The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is beginning a hearing this week into complaints that migrant workers in Elgin County were racially profiled during an Ontario Provincial Police investigation into rape.
The raped woman said she believed her attacker was a migrant worker and Henry Cooper, a migrant worker from Trinidad and Tobago eventually pleaded guilty.
But the police collected DNA samples from 96 black and brown farm workers at five or more farms. At one farm, the owner told workers they would not be invited back if they refused to submit a sample for DNA analysis.
Lawyer Shane MartÃnez, who is representing the migrant workers pro bono, said most workers who were swabbed did not fit the physical description of the suspect except for the colour of their skin.
"Workers were West Indian, workers were black from Jamaica, workers with long dreadlocks, ones who were bald — one worker had gold teeth," MartÃnez said. "They were as diverse a group as you could potentially imagine."
"When they tried to provide explanations as to [where they were] and they provided alibis, the police completely disregarded those and wanted nothing more than to collect their DNA because of how they looked."
A class-action lawsuit on behalf of anyone whose DNA was taken by the OPP in relation to these types of investigations has also been certified.
The lawsuit alleges the Centre of Forensic Sciences has retained DNA profiles in a database, even though the material gathered did not match that of the suspect in the criminal investigation.
Although the 2016 independent police review states that all of the migrant workers' samples were destroyed in 2014, a spokesperson for Justicia for Migrant Workers says the workers don't have faith the samples and their profiles are gone — and were never made aware their DNA profiles would be entered into a database.
"These are widespread issues of privacy, of privacy infringement, of racial injustice that I think all of us in the community need to be concerned [about]," said Chris Ramsaroop. This is a systemic practice and policing that's flawed."
According to Justicia for Migrant Workers, the case is the first human rights hearing of its kind in Canada to examine allegations of systemic racial profiling and discrimination by the police of migrant farmworkers.