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Ottawa doubles maximum time employer can hire low-wage temporary foreign workers (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 10 hours ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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[–] 21 points 10 hours ago* (2 children)

Try visiting Norfolk County in southern Ontario in June and July ... the nice little downtowns are cute but the highways and small communities turn into Haitian, Dominican, Nigerian, Mexican and Columbian communities with hundreds of foreign farm workers everywhere. Ontario likes to advertise that we grow our own food ... great, but no one ever thinks about who collects, packages and moves all that food and who profits from it all. We, in Ontario, get to have cheap produce because we have access to cheap foreign labour temporarily visit our country every summer.

What I love about this dynamic is that Norfolk County is famously a Conservative stronghold that is very anti-immigrant ... they absolutely do not want any kind of immigration at all in the country ... yet they are one of the biggest places in Canada that import temporary foreign workers every summer.

We want immigrants here to do our work but we don't want them to stay to benefit from our country's democratic system.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 child)

    True. It's a complicated issue:

    -are these good jobs for the temporary workers? I think yes

    -it doesn't benefit Canadians to have the food grown elsewhere

    -on whole food standards in Canada are amongst the best in the world

    -labour standards are generally very high in Canada, but I suspect these types of jobs would be near the bottom in Canada (but certainly not globally)

    My opinion is that it would it would be beneficial to have more Canadians in these jobs (youth are looking for part time employment for example). But mostly to keep the employers honest.

    *edit more thoughts

    -it's probably economically beneficial for Canada to subsidize wages for Canadians to do these critical jobs. (Money doesn't exit the county)

    -for the same reason TFW are more beneficial to donor countries than immigration.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago

    That's the problem ... if these farmers started hiring Canadians, even if for minimal wage ... the farmers would be subject to strict worker regulations and controls and it would be more prominently highlighted by the local population and region. A farming business wouldn't be able to take advantage of local Canadian farm hands because they live right in the country and if the workers complained or disagreed with any of the work conditions, they would have recourse to take the farmer or farming corporation to court and fight for something. The worker would have decent representations and recourse to say or do something.

    When it comes to temporary foreign workers ... much of these rules don't apply. And if they do apply, most workers choose not to report anything or complain because they know that once they do, they would never be hired again in the future. And if they are never hired again, they would never have a chance to return to Canada as a worker again.

    The other side of that problem is that if farmers or farming companies (I make that distinction because there are actual honest farmers out there ... but most major farming operations are just giant faceless companies these days) don't want to hire Canadian workers because of the cost. Once you hire Canadian workers and apply stringent worker rules and regulations, hiring them becomes very expensive to the operation.

    It's much cheaper and economical to bring in foreign workers pay them as cheaply as possible and operate as close to the regulations and ethical concerns as possible to get away with abusing foreign labour and make as much money as possible.

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