A third migrant worker is dead and the farm he worked at had a long history of complaints — an inside look at Scotlynn Growers
The multimillion-dollar produce farm is the site of one of the province’s largest recorded COVID-19 outbreaks. What happened in Haldimand-Norfolk?
On the evening of June 1, Sonia Aviles was putting her children to bed when she received an urgent call from an anesthesiologist at Norfolk General Hospital. A migrant worker at Scotlynn Growers had been hospitalized with COVID-19. He was in critical condition, in need of mechanical ventilation.
Juan Lopez Chaparro did not speak English and had no phone. His family had no idea he was ill. With no translators to assist, the hospital needed Aviles, a migrant worker organizer, to tell Lopez Chaparro that he needed to be sedated and may never wake up.
“Before I could finish getting his consent, the call dropped,” Aviles says. “Nobody called back.” Three weeks later, Lopez Chaparro was dead. Scotlynn Growers, a massive Norfolk County farming operation about an hour southwest of
Hamilton that describes itself as “North America’s Farm Stand,” is the site of one of Ontario’s largest recorded COVID-19 outbreaks. Some 200 workers there have tested positive for the virus.
In the years leading up to the outbreak, Mexican migrant workers at the farm had repeatedly sounded the alarm about poor living conditions they described as unsafe and sometimes hazardous, records obtained by the Toronto Star show.
Scotlynn owner Scott Biddle says his operation assiduously followed public health guidelines to prevent an outbreak, and has previously been lauded for providing quality accommodation to migrant workers.
In an interview with the Star on Tuesday, Biddle said the local health department has “always used us as an example for what other farmers should be doing.”
“We’re building housing for another hundred men this year,” Biddle said, adding that the new accommodation will be larger than what’s currently required by Health Canada to account for any changes to federally mandated housing standards.
Biddle told the Star he provides climate-controlled housing with lounge areas and soccer fields for leisure time. He said the facilities had been built “within the last 10 years or so.”
Biddle said he is saddened by the loss of life on his farm, and said Lopez Chaparro’s nephew, who also works at Scotlynn, will be flown home to spend time with family. He added that, upon the worker’s request, he will return in August to continue working.
“These guys, they’re frontline workers, they’re out there working in the fields, providing food for all of us in Canada, and putting their lives at risk. I mean, it’s, it’s very unfortunate what happened to us,” Biddle said.
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In complaints filed to the Mexican Ministry of Labour and obtained by the Star, workers have described pest infestations and bunkhouse floods; they reported overcrowding and broken amenities.
Between 2016 and 2018, Mexican authorities received 33 complaints about Scotlynn — the most made about any one Canadian farm during that period.
One worker reported it was impossible to shower in his bunkhouse because “excrement comes up through the drain.” Three others reported falling ill and not receiving timely medical attention.
Another complaint details 30 people sharing three bathrooms. More than a dozen Scotlynn workers complained of a bedbug infestation they said their employer had not treated. One claimed he had been offered cash if he returned to Mexico and did not report an abdominal injury sustained on the job.
“With as many workers as we have, there’s always going to be a few distraught workers,” Biddle said of the past complaints.
“Not every review can be perfect.”
Workers can file complaints with the Mexican authorities when they go home at the end of each growing season and ask for reassignment to a different farm. Those requests are not always granted; sometimes, making such a request can mean losing a spot in the program entirely. The complaints filed by workers are rarely shared with the Canadian government, a Star investigation found last year.
Critics say outbreaks like Scotlynn are symptomatic of a broader system failure — one where low-wage, racialized migrant workers are disenfranchised by their precarious immigration status and cannot count on effective enforcement to protect them.
Before COVID-19, Scotlynn was last inspected by the Ontario Ministry of Labour in 2018, when the farm was issued with four health and safety orders for failing to take all reasonable measures to protect workers. Between 2017 and 2019, the ministry conducted a proactive inspection blitz of Ontario employers who hire temporary foreign workers; 17 workplaces were inspected in total.
Aviles says this tragedy was both preventable and predictable. In fact, documents obtained by the Star show that public health experts warned months ago that deaths like Lopez Chaparro’s could happen.
Ultimately, attempts to mitigate the risk fell flat.
One Scotlynn worker who spoke to the Star said he has experience on multiple Canadian
farms, and that employers and authorities often seemed slow to react to concerns about living and working conditions.
“It is a form of racism,” the worker said.
