Document Details

2011

Justin Shoemaker

University of British Columbia

Political Science

‘Growing’ Dependence: Assessing Media and Political Discourses Surrounding
Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program

Honours Thesis, Amended to Meet Requirements for the Writing Sample Component of the Masters of Global Affairs Program Application

Justin Shoemaker
University of British Columbia

Introduction:

Immigration policymaking is a hotly contested field. Managing migration represents
much more than controlling the simple entry of individuals into a territory. Newcomers invariably shift pre-existing societal relations, and thus, the capability to manage migration represents the capability to manage the effects that new entrants have on the existing relationships between an array of actors who may see themselves as either threatened, or benefited by immigration. This paper considers the politics of who and what are driving so-called ‘temporary’ labour migration in Canadian agriculture. Labour shortages have been a persistent feature of the Canadian farming landscape and state sponsored schemes for the recruitment of foreign labour are a recurring phenomenon in Canadian history. Nonetheless, no scheme has been as persistent and enduring as the country’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), a federally run program that, since 1966, has recruited temporary foreign workers from the global south to work in the Canadian agricultural industry on eight-month rotational cycles. Since its inception, oversight of the SAWP has been seemingly absent from the legislative agenda and few substantial changes have been made to the program. However, since the early 2000s, the SAWP has faced a more sustained, and increasingly critical, degree of scrutiny from the media, Parliamentary Committees, opposition MPs, and even the Auditor General herself.
This paper assesses the significance of this challenge to the SAWP by situating the
program’s enduring resistance to change in a policy network analysis based upon
Baumgartner and Jones’ (1993) work on the relationship between media dynamics and the capability of policy-subsystems to manage public policy. Through an examination of media coverage and parallel Parliamentary interest in the SAWP at a national level between 1994 and 2010, I argue that growing media attention to the program has allowed policy challengers access to political venues, previously restricted by both low media visibility and the regulatory management of the SAWP by a closed subsystem network of bureaucratic officials and business representatives.

Research Question:
According to a Service Canada (2008) summary, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers
Program (SAWP) is managed migration program that facilitates the temporary movement of foreign farm workers for employment in “approved commodity sectors” during “peak activity periods where the supply of Canadian workers is determined to be inadequate” (Online). In 2009, 27,654 temporary foreign agricultural workers entered Canada through the program from the Caribbean and Mexico (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada [HRSDC], 2010). SAWP Participants fall under the category of ‘Temporary Workers’ in the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). The SAWP is jointly administered by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), and several private administrative bodies (FARMS in Ontario, FERME, in Quebec, and WALI, in western provinces) who process hiring requests in concert with foreign governments, coordinate worker transportation, and provide housing inspections.

Incidences of workplace abuse and employer neglect in the SAWP have attracted
increasing attention from the academic community. However, the predominant focus of research has converged on sociological issues of class, race, and the systemic
vulnerability of migrant workers in the program (Walia, 2010; Basok, 2002; Sharma,
2006; Choudry et al., 2009). Of the systemic flaws identified with the program, amongst the most controversial remain those related to the capability of employers to gatekeep foreign worker participation in the program. Under the program, a contractual repatriation clause stipulates that workers may be deported for “[n]on-compliance, refusal to work, or any other sufficient reason to terminate [emphasis added]” (Foreign Agricultural Management Services [FARMS], 2011, Online). At the end of each worker’s employment period, Canadian employers file a performance review with each worker’s country of origin. Additionally, when employers file requests for labourers at the beginning of each growing season, they may ‘name’ particular workers, creating pressure on migrants to act in a compliant manner, lest they not be requested to return. The isolated, indentured, nature of employment, combined with an inability to improve one’s immigration status through the program and the power of employers to repatriate and blacklist workers, creates an employment relationship in which impoverished foreign workers may tacitly accept abusive conditions due to a dependence on program participation as a source of income (Choudry et al., 2009).

However, despite the growing academic focus on the structural shortcomings of
the SAWP, little literature has been published on the contemporary policy-making arena in which such structures are maintained in the face of public and academic criticism. What public policy literature does exist tends to focus exclusively on the program’s formative period of 1945-1966 (Satzewich, 1991) but fails to undertake any deeper analysis of the policy network that has supported, expanded, and maintained the pilot project that began in 1966. The resilience of these highly contested features is even more remarkable given that these basic structures have remained unchanged since the program’s inception in 1966. The most basic approach to the study of public policy suggests policy-outputs follow a regularized ‘life cycle’ beginning with a phase of problem identification and definition, followed by the selection of a policy instrument. The cycle then continues with the implementation of the given policy option, after which its effects are evaluated, leading to the identification of new problems and, either the termination of the policy, or a repetition of the process to adjust it. This approach is typified by David Easton’s (1965) ‘black box’ modeling of the political system as a regularized feedback loop of intra and extra-societal pressure, which generates input
demands, and support for particular governmental interventions, which, in turn, are
converted by authorities into outputs that are once more subject to changing social and contextual pressures.

