of illegal immigration but with some semblance of governance attached. Essentially created is a two-tier system of immigration, the upper tier targeting people with means for permanent residency, the lower targeting temporary workers (and to some extent refugees) for the type of jobs the majority of Canadians refuse to fill.
Successive governments are culpable, both Liberal and Conservative, for building an increasingly elitist society in Canada, pitting rural versus urban, failing to value food production, and creating a second if not third class of citizenry within our society, people who are necessary and yet expendable.
The SAWP program in Canada operates much as it did when introduced nearly 60 years ago, a compromise to global realities, but in many respects well-serving the interests of worker and employer alike. Dollars earned in Canada tend to go a long way in the workers’ home countries. Simple economics.
Canada’s approach to temporary migrant workers has evolved beyond the old SAWP program, however. Several additional avenues to temporariness have been introduced to fill jobs in food processing, construction, hospitality, and many other low-wage occupations. Many have decided they are staying permanently, regardless of the program rules that are in place, nor should not be forced to do otherwise.
In May this year, the report ACT NOW: Solutions for temporary and migrant labour in Canada from the Canadian Senate was released. I recently spoke to Senator Ratna Omidvar who chaired the effort.
Ratna said the report makes several recommendations, the most central being the establishment of a Migrant Worker Commission representing the interests of both employees and employers. From there, she hopes further recommendations in the report can be implemented, including a shift from temporary immigration to fill low-wage occupations to permanent residency.
I applaud the effort but I am concerned the recommendations, many of which I agree with, will be shelved and rather than taking concrete measures to address the issue of immigration, more band aids will be applied. ◊