Syed Hussan is the executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, a membership based organization of migrant farm and fishery workers, care workers, students, refugees and undocumented people fighting for immigration and employment justice.
Sixty years after then-immigration minister Jean Marchand called binding migrant workers to one employer “slave labour,” the United Nations Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery continues to use the same term to describe the way Canada brings in temporary migrants to the country each year, many of them working across the food chain.
There are 100,000 temporary foreign workers in agriculture each year, over 42,000 in food and beverage manufacturing, and tens of thousands more in the food industry. Many are in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), which was recently the subject of an IJB investigation.
The article echoed what migrant workers, media stories, and expert reports, including the three I’ve written, have documented for years: SAWP creates the conditions that permit verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Wages are stolen, workers labour in unsafe conditions alongside chemicals and through natural disasters, and live in overcrowded, undignified housing.
The problem is straightforward: binding workers to a single employer creates a power imbalance that enables all of this.
The fix is well known: give these workers permanent residency, open permits, equal access to healthcare and other benefits, and enforceable national housing standards.
So why does nothing change?
The answer starts with money.
Canada is the world’s 5th-largest exporter of agri-food and seafood products, with exports of $100.3 billion. Agri-food generated $149.2 billion in GDP in 2024, accounting for roughly 7% of the economy and 1 in 9 jobs.
Behind the advertisements about mom-and-pop farms are sophisticated industry groups, and behind those, very wealthy agri-food corporations.
Farm lobbies are led by large commercial operations, not small family-run farms, and farmer groups like Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada include corporations like McCain Foods, Bayer Crop Science, and Syngenta among its members.
They exercise their power relentlessly. By my count, the agri-food sector logged 576 federal lobby communications in the last six months, more than the 457 logged by oil and gas. They have consistent access to ministers, MPs, senators, and senior officials, and with 200 of Canada’s 343 federal ridings being rural or mixed rural-urban – and with agri-business framing itself as representatives of rural Canada – politicians don’t stand up to them.
As a result, even the most basic protections for migrant farm workers get blocked. Canada still has no enforceable minimum housing standards for migrant workers. During COVID, a migrant farmworker was more likely to contract the virus than a healthcare worker. Ottawa announced consultations in 2020. The farm lobby pushed back, opposing almost every proposed measure, including the modest principle that workers should have freedom of movement and be able to receive guests. The standards were quietly shelved.
The corporations blocking worker protections are squeezing consumers and farmers alike.
Grocery prices rose 9.8% in 2022 and another 7.8% in 2023, while grocery-store pre-tax profits more than doubled, from just over $3 billion before the pandemic to $6.5 billion in 2022.
At the same time, there were 2,165,766 food bank visits last year, the highest in history. One-third of food bank clients are children.
The largest 4% of farms account for 51.5% of total farm operating revenues, making most of the profits. Small and mid-sized farmers, on the other hand, see little of the profits from increased food prices: realized net farm income fell 26% while farm debt rose 14.1%. The retail price of bread rose 50% over 30 years without comparable increases for wheat farmers; ground beef has doubled in price since 1994 while farmers’ returns rose only 40%.
With few profits and massive debts, many small farmers are leaving. By 2033, 40% of small farm owners will retire; two thirds don’t have a succession plan.
Consumers are paying more. Farmers are hurting. And migrant workers are being exploited. Migrants with rights are the solution.
Granting experienced migrant farmworkers permanent resident status, with a real path to farm ownership, would address multiple crises at once: the labour shortage, the succession crisis, regional food insecurity, and the instability of a food system dominated by a handful of corporations. Migrants could bring new crops, new knowledge, and more biodiversity into Canadian agriculture. They could help make food more affordable.
We can build a just food system – not workers trapped in bunkhouses on tied permits, but people with rights, roots, and power.
