Ontario Human Rights Commission tackles complaint with statement

by SUSAN MANN

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has responded to a complaint about gender discrimination in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program by issuing a position statement reminding all those who participate in the program to ensure their hiring practices follow the provincial Human Rights Code. But the commission has stopped short of conducting an inquiry into the issue.

“It has come to the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s attention that employers in Ontario are hiring almost exclusively men to work on their farms as part of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program,” says the statement posted on the commission’s website Wednesday. According to research, less than four per cent of the workers coming to Ontario annually as part of the program are women.

Stan Raper, United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada national coordinator of the Agriculture Workers Alliance, says the commission told them it would not be conducting an inquiry into the systemic gender discrimination complaint the union filed in July. But the commission “felt that it was important enough to issue a statement.”

Vanessa Tamburro, commission information officer, confirmed the commission is not doing an inquiry in to the seasonal agricultural worker program. The commission didn’t issue a reason as to why it declined to do an inquiry, she notes.

About 16,000 workers participated in the seasonal agricultural worker program in Ontario this year with about 80 to 85 per cent of participants going back to the same farm they worked on in previous years. Other provinces also participate in the program.

Ken Forth, president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), says “we’ve been supplied with workers on our farm for years and if we like them we bring them back because it works for everybody.” FARMS was incorporated in 1987 and is the non-profit organization that facilitates and coordinators farmers requests for foreign seasonal agricultural workers.

The commission statement says migrant workers are protected by many of the same laws that protect other workers in Ontario, including the Ontario Human Rights Code. The code says everyone has a right to equal treatment in their employment situation.

That means employers cannot refuse to hire a person because of their sex or other code-protected grounds, and that they cannot include discriminatory preferences in their hiring process, the statement says.

Afroze Edwards, commission issues and media relations officer, says the statement “is a position on how the commission feels about the program itself and the apparent discrimination against hiring female workers.”

Forth says farmers in Ontario requiring workers under the program don’t recruit the workers. That’s done by the ministries of labour in the supply countries of Mexico and the Caribbean.

But there aren’t enough women applying to participate the program because “women from Mexico and the Caribbean who can work on your farm are generally raising families” and aren’t able to leave for agricultural work in Canada, he says, adding the program isn’t discriminatory.

Raper says the union has filed similar gender discrimination complaints in Quebec and British Columbia and is waiting for the decisions from those provinces. “The general sense that we’re getting is that the program is a federal program” and that requests for an inquiry should be directed to federal authorities and not provincial ones.

“We think that the discrimination (in this program) is systemic and that the federal government has an obligation to correct the discriminatory practices,” he says.

About the commission position statement, Forth says it just reiterates the law. “I don’t have any issue with that at all.”

He adds farm employers don’t discriminate against women. “We just want workers,” he says. But farmers can and have always been able to request people by name to return for work on their farms annually and many workers do return to the same farms year-after-year.

Forth adds the gender discrimination complaint against the program “is some people trying to make something out of nothing. They’re playing with a program that brings people out of poverty.”

Raper says FARMS recruits the number of workers, processes the applications and then sends them to Mexico. “Mexico basically fills the order,” he notes.

Raper adds that no one is denying the numbers, which show only four per cent of the workers in the program are women. But the difficult is  “trying to find someone who’s prepared to do something about it.”

The union “was hopeful a (commission) inquiry would help us try to figure out where there is a flaw in the system that has been going on since 1966 really,” he says.  “We’re not happy the inquiry is not going forward but we appreciate the statement.” BF