When assessed according to this model, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers
Program appears anomalous: The context in which the SAWP was conceived has
changed drastically since 1966, generating a host of criticism and challenges to the
program, yet such pressures from legislators, NGOs, and the media have not translated into substantive policy change. In contrast to the trajectory of the SAWP, other temporary labour migration programs enacted during the same period, including the German Gastarbeiter program, and the American Bracero Program, experienced a range of legislative overhauls, judicial interventions, and eventual termination as perceptions of moral obligations to foreign workers grew to be incompatible with program structures (Joppke, 1998). Clearly, some exception to the flow of the policy ‘life cycle’ is occurring in Canada that is either inhibiting, or negating the need for regularized overhauls of the SAWP as a policy output. This essay thus asks: How then have the most controversial structural features of the Canadian SAWP escaped revision in the face of growing public criticism?

Thesis:
It is my contention that the resilience of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program can be explained, in part, due to the capability of its proponents to reassert the program’s legitimacy in the face of declining structural relevance by ‘redefining’ the goals of the program and the ‘problems’ which it purports to solve. Patterns of global trade, labour relations, and normative expectations of immigration have changed drastically since 1966. Accounting for the full-range of pressures such changes should have on a temporary labour migration program is an endeavour that extends well beyond the ambit of this paper. Thus, I undertake an analysis to short-cut evaluations of all the changes in the external environment itself by instead examining the problems raised by mobilized pressure groups, and the media, under the assumption that these represent the most relevant challenges to the stability of the SAWP. This assumption is premised on Baumgartner and Jones’ (1993) model of punctuated equilibrium, in which the media plays an integral role in the ‘lurching’ onto the political agenda of issues previously confined to a ‘subsystem’ or policy network. Baumgartner and Jones (1993) argue that although public policies may have a diverse array of effects and implications they are understood and discussed “even by the politically sophisticated, in simplified and symbolic terms” (p. 26). These simplified frames, which they term “policy images”, contain a “mixture of empirical information and emotive appeals” called “tones”, which attempt to limit the debate over an issue to a particular dimension of conflict. According to the theory, if a single image dominates the discourse, or competing images receive little attention, one would expect to see the public policy sink off the political agenda, creating a condition of stability, or equilibrium in the policy area.

In order to test my hypothesis, I operationalize policy image competition through
the measurement and evaluation of the presence of positive and negative images in
Parliamentary debates, committee testimony and appeals to the public through the media in the period between 1994 and 2010. My analysis leads to three conclusions: (1) A relatively closed policy subsystem exists between HRSDC, The Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, provincial peak association representing labour-importing growers (FARMS, FERME, WALI). This subsystem has an expertise and self-funding capacity that I argue can account for the long period of ‘equilibrium’ in the policy field, due in part to the capability of this subsystem to internally administer and update the program. (2) The analysis also demonstrates that the policy subsystem has managed to prevent a total reworking of the SAWP by maintaining the program’s relevance by dynamically updating the policy as a ‘solution’ to a number of ongoing, and developing ‘problems’. These ‘solutions’ have included: As a relevant policy solution for Canadian farmers that addresses the problem of the ‘cost-price squeeze’ in increasingly globalized food production; as an adaptive solution for importing ‘undesirable’ persons under a changing restrictionist immigration scheme in which ‘skill’ has replaced ‘race’ as the qualifying denominator for entry; as a solution to a growing unwillingness of indigenous workers to accept low-skilled, seasonal work. (3) My analysis further demonstrates how this combination of program self-sufficiency and re-legitimization at the sub-system level create unwillingness to either terminate or drastically adjust the program by legislators.
Thus, although in the 2000s labour issues and moral obligations to non-citizens have become increasingly unpalatable by contemporary standards and have ‘lurched’ onto the legislative agenda, no major adjustments to the SAWP have been forthcoming.

Methodology:
Using LexisNexis, a media survey of major Canadian news sources was conducted
between the beginning of the 35th Parliament (January 17th, 1994) and December 31st, 2010.* This timeframe was selected to correspond to available online publications of Hansard records. The media survey contains all 97 Canadian newspaper stories, editorials, and letters to the editor from news periodicals deemed ‘major’ sources by LexisNexis, and which actually covered content pertaining to temporary foreign farm labour. Several factors influenced the choice to narrow the sample to what LexisNexis classifies as “Major” Canadian news sources. Primarily, major sources (predominantly the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Vancouver Sun) were chosen because they

* The exact boolean phrasing of search terms was “(Labour) OR (worker) AND (farm) OR (agricultural) OR (agriculture) AND (migrant) OR (foreign) AND (seasonal) OR (temporary)”, after which a geographic modifier was used to group results indexed by Lexis Nexis as pertaining to “Canada”.

