Ideas - Your tomatoes have a backstory and it’s not always pretty

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

In fact, author and journalist Marcello Di Cintio argues Canadians are complicit. After four years investigating the lives of migrant workers, he found that many temporary foreign workers are trapped working in precarious, exploitative conditions. These jobs are essential to our economy and society, yet invisible. Each migrant worker has a story to tell, says Di Cintio. He joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed on a visit through the tomato capital of Canada to hear their stories and talk about what his investigation reveals about Canada.Marcello Di Cintio's book is called Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers.

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Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Look at these greenhouses. Like, it's row upon row, upon row, upon row. I'm on the road with journalist, author, and all-around curious guy, Marcello di Chintu. Look at that. I've been inside some of these. Have you? Yeah, and they're more like NASA facilities than they are, like, greenhouse. My grandfather had a greenhouse. It was nothing like this.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And welcome to Leamington, Ontario, the tomato capital of Canada. I can smell tomatoes in the streets of Leamington. When the wind ships, I can smell the tomato-scented breeze coming in. Seriously? I'm Italian. I can smell a tomato from a good distance.

I'm like a bloodhound for that kind of thing. And if you happen to eat tomatoes, you'll want to know about a backstory that isn't always pretty. There's very few sectors of the Canadian economy that do not employ migrant workers. And the more I learned about the workers, the more I learned about the programs that they come and work under. And the more I learned about the history of those programs, the more I learned about us as a nation. And quite frankly, the portrait that that painted was rarely very flattering. So here we are on Talbot Street, and probably the biggest tomato I've ever seen. This big red, is it metal?

This big red tomato with a green stem. Oh, it's kind of plastery. Plaster concrete tomato, the size of a house. Yeah, it's like twice as tall as you are. That's not saying much. Yeah, I guess it's standing. in for Leamington's history of being a

not just a tomato capital, but a greenhouse and agricultural capital of certainly Ontario, if not the whole country. In the fall of 2021, Marcello set out on a journey across the country to produce what could be described as a migrant worker map of Canada.

Or more precisely, a map of their stories. Leamington, Ontario was an obvious destination. This is not not your first time here. No, I came down here a few years ago to write about those workers. I was interested in the lives of migrant laborers who come to Canada to work in places like Leamington and places like greenhouses and the tobacco fields and these sorts of things and got a sense of what their lives are like here. And what do you know about the history of this town? You know, for generations, the greenhouses around Leamington have been producing, you know,

the nation's tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers. And often from, immigrant labor. It was my people, the Italians, I think, were some of the first farm owners around here. And now the farms are worked by people from all around the global south, particularly Mexico and Jamaica and the Caribbean. We're very close to the U.S. border. Yes. There was a time decades ago where the farmers in Ontario, southern Ontario, were desperate for laborers and at one point

went across the border to kind of recruit day laborers from Michigan to come to Ontario to work just for the day and then return them. There was this push for farm owners to get the Canadian government

to allow temporary foreign labor to allow migrant agricultural workers from around the world and Canada resisted for a number of years and so one of the workarounds was kind of poaching them from the other side of the border.

But that border was also interesting. It has a history that's related to the times of slavery in the U.S. too. Yeah, there was a, on this side of the border, we're nearby some of the termini of the Underground Railroad. Some of the first freed slaves from the American South ended up in this part of Ontario. What do we mean when we talk about migrant workers? It's in the subtitle of your book, The Lives of Migrant Workers. Can you paint a brief picture of what?

that term is actually referring to. You know, for me and for this project, I kind of made the definition rather broad. So I'm referring to anyone who comes to Canada to work, but is not supposed to stay. You know, is here temporarily, right? So that could be someone under one of our migrant labor programs in Canada, the seasoned agricultural worker program or the temporary foreign workers program. But I also wrote about undocumented workers, people are here with no status. I wrote also, too, about international students.

You know, migrant students are more often than not also migrant workers. So I included them and I included people who have been trafficked, like the victims of labor trafficking. Again, are people who are working but are not supposed to be, or are not intending to stay. I tried as best as I could to cover a wide swath of the country for this project and also cover a relatively wide swath of sectors in which migrant workers work. And the places where they come from. You know, in British Columbia, I spent some time in the Vancouver area and also the Okanagan,

talking mostly to agricultural workers working in orchards and the vineyards out there. I spoke to agricultural workers also in southern Ontario. I spoke with caregivers in Toronto. I went as far as Guse Bay Labrador to speak with migrant laborers in that province. And they're mostly Filipino workers working in service jobs. In Newfoundland, I spoke to international students. I met Thai workers in medicine hat greenhouses. I spoke with people who worked on cannabis farms.

