A second legal request opens against the federal government in order to abolish closed permits for temporary workers. After a request to the Superior Court of Quebec last September, the Superior Court of Ontario was seized of a new class action earlier this week.
The closed work permits of the approximately 50,000 immigrants who work in agriculture in Canada each year are based on “openly racist political objectives,” details the sixty-page complaint first revealed by the Toronto Star.
Such an appeal aims to restore an injustice that has prevailed for decades, explains in English the lawyer on file, Jody Brown.
“First, we want to recover part of the employment insurance premiums that these workers paid into the system. They have never been allowed to receive these bonuses, because they have to leave the country at the end of their working time. » This expected reward is estimated at around 500 million dollars.
Next, the suit ultimately hopes to correct the closed licensing system. Too much power ends up in the hands of employers, the Goldblatt law firm alleges, because the end of an employment contract for a farm worker means their expulsion from the country. This is an “unprecedented power imbalance in an employment relationship,” according to M.e Brown. A reform is therefore necessary in order to give workers more rights to be able to leave their current employer and use their work as they see fit, he argues.
This lawsuit must first be certified by the Ontario court before it can move forward.
A “racist” program
When Jean Marchand established the closed permit program in 1966, this federal minister of Manpower and Immigration based his policy on “a racial logic,” as described in the legal motion.
Allowing thousands of immigrants from the South to settle permanently in Canada would have created “social problems on a large scale,” according to Minister Marchand. “Perhaps most serious are the social difficulties that could arise when groups of blacks work among Canadian women workers who are far outnumbered,” he said at the time.
Edward Dunsworth, who has extensively studied the benefits of the program for the tobacco industry in Ontario, confirms this “racist” bias.
In 1966, the same year that the first closed licenses were issued to native Jamaicans, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture simultaneously launched a similar recruitment program in Britain. “And they were going to allow them to stay permanently. »
“There was a migrant labor program that started during the war that brought workers from Jamaica, Barbados, or wherever, into the United States. They wanted to do something similar in Canada. The government refused, refused, refused for years. And one of the main reasons for this was racism,” says the professor at McGill University. “They didn’t want to open the door to black migrants and they especially didn’t want black people to be able to stay permanently. »
The Canadian program started with 264 Jamaicans and has been growing ever since. In addition to its size, the program has also evolved to the detriment of workers, according to Professor Dunsworth. “Over time, employers have been really successful in getting workers to pay more and more of the costs: the cost of their plane ticket, the costs of housing, the costs of utilities, that sort of thing. things. »
The opening of a second program in 2011, which allows closed permits for agriculture year-round, breathed new life into the explosion in the number of these workers.
This report is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.