The Association for the Rights of Home and Farm Workers (DTMF) is asking the Superior Court of Quebec to authorize a class action against the federal government. She is seeking to have closed permits, which tie temporary foreign workers to a single employer, declared contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“We have been denouncing closed permits for a long time and we have been saying to ourselves that we are no longer at the stage of kindly asking politicians to do better,” says Eugénie Depatie-Pelletier, general director of DTMF. Accompanied by other members of the board of directors as well as representatives of union centers, she made the announcement Friday morning in front of the Montreal courthouse.
They chose this type of legal recourse because “no one could carry out something so big, long and complex alone,” she explains in an interview with Duty. Granting a closed work permit “is not charity”, she defends, “it is a violation of human rights and we want it to stop”.
The specific case presented anonymously under the pseudonym AB is that of a man from Guatemala who worked as a poultry catcher in Quebec. It opens a window into physically demanding work and difficult conditions, including skin diseases developed through contact with chicken excrement. Fearing having returned to his country of origin, the worker in question did not dare to complain, it is written in the document.
The legal action nevertheless targets all migrants on closed permits across Canada since 1982, the year the Charter came into force. Mme Depatie-Pelletier considers that indications were already available at the time on the inability of migrant workers to exercise their rights.
Damages claimed
The collective action request that we were able to consult sets out the constitutional rights violated according to the plaintiffs. First there is Article 7 which concerns the right to life, liberty and security: measures that bind a worker to a single employer “restrict their physical freedom and their ability to make life choices fundamental by preventing him from changing employers. More generally, these closed permits make temporary workers “completely dependent on their employers for the preservation of their legal status in the country”.
Article 12 is then discussed: it sets out the right to protection against any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment. The suit sets out the argument that because of its harmful impacts, the closed license is “dehumanizing.”
Finally, the association wishes to demonstrate before a judge that article 15 on the right to equality is also violated, since the measures which regulate temporary foreign workers are rooted in “direct discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin and color”. The majority of foreign agricultural or low-wage workers in Quebec come from Mexico and Guatemala, many of whom have indigenous origins.
“It takes the ability to be able to say, I’m going to leave if there’s a line crossed. The right to change employer makes it possible to demand all other rights,” illustrates the director.
The association is also seeking financial compensation to compensate for the damage suffered. A question of dissuading governments from putting these types of measures in place in the future, she said.
It is therefore no longer a question of trying to separate “bad employers” from good ones, but rather of attacking an entire migration program “which creates an underclass of unfree workers”, explains M.me Depatie-Pelletier.
A week of slinging
The subject of closed permits also occupied public consultations on immigration planning at the National Assembly earlier this week, even though Minister Christine Fréchette refused to include the question of temporary migrants in these discussions.
The four union centers marched in committee and demanded with one voice the abolition of closed permits. Quebec Solidaire MP Guillaume Rivard-Cliche also filed a request for an initiative mandate in order to get to the bottom of this issue with the other parties in the National Assembly. Liberal MP Monsef Derraji said he was in favor of the initiative.
Recommendation after recommendation, both committees of the House of Commons and the Commission on Human Rights and Youth Rights of Quebec have stressed that the closed permit system must change. “We now hope to open a debate with the federal government in a framework that understands and recognizes the importance of fundamental rights and that takes the Constitution of Canada as a reference,” concludes the director of DTMF.
Employer groups, both the Union of Agricultural Producers (UPA) and the Conseil du patronat du Québec, have in the past submitted recommendations to the government to transform these permits into “sectoral permits” or even “multi-employer permits”. Minister Fréchette said this week that she was open to discussing these ideas further, as well as a regional permit.