It feels very much like a cross-Canada story and one that very much underpins our everyday lives. Yeah, absolutely. There's very few sectors of the Canadian economy that do not employ migrant workers. There are wide swathes of the Canadian economy that rely on migrant labor, agriculture being the primary one, but also caregivers, also the construction industry, the trucking industry relies heavily on migrant workers. And so, you know, writing a book about migrant labor is also writing a book about kind of Canada as we function in a kind of contemporary society.

Marcello began collecting stories about temporary migrant workers in Canada shortly after his grandfather passed away in 2020. Amadeo Sorrentino left Italy and arrived in Canada in 1956 as a migrant worker. He was a migrant worker before. That was even a term here in Canada, right? He had, he left behind his wife and three daughters back in Italy, traveled across the ocean to work in greenhouses and construction sites in Calgary. The kind of jobs that workers, migrant workers do now. His whole intention was to earn some money here, send it back to his family, which he did, and then one day return. You know, he didn't want to stay in Canada. He wanted to eventually return, return to Italy. As it turned out, my grandmother, who's fierce and calls the shots

and still with us. And still with us at 96, 97, she decided that she was going to bring the family to here instead of no-no going back there. And so it was when he passed in 2020 that I'd really start to think about migrant labor because, you know, there are countless people like him in Canada now, people who have left families behind to come here for the financial opportunities that Canada provides. The difference is no-no was allowed to stay. He was granted landed immigrant status on arrival, whereas these workers that I talked about in the book, we welcome their work, but we don't welcome them to stay. So early in the book, you ask, what does it mean to voyage far from family to a nation that wants you to work but doesn't want you to stay. Bring your arms and

backs, you write, Canada pleads, but leave the rest on the other side of the border. We need your sweat. We don't need your stories. So let me ask you, what does it mean that we ask these people to come and leave their stories behind? What does it mean for them? It means an opportunity. It means often a better life for family back home, as it did for my grandfather and my mother and her by two hands. Sometimes it means escaping pressures in the home country that are dangerous. What does it mean for Canada? That's, I think, a compelling question. Because, yes, it means, officially it means a supply of labor to sectors that require it. Let's face it, cheap labor is what we're talking about. But what does it mean to Canada's idea of itself? That's

interesting because we we like to think of ourselves as a warm, generous, and welcoming country. I grew up that way, you know, growing up in Canada. That's how I was taught to think about my citizenship and my nation, this welcoming place. For a lot of these workers, however, who come, they are not treated with that kind of hospitality that we seem to think that we offer. The welcome, the handshake can be pretty rough here in Canada. And the more I learned about the workers, the more I learned about the programs that they come and work under, and the more I learned about the history of those programs, the more I learned about us as a nation. And quite frankly, the portrait that that painted was rarely very flattering.

Just to toggle back to the personal, I wonder how often, as you were navigating the story across the country, you had kind of your grandfather at the back of your head as you compared the situations. Was that, or was that just a story? starting point. It was a starting point, but he came to mind a lot, especially when I met fathers that were here, fathers who had decided that to be the best parent that could be for their children was to leave them and come to Canada and work. So that sacrifice of being an ocean away from their children. And so I thought about that a lot with my grandfather, because I would hear the stories about him talking about missing his three daughters. Of course, the

letters he would write back and these sorts of things. Voice recordings. He recorded a vinyl album in Calgary once and sent it overseas. They had to buy a record player with the money he sent back in order to listen to it. I mean, now things are easier, I suppose, you know, with all the modern technology. And I mean, back then you could even call, much less Zoom. But those pressures, I felt a lot. And they reminded me my grandfather. And as a father myself, that reminded me of how I would do, you know, I don't like being away from my son for days at a time. Can you imagine two years? I couldn't, I couldn't do it.

