The government of Canada recently amended the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations to include new employer obligations. These amendments are intended to enhance protections for migrant workers and ensure the integrity of the government’s temporary foreign worker program.
While a step in the right direction, the changes side-step the root issues that make temporary foreign workers vulnerable to abuse in the first place.
More than 61,000 migrant workers were employed in Canada’s agriculture sector in 2021, an increase of almost 12 per cent from 2020, marking the greatest proliferation since 2016.
In fact, migrant workers comprised nearly one-quarter of all agricultural workers in 2021.
Migrant agricultural workers are exposed to various physical and psychosocial health risks that are compounded by the precarious circumstances they face in Canada.
Our research shows that the conditions of employment under Canada’s temporary foreign worker program generate significant challenges to workers’ health, the protection of their rights and even their survival.
Repatriated if injured, sick
Workers are hired on temporary contracts that bind them to a single employer, and these contracts include a repatriation clause that allows employers to terminate and deport workers without a grievance process. Injured and sick workers are often repatriated before they can access health care and/or workers’ compensation.
Consequently, migrant workers are often unable to refuse unsafe work and are reluctant to raise health concerns or report situations of abuse.
While acknowledging some of the issues facing migrant workers in Canada, the amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations fail to address the power imbalances at the heart of the temporary foreign worker program. In fact, they risk further cementing some of these systemic problems.
Employers as health mediators
First, the federal government continues to entrench the role of the employer as an informal mediator of basic health care for workers.
Migrant workers in Ontario are eligible for provincial health care, but they experience many barriers to accessing such services, in part because of a reliance on employers.
Under the new amendments, the government of Canada once again normalizes this role. Employers are obligated to cover the waiting period before provincial health care eligibility by providing private health insurance to migrant workers upon arrival.
By imbuing the responsibility of “reasonable access to health care services” to employers when a worker is injured or becomes ill at the workplace, the government is wilfully denying the power imbalance and obvious conflict of interest posed by such an arrangement.
Consider, for example, the history of medical repatriations faced by this workforce, in which injured and sick workers are prematurely deported. At minimum, workers need independent access to health care that is unmediated by employers.