Canada's seasonal migrant workers need a place at annual negotiations : Advocates

Canada and countries of the Caribbean are negotiating in Jamaica this week to set out the annual terms of the Canada-Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP).

The program was established 60 years ago and since 2023, 75,000 workers a year have been employed in Canada, primarily in the country’s agricultural sector.

An organization that advocates for migrant workers said workers are not consulted or represented in the negotiations and that both Canada and Caribbean countries are complicit in exploiting the workers resulting in the program’s expansion. 

“When I started this stuff 25 years ago, [the numbers were] like 20,000,” says Chris Ramsaroop, a Justice 4 Migrant Workers (J4MW) organizer who teaches at the University of Toronto.

He said that Caribbean countries want to increase the number of workers because  “when workers are sending money back home, I think the central idea is to try to get as many people in these programs so they can provide for remittances.”

Remittances, Ramasaroop says, helps the Global South, including Caribbean countries, replace their social welfare system as they continue to privatize their economies.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada said seasonal employees work on a wide range of products, from honey and maple syrup to fruits and vegetables, flowers and trees, eggs and meat with “a variety of end results and destinations within the Canadian food system.” It did not say how much of that production is exported.

In 2025, the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program approved approximately 83,000 positions in primary agriculture, which is roughly 48 per cent of all the positions it approved across every sector that year, according to an emailed response from Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). 

An approved position allows an employer to hire a foreign worker, but it doesn’t mean that worker actually arrives. The 83,000 positions encompass all of Canada’s farming roles, not only the ones associated with seasonal work.

ESDC manages the seasonal workers program for the federal government. It approves employers’ requests to hire workers and inspects workplaces for compliance. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada issues the work permits.

In a Nov. 8 letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney and Caribbean officials, J4MW said workers and their advocates have been shut out of the seasonal workers program annual review. The organization said workers want the talks to focus on "a vision based on their priorities, not those of government officials nor employers." The workers' demands include permanent status on arrival and an end to work permits that tie them to one employer.

Ramsaroop said the deck is stacked against workers at the annual review. 

"So at this table, there won't be any justice.”

He said the contract between Canada and the Caribbean countries serves export-oriented agriculture rather than the workers, and that changes to the program have been minimal over the past 60 years.

ESDC calls the annual meetings "the cornerstone of the negotiations" between the federal government, the governments of participating Caribbean countries, Mexico and Canada's agricultural industry. 

The agency did not comment on whether any worker representatives were invited. It said current employment contracts are posted online and will be updated in 2027.

The federal agriculture department said the seasonal workers contracts are negotiated between the source countries, employer representatives and ESDC, which works with the immigration department where appropriate. It did not mention any role for workers or their representatives. Talks with Mexico are held separately.

Edward Dunsworth, an associate professor of history at McGill University who studies migrant farm labour, said the absence of workers at the negotiating table is no surprise. 

"Workers are extremely marginalized within the program," said Dunsworth, who has collaborated with J4MW but has no formal ties to the organization.

He said he filed an access to information request to the federal employment department for records of all meetings between Canada and the program's partner countries since 1966. That was seven years ago and the request has still not been fulfilled, he said.

Dunsworth said Caribbean governments mainly push for more workers in the program. “(Their officials) might say some platitudes in support of better conditions for workers, but I've never seen any evidence that they actually care that much about that.”

The Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association has said the review process "has led to consistent and ongoing positive improvements to SAWP." 

Dunsworth sees it differently. Over the decades, he said growers have lobbied successfully to pay a smaller share of workers' airfare and to deduct more for housing and food. 

"The screws have really tightened on workers.”

He said that for Ottawa, the program appeases farmers at almost no financial cost to the government. 

"For these workers, they pay into EI but they can't collect on it," Dunsworth said. That exclusion is part of a class action lawsuit against the federal government, which was certified by the Ontario court in February. 

"To me, it's not controversial at all to call this labour in this program unfree labour," Dunsworth said. "Workers cannot change jobs freely. If they quit, that means they're deported."

In October, Ashwini K.P., the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, urged Canada in her end-of-visit statement to abolish closed work permits and give migrant workers a pathway to permanent residency when they arrive. 

"It is shocking to me that Canada has been using these schemes for many decades despite the documented human rights violations and the inherent manifestations of racial discrimination," she wrote. The comment was quoted in J4MW's letter.

A spokesperson for ESDC said temporary foreign workers have the same employment rights and protections as Canadians, and that non-compliant employers can face penalties of up to $1 million a year or bans from the program. 

In 2025-26, the agency carried out 113 SAWP inspections. Two of them — or 1.8 per cent — found employers non-compliant. No final decision has been made on a new agriculture and fish-processing stream promised in Budget 2022, the ESDC spokesperson said.

The agency also pointed to open work permits, which have been available since 2019 and let workers facing abuse leave their employer. 

Dunsworth called it better than what came before, but "a pretty limited way to deal with a huge problem."

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not respond to emails seeking a response.

Dunsworth said bigger changes to the seasonal worker program have been hard to win because workers are not citizens and cannot vote. 

Ramsaroop said the pressure to change has to come from across borders. 

"What needs to happen is that workers and allies and community people, both in the Caribbean and Canada, need to organize transnationally."

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Aadya Arora and Shilpashree Jagannathan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, New Canadian Media.