It looks really interesting. There's quite a few Mexican restaurants, it seems. I will make the controversial statement to say that probably the best city in Canada for Mexican food is Leamington, Ontario. And clearly, because there is such a large clientele base. Yeah, there's plenty of restaurants here catering to this taste. And you see that even law for You'll see accountant or like tax services, little grocery stores with, you know, kind of Spanish groceries and foodstuffs, things that the workers would remind them of home and add some comfort. And it was thanks to you, Marcello, that I learned that there's actually a Mexican consulate in Leamington? Yes. Isn't that remarkable? I think the only other consulates are the big cities, right? And Leamington. I mean, it's here primarily to serve the seasonal agriculture.

workers that come here. Leamington has been transformed by the presence of those workers. Across Canada, in 2024, there were about 191,000 temporary foreign workers here to do mostly low-wage jobs that couldn't be filled by Canadians. They might have served you coffee today, or helped feed your loved one at a hospital, or maybe you ate one of the tomatoes or apples they picked on a Canadian farm. They're all essential to. our economy and help underpin our way of life, and each one of them has a story to tell. Almost all the workers that come here, and certainly all the Mexican workers, leave behind family back home, right? In fact, in order to be part of the seasonal agricultural worker program

in Mexico is that you have to have family back home. They want people with children so that they have a reason to go back. They have a reason to return after those eight months. months. And so I talked to so many workers, both Mexican and others across the country, who talk about what it's like trying to be a parent from, you know, thousands of miles away. And I talked to a lot of dads. And as a father myself, it kind of hits where, you know, they're away from their kids for months, sometimes years at a time. And they talk about missing so much in their children's lives, milestones. And I heard stories, too, about, you know, sometimes those kids who don't understand why dads away resent them for it. And so

so many of these workers, they have to come to grips with the idea that being a good dad means being an absent dad. The opportunity is worth the absence. And, you know, for any parent, You know, that's a heartbreaking decision to have to make. Right. So a place like this tacharia and, you know, the bars in Leamington that play their music and all that kind of stuff become these, certainly not a substitute for home because nothing is that. But at least a place where they can find comfort and familiarity. And, you know, people who also, it means surrounded by people who understand what they're going through as well. At certain times of the day or week.

The workers are very visible on the streets of Lamington, shopping or heading to a restaurant or sending money abroad. As Marcello discovered, though, you can't simply walk up to them for an interview. Instead, one of Marcello's contacts introduced us to Omar Walcott, who's here under what's called a seasonal agricultural worker program designed specifically to bring in workers from Mexico, Jamaica, and other Caribbean countries. Tell me about making that decision 19 years ago. Well, I was excited because making that decision is not hard.

The program back home is it run for Canada and America. And when you know you're going to Canada and America, you could see, like, opportunity. You know, I think that opportunity we're here for me. Omar Walcott is not his real name. He stands to lose his employment and status in Canada for speaking out about his working conditions. So to protect his identity, his words are also read by a stand-in. The only goal that we have is not to be a pilot.

It's not to be, you know, a scientist. The goal, the only goal that we have is to build ourselves a house. You know, so that's what I'm doing at the moment. So that's the reason. That's what keep us coming back, going back and forth, because we try to finish. Always try to finish our house. How close are you? I'm far away.

You know, I build what my family is comfortable in already, but I've not finished. Because I don't know if you heard about Jamaicans. We build house for like seven years straight. This year you build one room, come get some more money, because it's small, you have to split it. The kids go into school while you're here, family have to eat. You keep sending every week or every two week. You bring home a little, or you put it in the bank, or you go home.

And then you spend it again. Build a next room. So that's how we do it. I don't think the program can finish this. I'll be coming too long. Why is it important for us to hear those stories, do you think? The stories we effectively are telling them to leave behind. If we're inviting people, anyone, to Canada, to contribute and participate in our society,

and they're not just talking about our economy, but to participate in Canadian society, if we owe them an audience of their stories, we should not treat them like arms and backs. You know, they come with dreams and hopes and loves they leave behind and fears and all those things that make all of us human. If we're going to share our space with them, then we should share everything with them. Their stories should matter to us. We don't define ourselves only by our labor. We're defined by our kind of our stories.

their stories don't concern us. Their dreams don't concern us. By saying that that also means that their humanity doesn't concern us because we're talking about humanity. If we treat people that come here as a pair of arms and a back, we are denying them their dignity. And by doing so, we're denying it to ourselves. You also say that each untold story contributes to their invisibility. Yes, of course. I mean, there's large swathes of the economy that are supported by the stories we never hear, who we never see, and whose dreams we don't concern us. And by not hearing those stories, right, by having this invisibility, it makes it far too easy for us to then neglect when things go badly, and they often do. If we don't see what's happening,

we don't have to address what's happening. And we can maintain that sense of the warm and gentle Canadian much easier if we don't know what's going on. How long have you been working in Canada? Okay. I've been working in Canada for 19 years. These 19 years in Canada, how would you describe them? Well, I described my experience working in Canada for 19 years. It's the hardest time I ever worked from the day I was born. And I would say it's the roughest time.

