The people who feed us, need us

COVID-19 has transformed our understanding of who Canada’s essential workers truly are.

Personal support workers, grocery store clerks, delivery truck drivers, public transit staff and others have joined the ranks of doctors and nurses in keeping the rest of us well and society functioning for the past three months. They’re heroes, all of them.

But there’s another group of essential workers who remain largely overlooked, even though they plant and pick much of the food we eat while doing jobs most Canadians would find too menial, repetitive and grinding. And even though they risk their lives in the process.

They’re the tens of thousands of migrant agricultural labourers who enter Canada every growing season to toil in the farm fields and greenhouses of the nation. The asparagus on your plate or the tomatoes in your salad bowl could well be the produce of their careful hands. Every year, they feed us. In this pandemic year, they need us.

Because they live and work in such close proximity with one another, they’re especially vulnerable to the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. And so they’re falling ill in alarming numbers in the Petri dishes that are their cramped bunkhouses.

As of this week, there were at least three major outbreaks in southern Ontario — at Scotlynn Group in Norfolk County, Ontario Plants Propagation in St. Thomas and Greenhill Produce in Kent Bridge — with more than 280 confirmed COVID-19 cases among migrant farm workers. Two Mexican workers have died. At least two others are in hospital in intensive care.

While the full extent of the outbreak in the lush farm belt stretching from Essex County to Niagara Region is unknown, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change estimates more than 400 agri-workers have tested positive for COVID-19. In addition, thousands of workers are having trouble protecting themselves and lack adequate health-care support.

Have Canadians learned nothing from the pandemic debacle in the country’s long-term-care facilities? The federal and provincial governments should have seen this coming and already stepped-up their response.

Yes, the migrant workers were quarantined when they entered the county to prevent them from infecting the Canadian population. Too little was done to guard the well-being of the workers themselves. That’s shameful. As for the farmers who employ these workers, it’s clear they’re trying to cope but lack the knowledge and ability to deal with the situation.

Canada must do better. This workforce is crucial to the country’s food-supply chain. Because of the outbreak in Norfolk County, for example, one farm alone lost 450 acres of unharvested asparagus. Yet beyond any practical arguments, we have a moral responsibility to help people who are thousands of kilometres from home, isolated and often face language barriers in knowing their rights and seeking help.

One positive development to come from this crisis is the recent creation of the Migrant Worker Health Expert Working Group, which is being co-ordinated by two professors at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.

The group is urging the federal, provincial and municipal governments to introduce measures that would provide better protection and care for these workers. It’s also sharing information with farm operators and health professionals so they can better safeguard this workforce.

At this point, more than tinkering is required. Canada’s foreign worker program must be overhauled. Canada’s migrant workers have deserved better for years. Their suffering in this pandemic bolsters all the earlier arguments for change.

And if it had passed unacknowledged before, Canadians must admit now these workers are absolutely, unequivocally essential.