The MWSN along with Immigration Partnership Winnipeg, Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba, the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, and Migrante, have asked candidates in the upcoming Winnipeg City Council election to provide their position on an Access Without Fear Policy for the City of Winnipeg.

An Access Without Fear Policy ensures that all residents, including undocumented migrants, have access to all city services regardless of their immigration status. Many municipalities in Canada, such as Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Hamilton, and Vancouver have adopted Access Without Fear Policies to reduce the barriers faced by undocumented migrants in accessing critical services. An Access Without Fear Policy is one of the recommendations in the Winnipeg Without Poverty Report, endorsed by over 90 community organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

The Canadian Council for Refugees recently released their new report cards on migrant worker rights in Canada. This project focuses on the approaches taken by provincial and federal governments to address problems with the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. The report cards are intended to identify areas for improvement for provincial and federal governments and to inform those concerned with migrant workers and the public.

From their press release:

“Migrant workers are taking on tough jobs here in Canada, but they are denied basic protections and are too often subject to abuse,” said Claire Roque, CCR President. “We hope these report cards will be a useful tool for decision makers to identify areas for improvement, and to learn about best practices from other jurisdictions.”

This series is an update to the original Migrant Worker Report Cards published in May 2013. Since 2013, some jurisdictions have taken laudable steps to improve protections and access to permanent status for migrant workers, while some have not. The project allows us to measure progress and change.

The report card for Manitoba looks at a number of different areas, detailing some successes and some areas where migrant worker rights could be improved.

The recent public debate over ketchup sold in Canada – and whether the tomatoes used are grown here as well – garnered several headlines earlier this year. Most of the discussion revolved around where those tomatoes were grown, not who was doing the labour required to harvest them, and this article from Maclean’s pulls back the curtain on the issue:

So began the ketchup wars—with Leamington as ground zero, ripe with national pride. It didn’t quite matter that Heinz, cast as the bad guy, remains a huge part of the community, purchasing loads of tomatoes from its old plant (to be used in juices and other products, though not ketchup). Or that good-guy French’s, a U.S. firm, ships a lot of those Ontario tomatoes to Ohio for ketchup production. In the eyes of many, buying Heinz was suddenly akin to treason.

Min Sook Lee read all those headlines in February and March. A documentary filmmaker, she had been busy chronicling another side of the ketchup frenzy, an angle nobody bothered to mention: the migrant, temporary labourers—thousands of them—who toil in the vast greenhouses and sprawling farmers’ fields of Leamington, picking and packaging the vegetables we eat every day, tomatoes included. “I am keenly aware of how Leamington has been drumming up a lot of nationalist fervour,” Lee says. “I think that myopia has to be interrupted.”