I've ever go through. Even though I may have stuff doing and stuff accomplishing, but it's the hardest time I've ever faced. And yet you stayed for 19 years. Why? Well, the reason why it's just financial, you know, is necessities to keep my kids in school, just to make a living for my wife and kids to eat and also me. As soon as you start the program, you actually make it become a job. And I don't think that people should do that. What do you mean?

You shouldn't make it a job. Because the program, it's not so good. So I don't think I should make it a career. Just since of lately, I started learning that. What made you come to that conclusion? Why did you decide that? Well, because I live it. I experience it a lot.

I experience a lot of racism and discrimination. People, the boss, doesn't treat us like we are human. There are federal rules that govern how foreign temporary workers are supposed to be treated in Canada. Rules to prevent abuse. to keep them safe and healthy, to ensure they're treated fairly. In the seasonal agricultural program, the Mexican consulate, for instance, has the power to inspect living and working conditions for its citizens and ask for remedies.

There's plenty evidence most employers do their best to follow those rules. But not all. Marcello managed to speak to dozens of workers about what happens when things go wrong. I can only imagine the litany of things that can go wrong when you're a vulnerable person from an impoverished background and, you know, you're here to work and under strict conditions. But could you give us a sense of the kinds of things you heard about from people, you know, the pitfalls that they would come across working in any of the sectors that you've covered? I heard, you know, just about every kind of flavor of abuse. Maybe I should be clear in saying, of course, not. all employers are monsters, but the system enables monsters to be monsters, right? And those monsters

will meet out physical abuse, verbal abuse. I heard stories about workers being denied water breaks and bathroom breaks. I heard stories about being underpaid, having the wages stolen. I heard stories about decrepit living conditions, you know, people crowded into far too many people crowded into bunkhouse with far too few bathrooms and kitchen facilities. And I heard about rats. I heard about sexual assault. Threats always of, if you don't like it, you can go home. If you don't like it, there's a hundred more Mexicans, Filipinos, Jamaicans who take your job if you don't like it. And unfortunately, that is kind of true.

And so these employers have immense amount of power to get away with all manner of mistreatment and abuses. And the workers will often, tolerating. it and endure it because standing up against it means going home. Omar told us he's lived in housing infested with vermin, with bedbugs, and with employers unwilling to do anything about it. And trust me, you don't want to see that house. It's the worst house. Worse I've seen.

and when I was at that house I couldn't believe that I'm in Canada because Jamaica is a third world country and nobody keeps their house like that then there is the matter of the hours he was expected to keep what time do you start and end this morning I start six

we're going to like seven you must be tired Omer Really, really tired. When you're on your knees for the whole day, that's when it's really, really. Even this year, especially out on this farm, every day I think I'm sick. I'm wondering if I'm sick. I know it's because I'm standing right through the day, right through the day. My knees swell sometimes.

My foot swell. It's hard. It's hard. I imagine you're also just not just tired today but just tired like 20 years of doing this is a long time

Yeah man Really tired Really tired The farm work feel like A modern day slavery You know It's not because we're not getting paid It's just

It feels like that Of course Because if you're working 7 days a week and nobody don't want you to take a rest on Sunday. If you take the rest, they ask you question on Sunday morning. I feel like this is slavery. Omar isn't alone in using that word to describe the migrant worker experience here.

In 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on modern slavery visited Canada and concluded that its temporary foreign worker programs serve as, quote, a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery. That caused a furor here, with politicians and many employers, including farmers, insisting it was a problem of a few bad apples, that the vast majority of employers follow the rules and treat their workers well. But critics like Amnesty International Canada and advocates for migrant workers point to structural problems

in the government program's very DNA that make it, quote, inherently exploitative. To find out more, Marcello went back to its beginnings. You say that the history of the government programs that provide for temporary foreign workers is confusing. They changed several times. What is the origin story? if you could, just address of why the first of those programs was actually implemented in Canada.