represent the discourse with the broadest reach, and thus the greatest impact on the
attention of the both the broader public and elected officials. Additionally, many of the ‘minor’ periodicals in the initial, unmodified 740 results did not contain digital records dating back as far as the beginning of the search. Therefore, including them would have created the false impression that reporting density was increasing with time. The 97-case sample was then assessed on the basis of the content of each article to identify recurring ‘tones’ in policy image ascribed to the SAWP in news articles—Baumgartner and Jones (1993) describe the ‘tone’ of a policy image as the evaluative perspectives and emotional appeals used to interpret a policy (p. 26-27). A parallel examination of Hansard records over the same period was used to assess the changing relationship of legislative officials to the policy. Records were retrieved through the overlapping use of the search function**
and manually retrieved entries indexed as pertaining to ‘Foreign Labour’ in the Hansard Index for each Parliamentary session between 1994 and 2010. News stories were then qualitatively analysed and grouped according to several recurring ‘policy images’ according to the type of empirical coverage provided and the evaluative ‘tone’ with which they approached both workers and the SAWP. Most news coverage presented only a single interpretation of the program, consistent with Baumgartner and Jones’ (1993) assertion that “reporters simplify often complex arguments […] by focusing only on a single aspect of a multidimensional issue” (p. 102). In cases where several policy images were present, articles were assigned a secondary image.* In some cases, the SAWP was not the focus of the article. However in most of these cases, a distinct evaluation of the SAWP was discernible. In such cases, I coded the primary ‘image’ of the story as the context in which the SAWP was mentioned, and assigned a secondary ‘image’ to code whether the program was mentioned in positive, or negative manner.

The 1990s – Policy Equilibrium Maintained Through an Uncontested Policy Image:
The analysis reveals that throughout the 1990s, temporary foreign labour migration was a low attention issue, and what little coverage did exist, largely legitimized the SAWP
** Similar Boolean operators to the media survey were used: “Seasonal OR Temporary AND Agricultural OR Farm AND Worker” within ‘Debates’ and ‘Committee Evidence’
* Thus a news story that discussed the occurrence of migrant worker abuse, but also made reference to the shortage of seasonal farm labour in Canada would be assigned two images: Primary = Abuse, Secondary = Labour Shortage.

through a supportive policy image. Of the 13 stories in major periodicals that contained a reference to the SAWP between 1994 and 2001, 10 were either supportive or uncritical of the program. Media coverage of the program tended to construct narratives that evaluated the program as a functioning solution to critical shortages in farm labour, which benefited both farmers and migrants. This perspective is summarized by one 1994 Globe and Mail article, which proclaimed that, under the program: “fruit growers prosper, [and] immigrant [sic.] workers get a big pay day [that] no doubt eased the unemployment problem in Jamaica, Barbados”.
This mutually beneficial image was one that frequently occurred throughout the
1990s and was strengthened by the failure of a workfare program introduced by Ontario Premier Mike Harris in 1999, which made unemployment benefits for Ontarians contingent on a period of mandatory farm service. Dubbed ‘farmfare’ by the media, it was harshly criticized by farmers. In three of the stories pertaining to migrant farm labour between 1994 and 2001, the SAWP was contrasted to ‘farmfare’ as providing a stream of labour more “reliable”, “efficient” and hardworking than any Canadian alternative (Gray, 1999). Such reporting tended to glamourise the SAWP as the preferable solution to farm labour shortages, while creating an image of migrant workers as being “unanimously, […] better paid in Ontario at our minimum wage than they would be back home” (Gray, 1999). The presence of such ‘positive’, legitimizing presentations of the SAWP in major Canadian periodicals, can be juxtaposed with the failure of negative images to gain national media attention. Of the 13 articles published between 1994 and 2001, only 2 articulated a competing, negative image of the SAWP. Moreover, not once throughout the 1990s was the SAWP discussed in Parliament.

This lopsided discourse and institutional location is somewhat surprising. The mid-1990s represented the period during which domestic Canadian unions such as the
United Food and Commercial Worker Union (UFCW) began to advocate on the behalf of migrant farm workers regarding benefits access, hazardous working conditions, and poor housing (Agricultural Workers Alliance, 2001). During the late 1990s and early 2000s, unions and civil advocacy groups organized a number of protests, information sessions and campaigns including a May 2001 mobilization of 100 migrant farm workers, who, with the support of the United Farm Workers of America, the Canadian Labour Congress and Students Against Sweatshops, assembled in Leamington, Ontario to voice complaints over poor living conditions, inaccessibility of medical services, and threats of deportation by their employers (Kitchener Waterloo Record, 2001).

However, even this relatively large-scale social action did not receive any exposure by major news sources, and its coverage was restricted to local papers. The lack
of venue access by migrant-worker advocacy organizations during this period contrasts sharply with their prominence in the late 2000s, when many of the very same groups were actively invited to testify before Committees in the House of Commons, and were regularly able to generate petitions that were sponsored, and read by MPs in the House of Commons. Thus, a distinction can be made between the 1990s, when the SAWP was not mentioned once in Parliament, and the period between 2006 and 2010, when the program was discussed in the House, on average, seven times per year (see Appendix I).

