Canada's foreign worker permits spark exploitation lawsuits

Canada's migrant worker program faces legal battles over exploitation risks

As the Canadian government expands access to temporary foreign workers in some parts of the country, and as some provinces push against the move, advocates for migrant rights say some permits, particularly 'closed' work permits, create conditions akin to modern slavery.

Gabriel Allahdua, a senior mobilization and education officer for the Association for the Rights of Household and Farm Workers (RHFW), says closed work permits in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TWFP) binds workers to one employer leaving them vulnerable.

"Your housing is dependent on that person, your access to health care, your status, everything is tied to that person. Is that an employer? Is that a farmer? Or is that your master?" Allahdua said, echoing sentiments from his book.

The association believes closed work permits are full of inequalities. As a result, they filed a class action lawsuit against the Canadian Federal Government in 2023. The suit was then authorized in the Quebec court in 2024. The case is still before the courts.

"When a migrant worker comes to Canada on a closed work permit or tied work permit, how can you access those rights, those freedoms? So we [the association] believe that the closed work permit or the tied work permit it infringes or it violates those Charter rights," Allahdua said.

The RHFW says restricting workers to one employer where there is a risk for deportation can force workers to endure unsafe or abusive conditions that violate Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing life, liberty and the security of persons. They argue these conditions also violate Section 12, the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual treatment, and Section 15, which guarantees equal treatment under the law.

The suit also challenges Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations that allow for closed or employer specific work permits that RHFW alleges leave workers open to contemporary forms of slavery.

But David Garson, an immigration lawyer with Garson Immigration Law, says the issue is largely one of oversight.

"The problem is the governance, governance of the program itself and the government, the governance of the employers who bring people in," Garson said. "You can have a closed work permit for an honourable employer."

While he believes "anyone who steps foot on Canadian soil and is working here deserves protection under the Charter," he also thinks the solution is clamping down on employer conduct, not abolishing closed work permits.

"What you can do is demand an employer behave honourably with regard to people they bring. And you have to enforce it and put teeth into it, and you have to punish employers that don't severely," Garson said. He adds Canadians won't stand for open work permits, which would allow temporary workers to take other jobs, and that you can't give them to everyone.

Equal treatment?

Allahdua says the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) an extension of the TFWP, was designed to admit only workers of colour and keep them tied to one employer, and therefore was discriminatory from the start.

"In 1966 the minister of Immigration, Jean Marcia, said in Parliament that the seasonal agriculture worker program would amount to enslavement if it were implemented on Europeans," Allahdua said, "It would amount to enslavement. But if it is implemented on people of color, then what is it?"

Allahdua came from St. Lucia in the Caribbean to Canada through the SAWP, and said he found the experience to be akin to modern slavery, a sentiment echoed by a UN human rights expert in 2023.

"I live where I work, I work where I live. Was it different for a slave? Same thing, same blueprint. Let us go to the work, where we work from sunrise to sunset, working long hours thinking that," Allahdua said.

Once Allahdua left the program in 2016, he joined with Justicia for Migrant Rights (J4MW), a volunteer-run collective of migrant workers, researchers and volunteers.

J4MW is now leading a $550 million EI class action lawsuit originally filed by former Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program workers Kevin Palmer and Andrel Peters in 2023. The class action extends to any worker under SAWP since Jan.1st, 2008.

This second lawsuit claims, similarly to the one on closed work permits, that the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program binds workers to one employer restricting the security of persons and violating Section 7 of the Charter.

They also claim that denying racialized workers predominately from Mexico and the Caribbean from accessing EI constitutes discrimination, violating section 15.

Chris Ramsaroop who's been with J4MW since it first started in 2001, says migrants deserve those benefits.

"The fact that workers have been paying into the EI system and haven't had access to it. And the claim is, is our arguing that migrant workers are owed hundreds of millions of dollars that should be paid or at least be restored to them," Ramsaroop said, adding that many workers come from Jamaica, facing homelessness because of Hurricane Melissa and could benefit from the EI.

The EI lawsuit was certified in late February.

During Ramsaroop's time at J4MW he has seen many unfavorable conditions in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.

"I've seen really, really cramped conditions of housing. I've talked to workers who've worked, you know, multiple hours over several periods of day, just near exhaustion," Ramsaroop said. "I've talked to workers, you know, literally half an hour, an hour after one of their comrades died in the workplace accident."

Despite that the Canadian government says migrants have rights against unfair conditions and overcrowding, Allahdua has experienced otherwise, echoing Ramsaroops sentiments.

"The housing (was) overcrowded in the bunkhouse where I lived. It was 62 of us, and eight of us were sharing one room with one washroom. So that is overcrowding," Allahdua said. "Number two, the kitchen, we had 16 burners, not 16 stoves, 16 burners for 62 of us. So when you do the ratio, you can see why it's a competition."

Ramsaroop wants a different future for migrant workers and hopes that one day "workers have access to status [permenant residency] on arrival, that they're not indentured laborers."

"That workers have mobility across borders, and they have equal access to our labor laws and our social safety net."