What need was it addressing? What question was it trying to answer? Kind of the modern programs that exist now, kind of were born after the Second World War with labor shortages in Canada. And first, we're talking about agricultural at first. And so Canadian farm owners didn't have enough workers to work to harvest, to work the fields, to plant, to tend to greenhouses, all of those things. And at the time, the United States was, bringing in temporary workers from the Caribbean. And Canadian farmers wanted to do the same. And so they pressured the feds to start these sorts of programs. And the feds resisted. And the feds resisted because, and this is not my interpretation. This is what was like explicitly

stated is that they didn't want black people in this country. They felt... Where was it explicitly stated? In Ottawa, you know, amongst deputy ministers and, you know, officials in officialdom. Yeah, they didn't, they didn't want that. Black people were ill-suited for our weather is one of the ridiculous claims that they made. But also even worse things, like they don't adhere to our society, like really, really horrible, horrible stuff. Eventually, the pressure eventually worked. And we started, we started what is now called the seasonal agricultural worker program in 1966. And we first brought in a crew of Jamaicans to come and work fields in Ontario.

And that's where things started there. Since then, it expanded beyond agriculture. And in 1974, the temporary foreign worker program, as it's now called, was born, which didn't just adhere to agricultural workers, but adhered to workers in all kinds of sectors. And not seasonal. They came for longer stretches of work permits, right? And so over the years since then, they've been amended or slightly tweaked, but generally these are the two streams we're talking about.

Yeah. So you talked about the resistance of the government to implementing such a program and that it was sort of based on racist thinking. I wonder how much of the structure of the programs as they were created originally also had racist undertones, I should say. They absolutely did.

So what happened in 1962, right, the Charter Rights was updated, immigration was updated, so we could no longer exclude people based on their color, which until that point, we could. But Canada, and I'm talking about us as a nation, still wanted to control, you know, the types of people we brought here. And so it was decided, okay, we can't keep people from the

Caribbean, for example, out just because they're black. But if they want to come to work and we give them temporary permits, then they don't stay. They don't affect our demographics that much. And if we make them temporary, they can't bring their families. So it's okay if we let a few of them stay for a little while if that means we don't have to accept a whole lot of them all the time and permanently. That's why the system exists. There was no temporary foreign worker program when my grandfather came because the majority of immigrants at that time were, like my grandfather, white. It was only once, it was people from the global south, immigrants from South Asia and Africa and the Caribbean and South America, Latin America, when that started to change. When the

government decided, this is a problem. We want to keep Canada whiter than this. And therefore, we'll let them in for a little while, but then they have to go home. Those sort of racist undertones or the color-driven decision. How much do you think of those, that way of thinking actually still survives in the DNA of the programs as they exist today? That's a hard question to answer. The people who come here on temporary foreign worker visas are still primarily. people of color, right? Those restrictions still exist. Is it because it's part of the DNA, like something that's a remnant of a time where Canada was worse than it is now? That's a nice way to think about it. That's the best way to think about it. It's certainly charitable,

perhaps too generous. I mean, we see kind of racism not so far under the surface all the time in this country. Why wouldn't it be here too? I wonder if all the migrant workers were coming here, were from Europe, we're Ukrainians, we're Italians again, whether or not we'd be looking at the same thing. In a 2025 report, Amnesty International Canada said most of the work permits issued under Canada's temporary foreign workers program are, by design, granted to quote, low-skilled workers from low and middle-income countries in the global south, with the majority of black, Latin American,

and other racialized populations, unquote. So unlike their high-skilled counterparts, these racialized workers are overrepresented in sectors that pay less and offer no chance of security. And unlike all other worker categories, Amnesty says, the nature of their visas, puts them at, quote, high risk of labor exploitation. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed.

This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexsavers.cairs.com. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cairs to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little.