The 2000s – Challenges to the Policy Image and Growing Political Contestation:
What accounts for this sudden shift of interest in the SAWP amongst elected officials?
This section addresses the contemporary discourse surrounding the SAWP and argues that, following the expansion of the temporary foreign workforce in 2002, a new period of agenda access is occurring in which the dominant policy image is being challenged. This challenge is being posed by the actors affected by the program, but previously excluded from the subsystem that manages and regulates its operation. Broadly speaking, these challengers include: Unions, civil advocacy organizations (such as churches and human rights groups), migrant interest organizations, and employers disaffected by the SAWP’s structure. Agenda access by these organizations has been facilitated by the opening of new opportunities created by the growing interest in migrant labour of the media, Parliamentary committees, and the Auditor General—all of whom are responding to broad changes to the Immigration system induced by the introduction of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) in 2001 and a rapid expansion in the scale of foreign worker admissions.

The inability of organized interests to gain agenda access for their criticisms of
the SAWP in the 1990s may, in part, be explained by a series of institutional
arrangements that created a minimal need for the involvement of legislative officials
other than the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC).
The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is atypical of other forms of public policy as it represents a non-legislative policy instrument. The program is established by means of a “bilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)” between Canada and each participating country in the program, to which, the signing parties are the Canadian HRSDC Minister and the comparable Minister of labour in the participating country (HRSDC, 2010). The Canadian government views MOUs as “International Instruments that are not binding under Public International Law” (Canada Treaty Information, 2011). The Canada Treaty Information Service (2011) further suggests that such instruments are generally made for matters of a routine or technical nature “between a Canadian Government department, an agency or a province or other sub-national government or para-statal organisation and a similar body in another country”. Accordingly, unless a MOU would “result in a major shift in Canadian policy […] policy controls will rest within the mandate of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and of the responsible Minister” (Canada Treaty Information Service, 2011). Aust (2010) suggests in his Handbook of International Law, that a “common reason for preferring an MOU is confidentiality” and that “[n]ot being a treaty, an MOU is generally not subject to any constitutional procedures, such as presentation to parliament […] The lack of formalities also means that an MOU is easier to amend” (p. 54).

It is worthwhile considering the implications of this type of policy creation process. As Aust suggests, it creates an information deficit at the legislative level, allowing a closed network to evaluate and amend policy without facing public scrutiny until after such changes are implemented. Interpreted through Baumgartner and Jones’ model of the policy process, any program established by MOU is thus ‘serially’ buried deeply below the everyday legislative agenda, as amendments and updates do not regularly reach the House of Commons. The normal process of amendment through introduction, debate, committee review, readings, approval, and review do not occur, and given the niche nature of its benefits, the program thus has a minimal priority on the legislative oversight agenda.

The autonomous capability of Ministers and Deputy Ministers of HRSDC to make minor regulatory changes to the MOU without the need for Cabinet, budgetary, or
legislative approval allowed the program to develop a self-sustaining policy subsystem with HRSDC, CIC, and FARMS/FERME/WALI coordinating wage levels, work permit authorizations (LMOs), worker recruitment through foreign governments, application processing, housing inspections, and worker transportation. Since the 1987 decision to privatize FARMS and remove entry quotas on the SAWP, HRSDC has become increasingly dependent on the FARMS and its counterparts in the west (WALI) and Quebec (FERME) for information, expertise, and feedback on the operation of the
program. A 2003 study by the North South Institute found that, with the privatization of FARMS in 1987, HRSDC lost the expertise and information gathering capacity to track the entry and location of migrant workers and now must rely on FARMS/FERME/WALI to provide entry statistics and information on complaints, repatriations, and abusive employers (p. 46). This subsystem arrangement has even matured to the point that it has an institutionalized formal feedback process that allows growers and growers associations to express their concerns regarding the SAWP through FARMS/FERME/WALI, whom convey these concerns, in the form of regulatory suggestions, to HRSDC. The structure of this process involves yearly ‘regional meetings’ through which growers, growers’ associations (generally organized by commodity), provincial agricultural lobbies (the BC Agricultural Council in British Columbia), HRSDC officials, and consular officials from Mexico and the Caribbean meet to discuss the operation of the program and make regulatory recommendations that are represented by HRSDC and FARMS/FERME/WALI at yearly ‘national meetings’. It is at the ‘national meetings’ that policy goals are set and changes to regulations are negotiated and formally adopted through updates to the MOU or the employment contract appendix. Notably excluded from this subsystem are migrant workers themselves, as well as any representatives of the NGOs and unions claiming to represent them (see Appendix II).

Given their exclusion from the policy-subsystem, throughout the 1990s, policy
challengers were thus forced to make their demands for changes to the SAWP through the media and via indirect pressure on the subsystem through legislators. However, through growing media attention in the mid-2000s new opportunity structures became
available for challengers to ‘lurch’ longstanding ‘problems’ with the SAWP onto the
parliamentary issue agenda. This negative attention, has subsequently forced the existing policy sub-system to defend, and re-assert the need for the Program to continue. Baumgartner and Jones (1993) argue that legislative involvement in a policy area occurs when media attention reaches a threshold at which point “parties may be drawn to it because it has the potential of conveying electoral advantage” (p. 22). Policies and the subsystems that manage them may invariably be traced to their political authors, and thus opposition parties may instrumentalize strong negative portrayals of such programs for the electoral leverage they offer. This assertion proves highly consistent with the pattern of agenda access that occurred in relation to the SAWP in the 2000s.

