Toronto / September 2024 – It’s Labour day and my thoughts turn to the role of unions, in our work of building inclusive and welcoming communities so that all im/migrants and refugees find a sense of home regardless of where they land in this vast country of ours.
This moment in time feels like back to the future. Not in the sense of Sankofa – looking back to take the lessons that will help to shape the future - but in a sense of historical erasure which will ensure that we repeat practices that are exclusionary, that are discriminatory and divisive.
The emergent narrative of migrant workers, asylum claimants, international students and other temporary residents as the cause of all of Canada’s economic and social challenges is bunk. Complete BS. In other words, it is a false narrative that must be challenged.
Many organizations working in the immigrant and refugee services and advocacy space, spoke out in the noughts and twenty tens about the rapid move to and promotion of temporariness in our immigration programs. Beginning with the policy of the ‘four years in four years out’ temporary workers program, to the open abuse of the Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), to the granting of student visas for so called “career colleges”, we knew this would all come to a head. And as usual those bearing the brunt of the fallout, are not the corporations and businesses that convinced the government that unfettered temporary workers visa was good for the economy, or the owners of the bogus colleges.
Instead it is the student whose family scraped and borrowed to get them a foot into Canada to advance their education with the promise of work permits, and jobs, and permanent residency in Canada; and is now facing the prospect of deportation. It is the migrant worker who may have paid (we have heard from news reports that some are charged as much as $20K Cdn) for the LMIA to make the trek to Canada with the promise of opportunities and a new and better life; and is now facing the prospect of deportation with thousands still owed from borrowed funds.
And it is the refugee claimant who has been forced to flee their home because their very existence is criminalized by new laws governing who they love, or claiming their true gender identity. Laws heavily influenced by western Christian evangelism tied to ‘development work’ in countries like Uganda, Ghana and Kenya. Or accelerating human-induced climate change. Or war and acts of genocide. Or unfettered extractive mining that destroys the lands of Indigenous communities throughout Africa, Asia, Indo-pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean.
This narrative of ‘blame the new immigrant/migrant/refugee/claimant’ isn’t going to bring about the changes we want to see. The need for increased deeply affordable and diverse housing; the need for price controls especially of basic goods like food; the need for employers to pay a living wage (which is more than the provincial minimum wage rate in most cities and towns) and the need for expanded healthcare that is truly universal where all one needs is an OHIP card, not a credit card (yes, I’m reclaiming this line).
So, you’ve heard all this from me before - often in this very space. What’s new, you ask. My question today is, where is organized Labour in all of this? Did Labour leaders speak up when our various federal and provincial governments bowed to big business and promoted and threw open the proverbial doors to temporary workers for permanent jobs which dampened wages, increased workers’ exploitation and created in some cases conditions that mirror that of slavery according to a recent UN Special Rapporteur’s report on Canada’s treatment of migrant workers?
We have welcomed the voices of Labour at various tables working on women’s and racial minority rights; on LGBTI2S+ issues and even on the environment. A number of unions have shown up in solidarity around the seasonal agricultural and farm workers program and have engaged in the discussion and attempts at organizing these workers. The national Labour organization (CLC) continues to lead on the narrow regularization program for undocumented construction workers.
This is all good. But where are the voices of Labour leaders when xenophobic and racist tropes about im/migrants being a drain on our social safety nets (fraying though they have been for decades now), of increasing crime (research shows that im/migrants are no more criminally inclined than their Canadian counterparts) are shared as facts on our social media feeds, at union shops and at family tables?
Labour leaders must show up for all workers. Unions who are busy organizing the non-profit sector must also ensure that their members in other sectors are always in solidarity with migrant communities. They must heed the oft repeated phrase- none of us are free, until all of us are free.
Happy Labour Day. We have much work to do.
In solidarity
dd