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Workers received basic information about how to protect themselves from COVID-19 from the Mexican authorities before they left for Canada, according to two Scotlynn workers who spoke to the Star anonymously for fear of reprisal. They were told to wash their hands frequently and to wear a face mask when possible.
Workers spent two weeks in isolation in a hotel upon arrival; Biddle says he spent $700,000 in an effort to properly quarantine them.
Then, workers moved into their bunkhouses.
Both workers said they began the asparagus harvest, working five people to a cutting cart, side by side on low metal seats with less than a metre between them. They said their only protective gear was what they brought themselves. One worker said he’d been given five face masks by Mexican authorities at the airport. He had managed to procure 10 others, and was rationing one a week.
Both said their employer was slow to react when their colleagues started falling ill. As the severity of the crisis became clear, one worker said he felt worried about raising his concerns with supervisors. In the past, he’d had difficult encounters with them — like the time he says he was angrily chastised for asking to go to the bathroom.
According to a report by the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, it was not Scotlynn that called an ambulance for a worker bedridden by COVID-19, but a co-worker.
Biddle said his farm has always provided sick workers with swift medical attention. He also said migrant workers are adequately provided with PPE.
For migrant workers, it “should never be a concern for them to voice their opinion,” Biddle said.
Fay Faraday, a lawyer and associate professor at York University who has written numerous reports on migrant labour, says speaking out can often come at an enormous cost to workers — in a system that affords them little agency.
Migrant workers’ right to be in Canada is tied to their contract with a single employer, a so-called tied work permit. They can be dismissed and repatriated with no right of appeal. They have almost no ability to exit a bad job and find another one; to find alternative housing arrangements if theirs are substandard; or to gain permanent residency here.
In Ontario, they are prohibited from joining a union.
This structure, says Faraday, is the “baseline” of how Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program operates, and the single biggest obstacle to better working and living conditions.
Despite “decades” of workers voicing concerns about poor working conditions in the face of risking their jobs, Faraday
says the program’s fundamental shape has yet to change.
“The power imbalance is absolutely essential to its operation,” she said.
Now, more than 600 migrant workers in Canada have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Three have died; Lopez Chaparro being the only Scotlynn worker.
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Early on in the pandemic, health officials in HaldimandNorfolk — home to Scotlynn and at least 450 other farms — warned of the district’s particular vulnerability.
In mid-May, the public health unit made an 800-page legal submission to the Health Services Appeal and Review Board (HSARB) in response to a legal challenge over its COVID-19 response.
The submission, obtained by the Star, noted that the district had the highest number of migrant workers per capita in Ontario. Early on, the regional health unit scrambled scarce resources to prevent outbreaks, the submission said.
In an affidavit, health unit medical officer Shanker Nesathurai said bunkhouses were a singular risk.
Even before COVID -19, they’d been the site of infectious disease outbreaks.
Just a year earlier, for example, a local bunkhouse had suffered an outbreak of chickenpox, which can lead to serious health consequences in adults including death. Containing the outbreak had required “significant public health resources” to isolate and vaccinate workers, Nesathurai’s affidavit said.
In Ontario, the task of inspecting migrant worker accommodation prior to their arrival is downloaded onto local health units. But this year, with resources stretched due to the pandemic, these routine inspections didn’t happen, according to the health unit’s HSARB submissions.
The health unit took other precautions. On March 24, Nesathurai issued a Section 22 health protection order limiting the number of quarantining workers to three per bunkhouse. Haldimand-Norfolk was the only health unit in the province to do so.
A report by Mount Sinai infectious disease expert Allison McGeer, who is also a member of the national chief science adviser’s expert panel on COVID-19, supported that decision. Her report noted that “congregate living and working facilities are unquestionably situations in which the risk of COVID-19 transmission is highest.”
While Canadian public health guidelines allowed for households to share facilities, they could “not reasonably be taken to mean, for instance, that 20 or 30 people would be able to share one bathroom,” McGeer’s report said. According
to isolation proposals submitted to the health unit, some bunkhouses in the district housed upwards of 50 workers.
But some members of the local farming community objected to the health unit’s Section 22 order — appealing it to HSARB.
In email exchanges with county officials, local farm owner Brett Schuyler, who lodged the appeal to the board, said he was committed to his workers’ safety and flattening the curve. But he said farmers were wondering “why Norfolk is going above and beyond federal protocols.”
In another email, Schuyler told Nesathurai that the bunkhouse order was in fact making things more dangerous, because his farm would now need to bring in locals to work the fields daily.
