With much talk in the media recently about Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, I was delighted to find the following recognition of foreign workers in a current exhibit at the Laurel Packinghouse, Okanagan Wine and Orchard Museum, Kelowna: (https://www.kelownamuseums.ca/museum/okanagan-wine-orchard-museum/)

Since the beginning of the Okanagan fruit industry in the 1890s, growers have depended on men and women from faraway places…. Closer to home, Indigenous people whose lives were disrupted by settlement travelled from both sides of the border to help with the harvest of tobacco, hops, vegetables and tree fruits.

Seven major waves of farm workers in the Okanagan:

1900-1930: Chinese

1930-1950: Doukhobors

1940-1960: Japanese

1950-1960: Portuguese

1960 -present: Quebecois

1970-1980: South Asians

2004-present: Mexicans, Jamaicans

Today, migrant workers are the backbone of Okanagan agriculture. In Canada, about 75% of the farm labour force are temporary migrant agricultural workers. Every year, the Okanagan hosts thousands of workers from Mexico and Jamaica. Workers appreciate the work and growers need the labour, but the system isn’t perfect.

Unfortunately, the exhibit was not dated so it’s unclear what year was “present.” In recent years I have met and heard about workers in the North Okanagan from El Salvador and Guatemala so there are likely many more countries of origin among current workers than that listed in the exhibit information.

Group of Nez Perce Indigenous in the hop fields at Coldstream Ranch ca 1910, gvma2121.

Statistics Canada data from 2024 report 13,452 temporary foreign workers in primary agriculture in British Columbia and 6,392 in food and beverage manufacturing. A recent article by Jason Kirby (2025) states that in 2024, the primary agriculture sector in Canada employed about 223,000 people of which 35% were temporary foreign workers. Kirby references a 2024 report by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council that estimated 28,200 jobs went unfilled during the 2022 harvest season, resulting in $3.5 billion in lost sales. Kirby’s article focuses on the experiences of seasonal workers from Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago who work in the gardens and fields of Norfolk County in Ontario, some who are employed eight months of the year, and one man from Jamaica who has come to work at a lavender farm every year for the past 40 years. Kirby tells the story from the workers perspective detailing the conditions of work and accommodation, the benefits to the workers and their home communities as well as the costs to them and their families. He illustrates the impacts the workers have on their temporary Canadian communities. He outlines the challenges the land owner/employers face in finding and accommodating employees. His main point is that without the temporary international workers, Canada’s food and agriculture sector would not function, “there basically would not be food on the table.” And yet, the seasonal farm workers that take on jobs Canadians do not want to do are, “largely invisible to the bulk of Canadians who live far removed from the nation’s food-producing regions.”

In the Fraser Valley where I live it is common in the summer to drive by large fields of food crops and see the buses parked nearby and many workers tending to the crops. I quietly give thanks to them for their hard work because I grew up on a farm that was largely self-sufficient. We grew and gathered the fruits, vegetables and meats in the short summer months in Manitoba and canned furiously all summer long so there would be food on the table throughout the winter for a family of six. As children we learned how to tend the plants and animals that we relied on, we knew our food sources intimately, and we all contributed even as children to securing and sustaining our food supply.

Kirby and others point out that while we in Canada rely on temporary foreign workers to secure our food supply, there are issues in the policies and practices of the foreign worker program. Do foreign workers really take jobs from Canadians? What do they earn when they work in our agricultural industries? Where and under what conditions do they live?

Doukhobor families working at Ootischenia BC ca 1930-39, svhs3245.

David Fairey (2022) focused on the blueberry industry in British Columbia in a study of the conditions of work for seasonal agricultural workers and concluded that the industry and workers would both benefit if some changes were made. The problems he elaborated were that farm labourers were excluded from the provincially legislated minimum hourly wage, that farm labour contractors (while licensed) were used and disadvantaged both workers and employers. He concluded that the government needed to investigate what he termed, “the oligopolistic control of blueberry processing” by a small number of large companies. It appears that since Fairey’s study, British Columbia labour laws have changed so that even if agricultural workers are paid on a piece work basis, their pay must equal at least the legislated minimum hourly wage that is currently $17.85 per hour.

The struggle for better wages and working conditions for temporary farm workers in British Columbia has a long history that Nicholas Fast (2023) documented by examining five years of activities of the Canadian Farmworkers Union (CFU) in BC, beginning in 1979. He describes the CFU as “a late product of New Left activism in British Columbia.” It served mainly South Asian farmworkers in the Fraser Valley. It attempted to combat racism and labour exploitation by working for better wages and accommodation and reduced use of labour contractors. The struggle for better working conditions was combined with meeting the needs of its members through English language training, union rights education, the Farmworkers Service Centre (to develop community connections), and producing plays and films for fundraising events. Fast reminds us of the financial challenges of unionizing attempts among some of the lowliest paid workers whose needs may be broad. While fundraising was ongoing, the union had to rely on financial support from other unions and the Canadian Labour Congress to cover operating expenses that exceeded its own revenues. The union struggled financially until it merged with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in the early 1990s.

Makoto Kawamoto with Japanese orchard pickers ca 1945, gvma22260.

The struggle for a fair wage, good working conditions, and accommodation for temporary foreign workers continues. As Kirby suggests many people do not know where their food comes from, who plants, cares for and harvests it, and under what conditions the workers labour and live. Fortunately, more people are buying local or growing their own food and rediscovering or discovering for the first time the hard work that goes into food production. And this is good because we need a re-valuing of the labour that goes into growing the food that sustains us all and a re-appreciation of the people who labour in food production.

References

“The state of labour in agriculture and agri-food” https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/sector/data-reports/state-labour-agriculture-and-agri-food

Fairey, David (2022). “Legislated Wage Suppression: Farm Worker Piece Rate Wage System Needs to End in the Blueberrry Industry.” BC Studies, (215), 7-25.

Fast, Nicholas (2023). ” WE WERE A SOCIAL MOVEMENT AS WELL”: The Canadian Farmworkers Union in British Columbia, 1979–1983. BC Studies, (217), 35-52.

Kirby, Jason (2025). “Field Advantage.” Report on Business, October, 24-32, 34.

On problems in the foreign workers program in BC, see: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/farm-workers-bc-employment-standards-1.7520435 or https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/27436b32-66c1-4cd4-87fa-132b121a9af3/content

Minimum Wage for Farm Workers: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/employment-business/employment-standards-advice/employment-standards/forms-resources/igm/esr-part-4-section-18

Orchard workers on day off at Silver Star Mountain Resort.