With the 2002 implementation of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act
policy priorities regarding the admission of temporary foreign workers shifted to
facilitate the entry of a greater number of migrant workers for temporary employment in various sectors of the Canadian economy. According to the Auditor General (2009), one of the four objectives for the introduction of new framework was “to facilitate the entry of visitors, students, and temporary workers for purposes such as trade, commerce, tourism, international understanding and cultural, educational, and scientific activities” (p. 5). To put the growth of the program under IRPA in perspective, between 1990 and 1999, the number of workers admitted through the SAWP rose from 12,451 to 15,060, but between 1999 and 2009, program use nearly doubled, with admissions rising steadily to 27,654 in 2009 (See Appendix III).
Concomitantly, as this new class of workers grew, so too did the number of news
stories addressing temporary farm-labour migration. However, whereas the media
coverage of the 1990s tended to converge upon a legitimizing discourse, coverage in the 2000s began to increasingly address issues of abuse, precarious legal status, and the limited collective bargaining capabilities of migrant farm workers. The previously
predominant images of the SAWP as a labour market necessity and as a form of mutually beneficial foreign development have, of late, been all but replaced by policy images that portray the Program as facilitating workplace abuse and encouraging the use of a disposable workforce. Of the eighty-eight stories which made mention of the program between 2002 and 2010, sixty-one described the program using negative images.

Many of these stories tended to cluster around focal events, such as the 2008
dismissal of fourteen Mexican farm workers from a greenhouse in Abbotsford days
before a unionization vote (Stueck, 2008). Although the workers were deported on the same day they were fired, the event created an opportunity for UFCW to focus national media attention on the vulnerability of migrant workers. In the following four months, major news outlets published an additional ten stories on employers’ use of dismissals and deportations as a means of countering migrant workers’ union-organization attempts.
In a similar display of media convergence, between August and October of 2005 alone, four full-length stories appeared in several papers, all of which condemned poor living conditions, incidences of underpay, and hazardous on-the-job conditions faced by migrant.

In the 1990s, the policy-subsystem quietly managing the SAWP, had done so
buttressed by a supportive policy image of an economically necessary program that
allowed ‘thankful’ Mexican and Caribbean workers to sell their labour in Canada.
However, with the growth in negative attention in the 2000s, that arrangement fell under increasing scrutiny, opening political opportunities for challengers to contest both the image of the program, as well as the way in which it was managed. Whereas in the 1990s, no Parliamentary Committee had ever discussed the SAWP, by 2007, four separate Committees had taken up issues pertaining to the program. In the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills Development, Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities (HUMA), opposition members began a campaign to widen Employment Insurance benefits access to include migrant workers. In 2006, in both the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) and the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food (AGRI), positive and negative aspects of the Program were discussed, as various interest organizations made appeals to be included in the program.

In the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (CIMM), a 2007 study,
initially proposed by ex-Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of HRSDC, Jim
Karygiannis to investigate undocumented workers, was amended just before a vote on the motion to additionally cover the growing Canadian reliance on temporary foreign workers. Another Citizenship and Immigration Committee member, Olivia Chow, described her relatively new interest in the position of migrant farm workers as having been provoked by “Min Sook’s [2003] documentary film [El Contrato] on farm workers”, which she said “reminded [her] of the tragic past of the single Chinese men who weren’t allowed to bring their families to Canada after they built the CPR” (Chow, 2011, Interview). This newfound interest of these political actors in temporary foreign labour migration can be interpreted as effectively shifting the venue of oversight for the SAWP from exclusionary, closed ‘regional’ and ‘national’ meetings, and elevating program oversight to a Parliamentary and national public venue. Additionally, the changing priorities and use of the immigration system introduced by IRPA, attracted the attention of the Auditor General of Canada, who, in October of 2007 decided to undertake a review of the foreign worker selection process. Emblematic of the destabilization of the policy subsystem’s control of the issue, the Auditor General’s Office ominously declared that, since 2002, the temporary foreign workers program has operated without formal evaluation, with “limited analysis of risks and without any formal goal, objectives, or basis on which to evaluate its success” (Office of the Auditor General of Canada [OAG], 2009, p. 34). Moreover, the Auditor General challenged the capacity of the policy subsystem to adequately manage temporary labour migration. The report concluded: [T]here has been no systematic follow-up by either CIC or HRSDC to verify that employers are complying with the terms and conditions under which the LMO application was approved, such as wages to be paid and accommodations to be provided. (p. 33)
Neither the Auditor General, nor the Parliamentary Committees that have taken an
interest in the SAWP have the authority to impose changes on the policy subsystem.
However, their interest in the issue has created substantial pressure on HRSDC, CIC, and the private regional administrative bodies (FARMS/FERME/WALI) to address the
concerns of unions and other civil society organizations, whose criticisms of the program had previously been ignored.

I will now briefly attempt to sketch how policy challengers have capitalized on
new opportunities in order to contest the dominant policy image, and how representatives of CIC, HRSDC, and FARMS have attempted to counter attacks on both the SAWP and the current distribution of authority within the policy subsystem. As I have suggested, the majority of conflict was facilitated by the interest of several key Parliamentary standing Committees. Hearings, debates, and petition-sponsorship provided institutional venues for a great number of previously excluded groups to promote numerous policy demands. I have attempted to articulate two of the dominant policy images used by challengers by grouping them into broad debates that seemed to recur throughout Parliamentary records.

Good Enough to Work, Good Enough to Stay? The debate over status: Some challengers have used this window of agenda access to attempt to contest the
veracity of the labour shortage, revisiting images reminiscent of 1966. As one Trade
Union representative argued: [T]he employers and the provincial government [of B.C.] have created labour market conditions that have contributed to the shortage by creating a labour market, a supply situation that is untenable for local workers. (Fairey, 2008)

However, no MP in Hansard records has instrumentalized this policy image, and thus, it seems the ‘need’ for farm labour assistance itself remains relatively accepted. Instead, the image most seized upon by MPs, and advocacy organizations involves the issue of ‘status’, and the injustice of a lack of opportunity for workers to naturalize when a clear demand exists for their increasingly ‘permanent’ employment.

The essence of any ‘guest worker’ program is the enforced, temporary nature of a
worker’s stay. However, as Satzewich (1991) has argued, the SAWP was introduced
during the 1960s when racialized images of social unrest, and a national image of a
‘White Canada’ had been used to justify the exclusion of migrant workers from
citizenship. Similarly, during the 1990s, exclusion from permanent residency was
predicated on an image of thankful ‘foreign’ workers, happy to toil in Canada and return home each year. Both policy images no longer substantiate the exclusion of migrant farm workers from permanent residency. Through CIMM’s hearings, challenges to the temporary status of migrant farm workers have been posed by a variety of groups using several different justifications. MPs such as Olivia Chow and Andrew Telegdi have invoked comparisons of the SAWP to Canada’s shameful exclusion of Chinese workers who “were brought in to build the railway, and when that was done Canada tried to get rid of them” (Telegdi, 2008; Chow, 2011). Another recurring challenge, made by the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour, as well as a number of migrant rights groups, and academics, links a lack of status to images of foreign workers “left vulnerable to abuse and exploitation” (Clarke, 2008). Even growers associations such as the Union des producteurs agricoles, have questioned the economic merit of the practise, asking why workers who have contributed to the Canadian economy, for eight months every year for “10 or 15 years [and whom would make] exceptional potential immigrants since they already have work experience” are being excluded from permanent residency (Varvaressos, 2008).

In defense of the program, the position of the government has been to effectively
wash their hands of any moral obligation regarding the right of temporary workers to
access permanent residency. Instead, government MPs and the Director General of the Immigration Branch of the CIC, Les Linklater (2008), have defended the program by suggesting that the responsibility lies with the Provinces through the new ‘Provincial Nominee Program’. In one CIMM hearing, Conservative MP Ed Komarnicki (2008) confronted a representative of an Immigration Services Agency by declaring:
[O]verall the immigration system is too complex, too difficult, and too hard to
understand for the average person […] Obviously that’s where the provincial
nominee system does work relatively well, because the provinces can nominate
the party they want and the federal government deals with security, obviously,
and health […] agreements have been signed where there are no limitations on
those [provincially nominated immigrants.] (Online, CIMM-34)

Later in the hearing, Komarnicki added a further justification for devolving the
responsibility for the naturalization of migrant workers to the Provinces claiming:
A lot of concerns are that people tend to migrate or emigrate to places like
Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, but if the province can nominate the people
[…] they can direct newcomers to areas outside of those areas[.]
Thus, through a re-focusing of conflict, the recent Conservative government has been attempting to defend the continued temporary status of workers in the SAWP by
redefining the ‘problem’ of moral obligation to temporary residents as a Provincial, not Federal, responsibility. Therefore, although policy challengers have forced government to address Canada’s moral obligation to temporary workers, the Conservative government has used devolution as the ‘solution’, and has limited the need for government intervention to negotiating annexes regarding temporary workers in devolution accords such as the Canada-Alberta and Canada-Nova Scotia agreements.

Structural or Negotiable? How to address abuse in the SAWP:
Unlike the issue of status, greater agenda access during the 2000s by migrant worker
advocacy groups has corresponded to increased government imposition of oversight
controls and protections for the rights of migrant workers. However, my review of the
Parliamentary discourse reveals that the core demands of policy challengers—that certain structural changes be made to the SAWP and that Unions be included in the policy subsystem—have been left unaddressed. Rather than treat the abuse occurring in the program as a structural phenomenon, as policy challengers have suggested, instead HRSDC and CIC have defined the ‘problem’ of worker vulnerability as an issue of poor intergovernmental communication and enforcement. The most common image used by policy challengers in their calls to restructure the SAWP, evoked substantive equality under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, calling upon government “to ensure equal protection of the rights of seasonal agricultural workers” (Dowd, 2008). The recurring demands made under this image by Amnesty International, UFCW, Justica for Migrant Workers, and the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission include: Removal of same-day repatriation and the establishment of an independent appeal body, the “right of representation at […] annual [SAWP Regional and National] meetings” for unions (Dowd, 2008; Vaugrante, 2008; Ramsaroop, 2008). These claims were no doubt buttressed by the concentration of media reporting through the late 2000s that presented
images of the workers under the SAWP being grossly underpaid. One (2008) Globe and Mail exposé reported on B.C. farm workers receiving $24 for 10-hour days, living in substandard conditions and being subject to forced deportations before union votes when they tried to organize.
It is possible to trace the changing stance of the program’s defenders as pressure
on the program mounted from opposition MPs, advocacy groups, the media, and in late 2009, the Auditor General’s Office. Initially, program architects and Department-level officials attempted to use the same absolution strategy of framing the problems as intricately tied to issues of federalism: As ex-Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of HRSDC, Jim Karygiannis (2008) declared after hearing testimony that the Federal government should be accountable for the welfare of the foreign workers migrating through the SAWP: “My professor used to say that BS baffles brains […] what I’m hearing here are complaints that should be addressed at different levels of government” (CIMM-19). Karygiannis was not the only voice attempting to pursue a narrow image of provincial propriety in defense of the SAWP early in CIMM’s investigation. At one of the earliest hearings, Les Linklater (2008), a Director General of the Immigration Branch of CIC, provided similar testimony on who was responsible for the welfare of workers: “provinces and territories, which are largely responsible for monitoring employment standards and occupational health and safety, are actively engaging on this file” (CIMM-13). However, barely two months later, when the Minister of HRSDC, Monte Solberg (2008) testified before the Committee, the federalism tone appeared to have been slightly diluted and a longer response regarding the welfare of workers was provided: [I]t’s really important that we take steps to protect temporary workers so they don’t face abuse. Under the law, temporary workers have the same rights as any Canadian worker […] So we’ve signed a number of letters of understanding with the provinces, who typically have jurisdiction, can monitor them and make sure they are being treated well. (HUMA-26)
Whether or not the signing of ‘letters of understanding’ occurred as the result of pressure from CIMM and the advocacy organizations testifying therein, by 2010, a clearer picture of the shifting dynamic of responsibility is clear. Testifying before the Public Account Committee (PACP), Janice Charette (2010), Deputy Minister HRSDC had the following to say regarding protection for the rights of migrant workers:
[T]he Auditor General had […] recommendations specific to HRSDC’s responsibilities [including] that HRSDC and CIC implement mechanisms to enhance program integrity and work protections […] HRSDC has launched a new initiative to assess employers’ compliance […] We’re asking employers to provide documentary evidence that they paid agreed wages and provided appropriate working conditions to foreign workers […] We’ve also signed information-sharing agreements with British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba. (PACP-8)
Other initiatives undertaken by the Conservative government during this period included legislation cracking down on ‘ghost consultants’ and unscrupulous labour recruiters who profit off temporary labour migration by bringing foreign workers into the country and then subcontracting them to employers (Goutor and Ramsaroop, 2008). Additionally, in response to CIMM’s final report, “[w]ithin existing authorities,” HRSDC developed national housing guidelines for the SAWP were established, and began publishing information on the rights of migrant workers in Spanish (Government of Canada, 2009).

However, these gains are marginal compared to the demands levied by policy challengers during the period of agenda access between 2006 and 2008, which included drastic reforms to the policy subsystem managing the SAWP. Targeting bad-apple employers, labour contractors, and publishing new standards do not address the structural concerns raised by civil advocacy groups, academics, and even some business associations. These initiatives may almost be considered a form of decoy policymaking detracting attention from the deep-seated structural problems with the SAWP that came to light during this period. Moreover, many of the intergovernmental initiatives the Conservatives paraded before CPAC are flatly failing. When called upon in the B.C. legislature to answer questions regarding migrant worker housing in 2009, British Columbia’s Minister of Labour Market Development, Murray Cowell declared: [A]s a ministry, we don’t have the responsibility for accommodation for any
workers in the province. That would come under municipal government for
housing. In this instance, the federal government has written into their contract
that they must be inspected by an independent registered inspector in British
Columbia, but it’s not something that this ministry would take part in[.] (p. 618)
There is a striking asymmetry between HRSDC testimony, which claimed growing
cooperation with Provinces and that of a Provincial Labour Minister declaring no ‘part’
in their contract.

How should one interpret the limited success of policy challengers in altering the
structure of the SAWP and the policy subsystem that manages it? While, the policy
image of docile, thankful labourers associated with the SAWP in the 1990s was
effectively shattered, increased government scrutiny of salient ‘problems’ receiving
attention in the media and in Committee did not result in the particular resolutions
demanded by policy challengers. Moreover, the conflict was contained by a minority
government during this entire period, creating substantial opportunities for the opposition parties to shape the national pressure on the policy subsystem. It is my estimation that the degree of media attention to the issue was insufficient to allow challenger to establish a dominant policy image that confined conflict to what Baumgartner and Jones (1993) refer to as a “definable institutional structure […] responsible for policymaking” (p. 7). Thus, the Federal Government proved capable of ‘shirking’ from the majority of demands placed on the subsystem by redefining the venue of conflict according to the federalprovincial jurisdictional lines, while undertaking a series of ‘decoy’ actions to create the image that they were addressing the ‘problem’.

