Foreign farm workers with COVID offered ‘recovery centre’

The City of Windsor is offering to set up an “isolation and recovery centre” to accommodate migrant farm workers in the county who test positive for COVID-19 and need space to self-isolate.

“We want to be part of the solution here,” Mayor Drew Dilkens told reporters Tuesday. Using the same model as the city recently employed to assist with homeless people who had tested positive, he said it was Windsor’s contribution to help “deal with the explosion out there” of COVID-19 cases at area farms.

Disappointed that Windsor and Essex County remain one of only three areas in the province not able to expand business openings, the mayor said Monday he had spoken with Premier Doug Ford on Sunday and urged the province to order mandatory testing of the thousands of temporary foreign workers employed locally.

“We realize it’s going to be very difficult for the city of Windsor and our entire county to move to the next stage, Phase 2, unless we deal with the migrant worker population,” Dilkens said Tuesday.

“Public health officials have indicated that the need to isolate after a positive test result has become a barrier to increased testing of the migrant population. The City of Windsor is taking immediate steps to remove that barrier and I’m repeating my call for full testing of the temporary foreign worker population in Essex County,” Dilkens said in a statement.

Protocols already established by Windsor’s social services department to help isolate Covid-positive homeless individuals in the city will be extended to include non-acute farm workers from the county. Space at the icheck Inn Motel on Howard Avenue was previously booked by the city to accommodate positive-testing homeless individuals, but Dilkens said “a different place” is being considered for the farm workers. He wouldn’t say where: “I don’t want to stigmatize.”

While the issue of COVID-19 on farms “is very complicated ... this concept could be attractive to us,” said Justine Taylor, science and government relations manager for the Ontario Vegetable Greenhouse Growers.

Highline Mushrooms CEO Aaron Hamer said he’s been “disappointed” with the relatively low response rate from the local agri-food sector to calls — from everyone from Premier Ford to Windsor’s mayor and local public health authorities — for farmers and their workers to volunteer to be tested.

“I feel horrible for the small-business owners who have to watch the rest of Ontario open up and they can’t,” said Hamer, who has had hundreds of employees tested. To remove a “negative incentive” for workers to not to self-report, he said Highline workers found to be positive for COVID-19 and who must then be quarantined continue to get paid.

The city’s isolation facility will be closely monitored to ensure that residents remain on-site and to ensure that local risk of continued community spread is minimized, the city said in a news release.

Social Services and public health staff will be made available to provide meals and check-in services for individuals, it added.

There will be “no cost to the city,” said Dilkens, adding farm owners will be billed.