You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca. Delve even briefly into the precarious lives of temporary foreign workers in Canada. And very quickly, the question arises. What do we owe them? A growing chorus of human rights and migrants advocates say

we owe temporary foreign workers much more than a paycheck and comfortable, safe living quarters, better working conditions, for instance, stronger rights, and especially the ability to freely change employers and jobs while they're here. Work permits under the temporary foreign worker program currently tie temporary foreign workers to one employer, a system that Amnesty International says fuels widespread exploitation and abuse. It launched a national campaign to push for the loosening of that structure,

a campaign supported by many organizations, including the National Farmers Union. Meanwhile, the federal conservatives have called for the program to be cut altogether, minus the agricultural stream, alleging that liberal corporate elites exploit workers to enrich themselves while denying jobs to Canadians. Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected those calls, saying access to foreign workers

is a top priority for Canadian business. The government points to an existing mechanism to which vulnerable foreign workers can apply to switch to an open work permit, but one that advocates say is incredibly difficult to navigate. Ottawa also points to its inspections of workplaces designed to call out and find bad employers. Author and journalist Marcello DeCintio says it's the whole system that requires reform.

We've talked kind of over the time we've discussed this book about the bad apples, that there are employers who they're not into treating their staff well. But you say the problem is bigger than that. You say it's not just the apple, but it's the tree and perhaps the entire orchard. Can you just explain what you mean by that? Yeah. I mean, we've all had bad bosses, you know, and we've quit those jobs because we had that opportunity, right?

But that is a right and a freedom that migrant workers do not have, temporary foreign workers do not have, because they come to Canada and they are here on a closed permit, an employer-specific work permit that means that they can only work for the person that brought them here, the person who's contract that they've signed. If they quit, if they try to change jobs, if they are fired, they are legally supposed to go home. The only way they're in Canada is through that one permit. And so that grants the employer an immense amount of power, right?

Because the worker will do anything and endure just about anything to keep that permit. So if you're a benevolent boss, no problem. If you're a villain, then this system enables you to be a villain. It incentivizes bad behavior. And so workers find themselves kind of trapped in these positions, whether they either endure mistreatment or risk being without status, risk being deported, and then not sending the money home, which is why they're here in the first place, right? Is there no way around that? Is there no option for them to change employers if they find themselves in the employee as someone who's abusive? Typically, no.

I mean, there's some avenues through the seasonal agricultural worker program that are extremely complicated and very rarely used and require there to be another employer nearby who also can, you know, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. There are programs that are relatively new for workers who have been so badly abused by their employer that the government will grant, them an open work permit for a couple, for a year to, to find other work, which sounds great, but, you know, it's this idea where the government has to decide if you've been sufficiently abused to be granted this open permit, right? So there are these avenues, but they're terrible avenues, right? And so for the most part, you know, you dance with the one who brought you. And if your partner is, is terrible, then you, that's who you're stuck with. And if you refuse that, what happens to you as a migrant worker if you quit if you if you quit your job uh you are legally

allowed to be in canada for as long as your permit lasts so there's that um and if you can find a job before your permit runs out you can stay that's much easier said than done you know not you can't just get a job anywhere you have to find a job where the employer has a permission from the government to hire migrant workers that's not that's not everybody how do you find that if you have no connections in the country? How do you find that if you don't speak French or English, which a lot of workers don't? So a lot of workers end up, you know, that permit runs out and now they are undocumented. They're here without status. If they haven't gone home, they're here illegally. That opens up a whole other level of precarity and potential

for abuses. If you thought working under a bad official boss is a terrible situation to be in, Imagine when you're utterly invisible, when you have no protections at all because you're not supposed to be here in the first place. There's kind of a natural pushback. You know, people have said, well, you're a contracted worker. It's a transaction. You're here to make really good money. Go home, live like a king after our queen. And you're lucky to be here because, as you say, there are thousands of others who could be coming instead.

What's the pushback? What's the argument back to that? Other than the moral argument, you know, we can start there. Like, that does not sound very moral or humane. And it sure doesn't sound very Canadian. You know, that's, that strikes against kind of our maple-dipped idea of ourselves, right? And why should anyone tolerate mistreatment and abuse that we would not tolerate? Why is it that people who come from away here are allowed to be treated poorly in ways that we would never accept it for ourselves?

just because they should be happy to be here, just because they come from a place where things might be worse, this is, this kind of logic is, well, it's frankly immoral. No, if people are welcome here to work, then they should be welcome to be treated fairly and humanely. There's not, there shouldn't be a different level of their humanity just because they're not here to stay. How would you describe your experience in Canada overall? Like just from the first minute you set your foot here to now, how would you describe? It was a roller coaster, yeah, because there's a lot of ups and down. I came here as a migrant worker year 2018, and it was a big opportunity for me because it

It's my Canada dream, and not only for me and for my family too. But I just want to work hard here and give my family back home a better life. Marcello introduced me to Cassandra, whom he met back in 2022. When she first arrived from the Philippines four years earlier, she worked in greenhouses, where she says a supervisor unfairly criticized, her work and gave her fewer hours than promised. At the time, she had not yet started her transition and was subjected to relentless taunting and rumors even by fellow workers. She held on because she had to. How much of a difference do you make in the life of your family back home?

