Canada Runs on Serf Labour

I started thinking about migrant labour in 2020 after my grandfather passed away. Amedeo Sorrentino fought for Mussolini’s army during the Second World War, was taken prisoner by the British, and spent months in a London POW camp before returning to his home in Lanciano, Italy. There he married my grandmother, Giulia. They had three daughters—my mother was the oldest—and Amedeo toiled as a tenant tobacco farmer to support them. 

For all his love of Italy, Amedeo knew he could never properly provide for his family by working on someone else’s farm. Men left Italy every day to find work abroad and, in 1956, my grandmother persuaded Amedeo to follow his sister and brother-in-law to Calgary. Like many immigrants of his generation, Amedeo was granted landed-immigrant status on arrival—and with it, the ability to stay permanently and eventually gain citizenship.  He poured concrete and tended greenhouses and sent the money home to Giulia. He vowed to one day return to his family in Italy. Instead, two years later, Giulia and the girls boarded a ship and joined him here. They spent the rest of their lives in Canada. 

Nonno’s passing made me curious about the experiences of his contemporary counterparts. He only wanted the best for his daughters, and he was willing to sacrifice years away from them for the opportunities Canada would eventually provide. No doubt today’s migrant workers make the same bargain. But unlike the foreign workers of my nonno’s generation, today’s migrant workers get temporary status—welcome to work here but not to stay. And unlike my grandfather who could work for any boss willing to hire him, today’s temporary foreign workers are tied to a single employer through closed permits, a requirement imposed by the federal government since the 1960s. They cannot easily change their jobs and face deportation if they quit or are fired. In 2024, more than 190,000 migrant workers in Canada held such permits.  

I spent four years travelling across Canada to research the lives of today’s temporary foreign workers for a book I was writing. I met Filipino restaurant staff in Goose Bay, Thai greenhouse workers in Medicine Hat, Guatemalan berry pickers in Vancouver and Mexican Christmas tree farmers in Simcoe. Nearly every worker and migrant labour advocate I spoke to condemned Canada’s use of closed work permits, which shackle migrants to potentially exploitative employers. 

In 2024, the federal government announced a plan to shrink Canada’s temporary resident population by limiting the number of temporary foreign workers. The government boosted the minimum wage for migrant workers, reduced the cap on the percentage of low-wage workers an employer could hire, halved the duration of their permits from two years to one, and restricted the hiring of migrants in urban areas with high unemployment. These policy changes aimed to reduce the numbers of migrant workers and prevent employers from abusing the temporary foreign worker system. But these measures still won’t prevent bosses from abusing workers as long as the closed-permit system remains in place.

When migrant workers on employer-specific permits suddenly lose their job, the consequences can be devastating. They may stay in Canada for the duration of their visas, but can’t legally work until they find another employer with both a job opening and government authorization to hire foreign workers. These job searches can be time-consuming, especially for workers who have no contacts in Canada and don’t speak English or French. Even if a worker’s visa doesn’t run out before they find work, they cannot access most social services during this time. And since many migrant workers, especially live-in caregivers and seasonal farmworkers, reside in housing provided by their employer, being jobless also means being homeless. 

As a result, migrant workers will quietly bear all manner of abuse—verbal, physical, financial, sexual—just to keep their jobs, housing and status. I’ve heard dozens of heartbreaking and infuriating stories from migrants who’d been trapped in this unfree labour system. A caregiver named Sarah told me how her terrible work conditions—cruel employers, isolation, abusive clients—nearly compelled her to jump in front of a subway train. Celesté and Griselda from Guatemala recounted being sexually harassed by their supervisor on a B.C. berry farm. Aniel, a Cuban farmhand, told me how doctors were certain the tumours in his lungs came from the pesticides he used on the Ontario ginseng farm where he worked. Aniel died from cancer on Christmas Eve in 2022. Closed permits tied each of these workers to their unsafe workplaces like some modern-day serfdom.

Other countries have dispensed with employer-specific permits. In 2014, the U.K. government issued a report on the use of closed permits for domestic workers that did not mince words. The introduction of such permits “unintentionally strengthened the hand of the slave master against the victim of slavery,” the report claimed. “The moral case for revisiting this issue is urgent and overwhelming.” The U.K. started allowing migrant domestic workers to change employers for any reason two years later.  

These permits have long been challenged in Canada. As far back as the 1950s, immigration minister Walter Harris declared that tying foreign workers to individual employers “would be contrary to the whole Canadian belief in freedom of the individual.” In 1966, the minister of manpower and immigration compared tied permits to enslavement. More recently, a 2016 government standing committee also recommended eliminating closed permits, recognizing that “permits tying workers to one employer lead to a power imbalance that is conducive to abuse.” 

The National Farmers Union, an organization that advocates for farm families across Canada, also wants to get rid of closed permits. In December 2023, the union acknowledged that the systemic abuses suffered by migrant farm labourers was the fault of federal programs “that are designed to maintain a cheap food system at the expense of the people who grow our food.” If producing food is an essential service, the NFU asked, “why aren’t all agricultural workers afforded the full rights of other workers in Canada and the agency to avail themselves of them?” The NFU called for direct and dedicated pathways to permanent residency for all agricultural workers, which would guarantee them the sorts of rights and protections all Canadians enjoy and expect. Until then, “closed work permits need to end.” 

The NFU doesn’t speak for all employers, however. Or even all farmers. Many farm owners fear migrants with open permits might refuse farm work altogether and seek work in another industry. Employers who’ve paid the requisite fees to hire foreign workers, ensured they have adequate housing, and provided half their return travel airfare—as is required by Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program—can’t afford to lose workers to big-city construction sites where wages are higher, for example. The whole intention of the migrant-labour system, industry lobbyists would argue, is to supply workers to sectors where there are labour shortages. Allowing workers to leave these jobs defeats the purpose of the program.

Then again, if the only way for an employer to retain workers is to legally bind them to the job, doesn’t that suggest there is something wrong with the job? Certainly no Canadian worker would tolerate this. Employers of Canadian citizens and permanent residents must vie for labour by offering competitive wages, benefits, incentives and other perks. Why shouldn’t employers who hire migrants do the same? Migrant workers should be offered open permits that allow them to seek work anywhere, just like the rest of us can. 

Part of the problem is that Canadians feel migrant workers shouldn’t be entitled to the same choices we, as citizens, take for granted. Our “guests” should be happy just to be here, satisfied with the opportunity to earn minimum wages in the service of a nation that wants them to work but doesn’t want them to stay. And if they can’t be grateful for our maple-dipped benevolence, they can go home. We give them jobs, just not dignity.  

The new rules imposed by the feds won’t remedy this. They might help prevent employers from abusing the migrant-labour system, but won’t prevent bosses from abusing the workers themselves—other than bringing in fewer of them to be exploited. Instead of cracking down on villainous employers, the government partially drained the pool of their potential victims.

In the end, our country’s migrant-labour programs have never prioritized worker happiness. We didn’t mould our migrant-worker programs out of altruism, after all. Temporary work permits aren’t akin to those winter coats Trudeau handed out to Syrian refugees. The plainly stated goal of the program, according to the federal government website, is to “hire workers to fill temporary jobs when qualified Canadians are not available.” Full stop. The policies aren’t meant to give, but to take. 

Closed permits abet this taking by making migrant workers indentured to bad bosses. Canadians shouldn’t accept this. My grandfather wouldn’t have.

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of the upcoming book Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers.