When Conwade Bramwell, a 23-year-old Jamaican, was selected for Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program at the peak of COVID in 2020, he quickly resigned from his full-time job as a hotel bartender.
Bramwell had met several Canadians in Jamaica and looked forward to spending time in the country—and building a chance for a better life.
“I saw Canadians as lovely people while growing up,” he said. “So, quitting my job for an opportunity to go to Canada and work was like a no-brainer. … But it’s never easy to leave your family and go somewhere else to work.”
His excitement was short-lived: The work proved punishing, abusive, and exploitative—leaving him bitter toward the country he’d once dreamed of visiting.
Bramwell said the first encounter with his employer was far from what he expected. His boss was hostile, and the atmosphere among the workers was tense and fearful. The first day at the Ontario farm, Bramwell said he spent 10 hours of hard work handpicking peaches and plums from a ladder. He didn’t get back to the cramped room he shared with three other workers until late, and crashed out immediately, only to start work again at 7 a.m.—after which conditions got worse.
“Why are you moving so slowly? Even my dead granny can move faster than you,” Bramwell recalled his employer commenting that morning. He added that his employer would force him and his coworkers to finish work earlier than they should, since the work was paid at an hourly rate.
“Whenever there’s a lot of work, he’s always pushing and telling us to work faster,” he said. “We will finish the work long before it should be finished and then we will be sitting in our house not having any work to do. [For example], my contract last year was for three months, but my employer made me finish the work for two weeks.”
As in the United States, agricultural work is unattractive to Canadians, leaving the country’s agricultural sector, worth $87.7 billion a year, heavily reliant on migrant farmworkers. The migrants are recruited under the federal government-run Temporary Foreign Worker Program, mainly the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). The SAWP was established in 1966 and allows Canadian farms to employ migrant workers from 11 Caribbean countries and Mexico temporarily for periods of up to eight months.
Every year, more than 27,000 migrant farmworkers come to Canada through the SAWP, and the workers accounted for nearly 25 percent of the total workforce in agriculture in 2022 alone. But like Bramwell, many of these migrant farmworkers face physical and verbal abuse, hazardous exposure, limited access to healthcare services, and even death risk. Employers, according to Bramwell and other workers, pay little heed to working conditions.
Sometimes this can prove fatal. In August 2022, Garvin Yapp, a Jamaican farmworker, died after collapsing at a farm in southern Ontario. The next year a young Jamaican farmworker working in Niagara-on-the-Lake died of unknown causes while sleeping in his bunkhouse, which his colleagues blamed on lack of access to healthcare.
The situation was exacerbated during the COVID pandemic, with the migrants working in harsh conditions often without health insurance or adequate protective gear.
Bramwell said upon arrival in Canada, he and other migrant workers were told to sign a letter that exempted their employers and the Canadian government from any liability should they contract COVID.
A 2022 study published in the International Journal for Equity in Health found at least nine deaths among migrant agricultural workers in Ontario between 2020 and 2021 alone. One of the risks the study identified was barriers to accessing healthcare.
“We don’t have any benefits or insurance,” said Bramwell, who worked for 10 hours each day for C$15.50 per hour. “We don’t have any sick days. We don’t get any holidays. Every day is the same.”
Migrant farmworkers are speaking up. Shortly before the death of Yapp, Bramwell and other Jamaican migrant farmworkers in the Niagara region wrote an open letter to Jamaica’s then-minister of labour and social security, Karl Samuda, in August 2022 concerning the poor treatment they received at two farms in Ontario.
“We wrote the letter because of the injustice [on the farm]. We are not being treated well,” Bramwell said.
But after arriving in Canada and visiting the farms, Samuda said that he saw “no evidence of mistreatment.” This quickly generated criticism from Jamaicans and migrant advocacy groups, forcing the minister to establish a special fact-finding team to investigate the workers’ working conditions on the farms. In 2022, some Jamaican farmworkers were pulled from four farms, after it was discovered that they were being subjected to verbal abuse and poor living conditions.
In May 2023, Samuda resigned, and Pearnel Charles Jr. was appointed as the new minister of labour and social security. Five months later, Charles arrived in Canada and visited about a dozen farms and met with 21 employers and employer representatives.
Accommodations are mostly provided by migrant farmworkers’ employers. But the bunkhouses are often rat-infested, dirty, cramped, and lacking in basic facilities, Bramwell said.