The money that you send home, how important is that? It is very important because if I will be working back home. My salary will be fifth times or six times, yeah, compared yeah. So it's a big help, yeah, financially to my family. When's the last time you saw your family? 2018. I haven't, yeah, have the opportunity to go back home, but looking forward to it, yeah. I'm very sorry that you

weren't able to go home to be with your mom. I know that you lost her. So I want to know how you look at this time in Canada. It both provided an opportunity for you, but it also took so much away from you. So what feelings do you have about this country and your time here? Those experiences that I encountered in love, it makes me like yeah stronger and I really learned a lot from it yeah and now I think I am more career oriented now because of those pains yeah that that I experienced before so now I will use it to be more productive to to grow yeah and to be a better person how How did it change how you feel about this country, like what you think of Canada?

If you are weak, you can't survive here. So you need to be strong, yeah. And, yeah, you will face a lot of trials in life. And mentally, you need to be strong, emotionally, physically, yeah. But in the end, the torment was too much, and Cassandra resigned. With the help of a lawyer, she managed to apply for and secure one of those rare open permits for vulnerable workers, so she was able to switch employers and is now on a path to Canadian citizenship. She's working at a long-term care home and training to become a nurse.

She was the first temporary foreign worker to successfully get an open permit. Applications to the Vulnerable Worker Open Permit program are on the rise. Advocates believe it's one measure of the extent of the problems that migrant workers face here. Just shifting gears slightly, you talk about their invisibility, the fact that we as Canadians, they're invisible to us, these workers. And yet you talk about the relationship that we have with them as that of an addiction. How can those two things coexist? they're invisible, but we're addicted. How is that?

Because we're addicted to their labor. We're addicted to the work that they provide. And this is, I believe it was Mark Miller, the former immigration minister who used that terminology. You know, we've become addicted to migrant labor, I believe is what he said. And yes, it's because we developed these sectors of the economy that become dependent on this cheap labor. And yeah, they're invisible because they're the ones harvesting our tomatoes.

We don't see them. They're the ones cleaning our hotel. rooms or the offices after we go home for the night, we don't see them. They're the ones maybe washing dishes in the back of a burger place. We don't see them. And even when we do see them, say, even if the person behind the counter pouring us our coffee is a migrant worker, we don't know that. We don't know that anyone by looking at them is a Canadian citizen or not, right? We don't know if they're here permanently or temporarily. That means we don't have to think about him. What does that mean for all of us? The fact that our

Economies underpinned by the backs and arms of these invisible people. What's our role in that? I think we've become accustomed to that as being the way things are and therefore the way things should be. It's been this way for 50 years, right? Especially for some of those sectors. And it's been that way for at least 20, 30 years for like kind of the fast food sector. That's a relatively new addition to these programs. And so-

I mean, does it make us complicit in some way? Yes. So because this is such, these programs are so ingrained in both our economies and our societies, it makes all of us complicit in what's going on behind the scenes in those invisible corners. We're complicit every time we buy a tomato. The experience of that worker who harvested that tomato, that experience brought that to us. And we are, we are implicated in all of that. The price we pay is dependent on, on, on, them doing that work. Yeah. We complain about it being high, but the reason why it's as low as it is is because we have labor that's willing to be paid meager, meager wages. Why don't we know that as

Canadians, do you think? Yeah, that's a good question. Why don't we know it? I think people who live in place like Leamington, like know it. We see migrant workers in the fields and on the streets. In Calgary, I don't think about it. I don't have to think about it. You know, I just buy the tomato. I mean, let's face it, Canadians don't like thinking about things that reflect poorly upon us. How long did it take before we started dealing with our role with indigenous? And we're still, you know, like, I'm 52 years old. It feels like it's only been part of my awareness in the last 25 years, right?