Conclusion:
This essay has attempted to establish how, operating at a subsystem level in conditions of low media and political visibility, networked actors, may prove capable of sustaining a morally controversial program. Throughout the 1990s, despite social organization and public protest against controversial aspects of the SAWP, the demands of policy challengers failed to reach the federal legislative agenda. However, in the 2000s, during a period of growing media scrutiny, political actors began to take an interest in the demands of policy challengers and actively created opportunities for them to present competing images of the SAWP—many of which continue to be echoed by legislators in a sustained attempt to provide oversight to a policy that, structurally, lends itself to subsystem management. Nonetheless, during this same period, government actors proved capable of deflecting the bulk of criticism to the program, on one hand suggesting alternate venues carried the responsibility for such issues, while on the other hand carrying out decoy reforms in an attempt to pacify public pressure on the policy area.

What does this failure to capitalize on the window of agenda access mean for policy
challengers? If Parliamentary discussion is at all an indication (see Appendix I) of an
opportunity for policy change, then that window has closed, as the few incidences of
discussion occurring in Parliament today represent petitions read to an empty chamber and single sentence challenges posed to Ministers. It is likely further research will be necessary to definitively flush out specific links between the sudden interest of legislators in the SAWP and the parallel growth of media interest in the program. My interview with Olivia Chow by no means represented a systematic investigation of the incentives structuring her use of parliamentary resources to pursue issues pertaining to migrant workers. However, the fact her awareness of morally controversial aspects of the SAWP was instigated by a documentary film suggests a definite link between sustained policy equilibrium and low media challenges to existing presumptions regarding the policy. Additionally, the inner workings of the policy subsystem managing the SAWP, warrant study—what incentives structure the close relationship between HRSDC and CIC as opposed to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada? While researching this paper, on several occasions I attempted to contact representatives to the SAWP national meetings to obtain interviews or meeting minutes, but received no reply—a befitting reinforcement of complaints by policy challengers that such meetings are lack transparency and inclusiveness.

In closing, I turn to migration theorist Joseph Carens (2008), who declared
seasonal migrant workers “hard locate on the map of democracy” in terms of the
permissible civil, social, and political restrictions that may be placed on them (p. 420). However, out of the recent debates in the House of Commons and in Committee, a definition of where such authoritative decision-making lies is becoming increasingly visible. By refusing to engage with alternate policy images and confining conflict to the Provinces in a manner that absolved HRSDC and CIC of responsibility for the protection of migrant workers, the Federal Government may very well be reshaping Carens’ ‘map of democracy’. Civil society organizations and grassroots challengers have not gone away, and increasingly, fields, greenhouses, and Provincial courts and legislatures are becoming the new venue for debate. Lead by organizations like UFCW, migrant worker advocacy groups continue to try and raise awareness of abuse endemic in the SAWP, and at the Provincial level have succeeded in extending coverage under Provincial Occupation Health and Safety Act (OHSA) in Ontario and are battling to do so in Alberta through their End the Harvest of Death campaign. Though these groups are waging a war against a national program, it is my prediction that, increasingly, it will be the skirmishes occurring much closer to home at the Provincial level—unionization rights, medical coverage, necessity of spot inspections—that will determine what images define Canada’s responsibilities to workers under the SAWP. As this essay has argued, issue dynamics are known to swing rapidly, gaining critical exposure one week, and then falling from the media radar the next. Even during the 2011 Federal Election Leader’s debate, seemingly out of nowhere, NDP leader Jack Layton launched an attack on Prime
Minister Stephen Harper on national television over the treatment of migrant workers.
Suffice to say, debate on this issue may be ebbing, but it is far from over and will
continue to shift with the currents of media coverage.

Appendices
Appendix I – Issue ‘Lurching’:
Salience of the SAWP (Canada, 1994 to 2010)
0
5
10
15
20
25
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Date
Incidence of Discussion
Media Presence Parliamentary Presence
Salience of the SAWP (Canada, 1994 to 2010)
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
Spring
Fall
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Date
Incidence of Discussion
Media Presenece Parliamentary Presence
22
Appendix II – The Contemporary Policy Network
The arrows in this Chart denote pressure and authority between groups. Although there are many actors attempting to influence the policy process, note that most have no access to the ‘regional’ and
‘national’ meetings where regulations are made. Instead, they must rely on courts, and the legislature to pressure the subsystem.
23
Appendix III. Change in Program Use (1966-2009)
24
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SAWP, Agricultural workers, Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, parliamentary committees

Harvesting labourers

Policy analysis

Policymakers, Public awareness, Researchers, and NGOs/community groups/solidarity networks

Canada, Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, British Columbia, Other provinces, Federal, Nova Scotia, and National relevance