Cherry Tomlinson Matthews, a Jamaican who was on the migrant-worker program in British Columbia from 2018 to 2021, said the rooms are often cramped and offer little privacy.
At the time she was selected for the program, Matthews’s daughter was just 2 years old, and so the decision to move to Canada was difficult.
“It was very hard for me to leave her at that tender age and come work here. However, I made a sacrifice and I went,” she said.
But four weeks after she arrived in Canada, she started experiencing unusual fatigue. “I overworked and fainted that year [2018], and when a nurse checked me, she said that the chlorine they use in the factory is affecting me,” she said.
Three years later, Matthews fainted again.
“That happened on the fifth of July 2021. I was unconscious. When I woke up, I heard people talking around me, but I could not respond. The paramedics came in and they said I had a brain shock because I fell so heavily on the concrete I hit my head,” she said. “They want us to work like slaves.”
For decades, migrant farmworkers in Canada have been pushing for permanent residency, which would offer them some form of protection from abuse and exploitation.
When farmworkers are subjected to abuse, they rarely assert their rights or seek healthcare services when sick for fear of losing their jobs or being deported. Those who spoke up immediately faced the consequences. For example, two migrant farmworkers were sent back to Jamaica in 2017 for complaining about problems with their paychecks.
Bramwell’s experience is all too familiar. He worked under the SAWP for three years and was not invited for this year’s farming season. He said this might be connected with the role he played in the open letter written by farmworkers to Samuda in August 2022.
“I feel [my contract was not renewed] because I wrote the letter,” he said. Now, he is back home in Jamaica doing farm work.
“If you complain about something to your employer, you have that fear that you can’t come back the next year [season],” said Leonel Nava, a 49-year-old Mexican father of two who has been working in Canada since 2014 and currently works on a cherry farm in British Columbia.
Under the SAWP, employers determine whether farmworkers’ contracts are renewed or not, which indirectly discourages workers from speaking up for fear of being victimized or repatriated.
This hasn’t stopped all migrants. Inspired by the letter written by Jamaican farmworkers, Mexican migrant farmworkers in Canada wrote a letter to their own government to raise concerns about the poor working conditions.
Syed Hussan, a Canadian citizen and executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), described these tactics as “blacklisting.” Hussan’s organization helps to advocate for the rights of migrants and farmworkers.
“Employers can determine who comes and works in the future,” Hussan said. “And so, when workers speak up about their rights, they are blacklisted. And what being blacklisted means is that they can never come back. Every day, we hear about injuries, every month we hear about deaths. So, the people who grow our food, the people who keep us alive, are living in conditions of massive exploitation and abuse leading to death because of Canadian federal immigration laws,” Hussan said.
Ontario’s Agriculture Employees Protection Act bans unionization, Hussan said, making it difficult for migrant farmworkers to gain access to fundamental labor rights. But with MWAC, which is similar to a union, migrant agricultural workers from across the country meet virtually once a month, where they form a united front to decide what their demands and issues are. Hussan advocates for a full and permanent immigration status for migrant farmworkers, noting that over 65 percent of them in the seasonal agricultural workers program are excluded from all permanent residency programs.
“A permanent resident status would solve most of the problems, because, at the end of the day, the problem is that workers can’t speak up,” Hussan said. “Permanent residency is a mechanism through which all other rights are accessed.” He added that this status can also allow workers’ family members to visit them.
In September 2023, thousands of migrants and farmworkers protested across Canada, demanding regularization and equal status for all. In September 2024, more than 2,000 migrants and farmworkers marched across Toronto demanding equal rights for all.
“We need to be recognized and better appreciated because we do the dirty work,” Matthews said, adding that she regrets her decision to go to Canada. “Migrant farmworkers are not lazy. We are willing to work. And if we are willing to work in your country, you should be willing to grant us permanent residency status to feel safe and to have access to healthcare services.”
Nava, however, said he has made good friends.
“I am going to continue with this job because I like the town,” he said. “We have been living here for a long time, and every year we have friends. I feel part of Canada. I’m giving my best to Canada, and I spend more time here than my home in Mexico.” But he, too, would like permanent residency if possible.
Bramwell is now working on a farm in Manchester, Jamaica. He said he hopes the needs of migrant farmworkers will be prioritized and that Canadians will join in mounting pressure on the government to provide permanent resident status to agricultural workers.
“Migrant farmworkers are important,” he said. “If Canadians put pressure on the government, there can be a change.”
This story was supported by The Sidney Hillman Foundation.