In his submissions to the board, Schuyler said the restrictions would cause “irreparable” economic harm, as well as endanger food security.
“From a public health perspective,” Nesathurai’s affidavit responded, “I disagree that cost considerations should trump public health priorities.”
McGeer’s report added that the health risks associated with migrant workers’ living arrangements were “substantially higher” than those associated with hiring local workers. In McGeer’s opinion, the “degree of congregate living” proposed in some farmers’ quarantine plans could “be expected to fail to prevent transmission of COVID-19.”
“I believe that clusters of disease in migrant workers will be reported over the summer,” said her report. “Inadequate protection of these workers during quarantine is, in my view, also a concern.”
In an interview with the Star, Schuyler said he opposed the health orders partly out of cost concerns, but mostly because he felt workers hadn’t been consulted in the process. Schuyler said the friction with the health unit has ultimately consumed a lot of energy that could have been devoted to fixing “systemic failings” in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.
In June, HSARB issued its decision on Nesathurai’s public health order. The board sided with Schuyler, ruling that the health unit did not have “reasonable and probable grounds” to limit the number of workers in bunkhouses under quarantine.
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Blessed Sacrament Church pastor Peter Ciallella has spent the past few weeks gathering gift cards and care packages. He wanted to show Father’s Day appreciation for Haldimand-Norfolk’s migrant farm workers, who spend up to eight months a year separated from their families.
Instead, he spent Sunday clad in protective gear, travelling to Scotlynn’s six scattered bunkhouses with a devastating message. Juan Lopez Chaparro, a father of four, was dead.
As Ciallella delivered the news at one bunkhouse, he noticed one man break down in tears. It was Lopez Chaparro’s nephew and former bunkmate. He knew his 55-year-old uncle was gravely ill, but did not know he had died.
“I still have concerns,” the pastor told the Star. “That concerns me, the number of men in such a small area.”
Nesathurai accompanied the pastor, who speaks fluent Spanish, on the bunkhouse tour that went until 1 a.m. on Monday — enough time to offer prayers and support.
Scotlynn’s healthy workers are now back in the fields. Their bunkhouses are just visible from the roads slicing through fields of asparagus and ginseng; one is diagonal to the farm’s sprawling head offices. A “No Trespassing” sign is posted on the front lawn.
Biddle did not answer the Star’s questions on how many workers share each unit. “It really depends on the size of the housing.”
On a recent early morning, local workers could be seen manning the asparagus carts; the farm offered $25 an hour to recruit them as its minimumwage migrant workforce fell ill, according to Facebook posts made by the company.
Faraday says the conditions brought into focus by COVID-19 are not new, but chronic.
“No action has been taken for a number of reasons,” she said. “The largest one is a refusal to believe that conditions like this exist in Canada.”
In response to the pandemic, Ministry of Labour officials have made 105 proactive health and safety visits to farms across the province.
The vast majority were inperson inspections. Scotlynn was not included in the blitz. Officials have made two reactive visits since.
Although hundreds of migrant workers in the province have fallen ill with the virus, the Ministry of Labour says it has received only 13 notices from agricultural employers (including one from Scotlynn) about occupational illness events since the pandemic started.
“Employers are only required to inform our ministry if an occupational illness is believed to be related to the workplace,” said spokesperson Janet Deline.
While large farms are often “dominant industries in the small rural communities where they operate,” said Faraday,
migrant workers “have no political standing.”
On Monday, Premier Doug Ford announced that farms which employ migrant workers in Ontario will face expanded inspections starting this week, as both he and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted at further action against farmers not following safety rules.
The health unit in WindsorEssex also said Monday that 31 of the region’s 32 new cases come from the agricultural sector.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government said it is reconsidering a national standard for migrant worker housing that was proposed in 2018 but scuppered after employer opposition, as revealed by the Star in May.
But the government has not commented on whether it will address what critics see as the program’s single greatest flaw: the lack of permanent immigration status for migrant workers.
Schuyler says it’s a measure he would support.
“I don’t want somebody feeling trapped,” he said.
Without permanent status in Canada, workers’ ability to advocate for themselves will always be undercut, says Faraday.
“Workers have no negotiating power in this relationship,” she said.
Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit says it will appeal the HSARB decision. In the meantime, Aviles is still fielding calls from workers’ families in Mexico, who she says sometimes call her in tears.
“They’re terrified,” she said. “This tells you how vulnerable that system is. It doesn’t work.” Sara Mojtehedzadeh is a Torontobased reporter covering work and wealth for the Star.
—With files from news services