And so we have this image of ourselves, right? We want to think of Canadians, like, we would imagine Justin Trudeau handing out Parcas to the Syrian refugees at the airport. That's Canada. Canada is not those workers from Jamaica jammed into a filthy bunkhouse on a farm, right? We don't like looking at the darkness, do we? Like, that's not something we like, we come to very easily. And I think it's part of that. You know, I think there will be some time in the future, maybe, where a prime minister will stand up in the House of Commons and issue an official apology for our decades of treatment of migrant workers in the same way that we've done that for Japanese internment and for residential schools. I think this is on our list of sins that we're going to have to address in some official capacity at some point. But I rather we don't wait till then, I'd rather we handle

these things now, offer our migrant workers the kind of conditions that we would work under. That's part of it, too. All these things, all these experiences that we seem to be fine with, We would never accept for ourselves, not a chance. And we seem to justify that by saying, oh, it's still better than where they are back home. It's still better. Essentially saying that those people deserve, their expectations should be lower than ours. Interesting, you use the word sins about migrant workers. I mean, is that how you see it?

These are systems like I said before, that are rooted in kind of racist ideology. This is a system that enables mistreatment. AIDS and abets it that does not punish severely anyway, people who do propagate abuses from migrant workers. Those bad bosses get away with being bad. Those feel like sins to me. What would you, what's the first? thing you would do to change the program? What needs to change to make it better and more fair to workers? You know what I would do? I would give them status on arrival. That's what I would

do. I would get them status on arrival, open work permit, you know, because if they get status on arrival, at least they can bring their family. And if they get open work permit, at least if the boss is disrespecting them, they could go look at another job somewhere else. What's your main message to Canadians? Well, my main message to Canadian is to treat the migrant workers better because we feed you. We grow your fruits. We grow your fruits. We grow your vegetables, you know. So treat us with a little respect.

We don't want a walk in the park. You know, we know rough life. I know rough life. Really rough life. I used to walk to get water on my head. Just to get water for my family

to drink. I used to go to the boat with a machete and chop dry sticks for my mom to cook. So we know a rough life. So all we want is Canadians to just treat us like normal work people.

Just treat us fair. That's all. Very early in your book, you recite a report by a UN official who described Canada's temporary foreign worker structure as a, quote, reading ground for contemporary forms of slavery. After everything you've seen,

Do you agree? The S word, right? It is quite something to hear that we're being spoken by a UN official. And it was quickly dismissed by many in Canada. But migrant workers have been talking, have been using the S word for years. You know, I heard in lots of reports by workers saying that their conditions on this farm or this construction site or here or there, you know, resembled slavery to them. I will let victims of slavery decide whether or not that word is accurate or not. But everything that the U.N. special rapporteur had seen and heard about that led to that conclusion are things that I also had seen and heard about.

All those kinds of abuses. That's what he's talking about. This is kind of indentured labor that people suffer under. I'm not going to argue with his vocabulary when everything. everything that he saw that led to that is completely true. What do you want Canadians to take away from this book? What's the bottom line that you want them to know? I would love if Canadians read this book and felt something for the men and women who are

doing this work that we do not want to do, but we desperately need to be done and to see them as complete human beings. And I would like to, Canadians, to understand that we are all implicated. If we want to be the Canada that we like to think that we are, then we have to stare our failures in the face before we can fix them. And these programs need to be fixed, and we can't fix them unless we know what's going on. And so, if anything, I hope this book does kind of turn on that light for Canadians. If Canada were as Canadian, as we claim,

if we embody the idea that we're no longer a white man's country, but a place that welcomes all, we'd feel more responsible for the migrants because of their vulnerability, not less. We wouldn't force them to choose opportunity over home, while we, as citizens, take for granted we can have both. Instead, our treatment of migrants undermines our fragile national fiction. Our failure to live up to our own billing has ramifications not only on how others see and will see us, but on how we'll come to see ourselves.

By diminishing the dignity of our most precarious workers, we diminish our own. Author and journalist Marcello de Chintillo, reading from his book, Precarious, The Lives of Migrant Workers. Many thanks to Marcello and to Biblioasis, especially Dan Wells, for making this episode possible. Thanks also to Dominique Beshard and to the Migrant Workers Alliance and to the Mexican Consulate in Leamington,

Ontario. Special thanks to Omar Walcott and Cassandra for speaking to us. Voiceover by Rayan Dawson. Many thanks to Rayan and to Nick Davis for their help in bringing Omar's voice to this piece. This episode was produced by me, Nala Ayad, with a lot of help from Marcello de Chintio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production. Sam McNulty. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.