Just as in the United States, immigration reform is urgently needed to improve the situation of millions of migrants who work and live illegally and are victims of labor abuse, Canada must also update its laws. and granting residency opportunities to temporary agricultural workers who each year for decades go out to work in Canadian fields, said Pablo Godoy, representative of the Food and Commercial Workers Union of Canada (UFCW ).

In an interview with El Sol de México, he added that since 2009, when the number of temporary foreign workers first exceeded the number of those who had the option of staying, Canada has opted for hiring manual workers. -temporary labor, which has resulted in workers being subjected to constant abuse by employers.

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“Programs like the Temporary Agricultural Worker Program (PTAT) need to evolve because we know Mexicans who have been working in Canada for 15, 20 or even 30 years and no doubt they are no longer temporary, permanent residency should be considered for them, ” he pointed out.

He said that until today, these types of binational programs have resolved for governments to palliatively control migration, but they have not been able to guarantee the rights and security of workers. “We alone have documented more than 65,000 complaints of abuse against temporary workers in Canada,” said the leader of the UFCW, considered the largest union in Canada with more than 13,000 members.

Likewise, he considered that the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeu has the ability to join that of Mexico and the United States to create in North America an immigration system that truly solves the need for labor. work that Canada faces but that guarantees workers’ rights.

Godoy is in Mexico to ask the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to include unions and workers in the revision of the PTAT that the authorities of both countries will carry out next November. “We know, because we’ve discussed it with employers, that they need workers, but what we’d like to see is the appeal we’re making to the governments of Mexico, the United States States and Canada, to give them the opportunity to have full access to workers because what has been proven is that many workers do not want to stay at work but rather return to their country, but many others deserve and want to stay,” he concluded.

According to data from the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, the PTAT closed the placement season for temporary agricultural workers with 25,671 people, a figure 6.3% higher than the number of workers placed during the 2021 season.