‘Buy local’ trend highlights Canada’s reliance on temporary foreign workers

As Trump’s tariffs hit Canada, Canadians have responded with an overwhelming wave of national resistance and counterattacks. Much of that pushback has been focused on boycotting U.S.-made products and prioritizing domestic production. The “Buy Canadian” craze has hit every single province and shows no signs of abating. 

But as Quebec’s and Canada’s priorities shift to emphasize more economic growth, self-sufficiency and domestic capacity, an honest conversation needs to be had about how this increased domestic production is expected to materialize and whose labour it often relies on.

The next time you reach for those Quebec blueberries or carrots, or that container of Quebec maple syrup in your local supermarket — in an effort to stick it to the Orange Man south of the border — consider how those products may have been harvested, processed and delivered to your local supermarket.  

Whose labour do we rely on?

Quebec’s agricultural operations are increasingly dependent on seasonal labourers, while the province’s food processing and manufacturing sectors heavily rely on temporary foreign workers (TFWs). They’re also widely needed in our healthcare, construction and hospitality sectors. The same scenario is duplicated nationally. 

“There’s this hidden workforce that’s at the backbone of anything that’s been made possible in terms of ‘thinking local’ or ‘buying local’,” says Mostafa Henaway from the Immigrant Workers Centre. “Our entire food chain, in terms of migrant labour –whether seasonal agricultural workers working in fields or greenhouses, migrants working in food processing, meat plants, asylum seekers or even refused asylum seekers working in industrial bakeries or restaurants and grocery stores — a lot of it relies on them.”

According to the Canadian Agricultural Federation, international workers have been essential to Canada’s food production for over 50 years. Many of the more than 60,000 TFWs come back to the same Canadian farm for many consecutive years, some as long as 40 years. Despite these government programs, on-farm agriculture still has the highest job vacancy rate of any industry, at 7.4%.

In 2022, Canada’s agriculture sector incurred losses of $3.5-billion in sales because of severe and chronic labour shortages. Even with a 30% increase in TWFs from 2017 to 2022, “labour shortages are projected to persist, with a peak domestic labour gap increasing and the aging of Canada’s population contributing to the forecasted domestic labour gap; 22,200 jobs are still expected to be unfilled during peak season in 2030.”

This is the main reason why — despite both provincial and federal current political rhetoric often treating TFWs as a problem to be solved — their numbers in Quebec have nearly quadrupled in eight years. Only Ontario exceeds Quebec in employing the most TFWs in Canada. 

Needed, yet scapegoated

As cost-of-living and housing issues continue to affect the country, one of the ways policy makers have responded is with the temporary scaling back of TFWs. The lack of awareness among many Quebec and Canadian consumers of how much we depend on migrant labour for agriculture allows for their scapegoating when it’s politically expedient.

“People forget where their food comes from,” says Carlos Rojas-Salazar, the former executive director at Action Réfugiés Montréal, a nonprofit helping refugee claimants access opportunities for resettlement and facilitate inclusion into Quebec society. The Mexican-born advocate has been defending migrant rights for over two decades. 

“We were having a cinq à sept at Laurier Park this past August and one of my colleagues went around asking 15 parties if they knew what foreign workers were. No one in the bracket of 18 to 29 knew about foreign workers,” he says.

And it’s not just farm workers making local production a reality. When Quebec produce is harvested, it still needs to be processed and transported. 

Groupe Nadeau, a Quebec-based trucking company, has a fleet of around 200 trucks and 1,400 trailers serviced by 70 full-time heavy mechanics. The company’s HR director says half of those mechanics are temporary foreign workers.

In 2023, the Quebec Trucking Association asked the Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI) to set up a working group to look at specific issues around the trucking industry’s foreign workforce. Quebec faces unique challenges when recruiting TFWs since provincial and federal governments share responsibility for immigration. 

Politics over pragmatic solutions

Despite these challenges, Quebec Premier François Legault recently announced a six-month freeze in the arrival of TFWs in the Montreal area. Provincial immigration lawyers say it’s more of a political move that aims to appease his base, while doing little. Unsurprisingly, given all the major shortages just listed, the freeze won’t apply to jobs in the fields of health, education, construction, agriculture and food processing.

“In order to have local industries, we need people, we need hands,” says Rojas-Salazar. “There are reasons why people come here and it’s not eight months of winter,” he says. “They want to improve their lives; they want to work. If we want to produce more in Quebec, we’re going to need them.” He says the best and most honourable way for Quebec and Canada to accomplish this is to at least guarantee permanent residency to people who are in precarious status or about to lose their status. “And then we need to step up and accelerate the family reunification process.” 

