Farmers who hire offshore seasonal workers have issued a
news release saying they need the program to continue in business.
Without the assurance of workers, Ken Forth, president of
Farm Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS) says farmers would not
invest and rural economies would suffer.
This year farmers
approximately 15,000 seasonal workers from Mexico and the Caribbean, the news
release says.
Under the federal
government’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), people from Mexico,
Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad/Tobago and the Eastern Caribbean States are able to
work in Ontario for a maximum of eight months and are guaranteed no less than
240 hours of work. The average length of stay is 20 weeks.
“These workers inject
a significant amount of money directly into the local economy, buying consumer
goods for their families back home from local businesses, as well as groceries,
clothing and other items for themselves while they are working here,” said
Forth.
Hold on! Any workers,
no matter where they come from, would have to be paid at least as much as those
coming in under SAWP and would contribute to the local economy.
“The seasonal worker
program also supports Ontario’s agricultural industry
and economy by enabling farm operations to remain viable in the face of a
critical shortage of suitable and available Canadian workers,” the news release
says.
Shortage? What shortage? This year we’re informed by the news
media that Ontario had a relatively high unemployment rate, especially among
students and recent immigrants and refugees.
These
unskilled workers are precisely what farmers are hiring through the offshore
program.
“Knowing a reliable source of
seasonal workers exists allows farmers to plan for the future, invest in their
operations and continue a livelihood that has sometimes been shared by their
families for generations,” says Forth.
So if farmers need these workers,
what, if anything, have they done to line them up in Canada?
“Without SAWP, some operations
would be forced to stop growing fruits and vegetables altogether, or move into
less labour-intensive crops,” the news release said.
Really? Are these farmers so
lacking in ingenuity that they would not find a way to continue in business?
What I see is a program that brings
a workforce into the province that is treated like slaves.
They live in housing provided by
the farmers who then expect them to work from sunup to sundown.
The imported workers have nowhere
else to go. They are tied to the farmer who hired them. They are like slaves.
I have worked with refugees and
immigrants in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and one year knew that there were at
least 30 of them who were farmers in their home country and wanted farm work.
But they did not own cars, nor did they have driver’s licences.
I suggested to a farmer that they
could be picked up at a central Kitchener location to be taken to the farm and
returned in the evening. He said that would be far too much hassle compared
with the offshore workers he had readily available through SAWP.
So many of those refugees worked as
volunteers on Habitat for Humanity build project in Kitchener that summer. And
we taxpayers supported them on welfare.
Frankly, at 15,000 workers per
year, I think the SAWP is out of hand.
More effort ought to go into recruiting from the ranks of recent immigrants,
refugees and students living in Ontario.