Advocates like the Canadian Council of Refugees have long argued the federal government should introduce a broad and comprehensive regularization program that would provide permanent residence to the more than 500,000 undocumented people living among us who live precariously without status, without access to basic rights and healthcare and in constant fear of deportation. Many of these people are working in the fields and meat plants we depend on for our food supply.

A report by Amnesty International published earlier this year criticizes Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) as “exploitative.” They found wage theft, unsafe working conditions, inadequate housing, physical and psychological abuse, restriction of movement and limited access to legal protections.

The same hypocrisy permeates the U.S. labour system. 

“There are farms in certain parts of the U.S. who are now freaking out with Trump’s deportations,” says Rojas-Salazar. “I’m being told that they’re sending scouts to Mexican towns like Jalisco and Guanajuato to bring people over to work. The scouts arrive with loudspeakers, go to the town’s main square and start announcing that there are jobs at these farms. How you make it to these farms, they don’t get involved, that’s up to you.”

He believes that, more than ever with what’s happening south of the border, immigration is an asset for Canada. “Immigration is a poisoned apple right now,” he says. “No politician wants to touch it. But we should take advantage of the people who want to come here and improve their lives.”

“We closed the borders,” says Henaway, “and we restricted migrants, and no one’s rent is going down and food prices aren’t going down and the people you’re kowtowing to and doing this for are now telling you they’re going to cannibalize your economy and add 25% tariffs. Whether that translates into more solidarity for migrants, time will tell. But we’re still pushing ahead for more regularization programs.”

Trump has changed the game

“The status quo has ended,” says Rojas-Salazar. “The way things were before ended. And now Canada is getting a taste of what Mexico has had to endure for centuries.”

The former Action Réfugiés Montréal director says there’s been an uptick in people attempting to enter Canada from the U.S. in recent months. He fears that since Roxham Road is no longer a place where people can freely enter Canada in order to claim asylum and are immediately documented, a lot of people are going to slip in and disappear.

“The day after Trump assumed the presidency,” he says, “my sources in Tijuana, Mexico, told me that the smugglers immediately raised their prices for people wanting to come to Canada. Someone working at the shelter there called me and told me that migrants were being told that it was ‘only a few minutes’ walk into Canada.’ I warned them that they would be risking their lives.”

Putting a stop on immigration while our society is aging and the birth rate is low makes no sense to Rojas-Salazar. “The implications for our demographics and our economy, it’s going to be a bubble that’s going to burst in 30 years or less if climate change aggravates things. We need to be smarter.”

In light of the tariff war, he says Canada should reassess its immigration policy. “We need to look at immigration as an opportunity. The measures that the government announced, reducing temporary foreign workers, are suicidal.”

Choose wisely when buying Canadian

An increased focus on domestic production isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it shouldn’t rely on the labour of exploited and undervalued people. Better protections need to be legislated and enforced for everyone. When government leaders request a common front for business leaders and workers to fight back against Trump’s tariffs, these two groups will be affected very differently, and their interests may not always align. 

Now, more than ever, it’s worth taking a closer look at what we’re being asked to support.

As the author of Essential Work, Disposable Workers: Migration, Capitalism and Class, Henaway takes a critical look at neoliberal exploitation of Canada’s temporary workers, a system he says “built to marginalize, exploit and divide people through the creation of exclusionary categories of belonging.”

In other words, it’s not enough to just say “Buy local.”

“The sentiment in Quebec is to boycott Amazon, a U.S. company, because it didn’t want to respect our local labour laws and democracy,” says Henaway. “But the alternative is Intelcom, a Quebec company where we often hear that workers are treated worse, they make less money, and there’s even more precarity. We think of Canada Goose as a Canadian success story, yet a lot of the workers are Syrian refugees.”

The problem with the ‘buy local’ narrative, he says, is that we’re also parading people and corporations that aren’t necessarily worth the praise. “All of a sudden is the Weston family [the owner of Loblaws, a Canadian company involved in overcharging customers, price fixing, and high prices] a national hero because they’re local? Is Dollarama [a company denounced by its workers for unsafe working conditions] a national hero because it’s local?”

Henaway wonders whether our newfound patriotism is taking these people into consideration. He points out that even the concept of local is a false narrative. “There’s no such thing as completely local,” he says. “Our world is deeply interconnected. The question should always be: ‘Is it fair? Who’s profiting from or suffering as a result?’”

Ultimately, as Quebecers and Canadians seek out more local and non-U.S. options, we should demand that ‘Buy Canadian’ also mean respecting migrant labour.

“It’s not just about ‘buying local’ but about our values and the society that we value,” says Henaway. “Not a chauvinistic nationalism that’s throwing people under the bus — especially people who help run our economy.” ■

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Read more weekly editorial columns by Toula Drimonis.