While agricultural work is hazardous for all workers, migrant workers face additional challenges that make them more vulnerable than domestic workers. The lack of access to permanent immigration status in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) and the agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) makes workers’ jobs hinge on retaining their employers’ favour and creates a particular type of job insecurity that overshadows their behaviour, decisions, and agency to assert their rights for safe and healthy workplaces and workers’ compensation. While researchers argue that the TFWP competes with the SAWP as employers search for the cheapest and most docile workers, less research has examined whether workers’ health and safety exposures and experiences differ within the two programs. Drawing primarily from interviews with advocates and system stakeholders and participant observation at advocate-organized events, this research will offer preliminary answers to discovering whether the programs pose different obstacles to improving health and safety and access to compensation that affect migrant workers’ experiences in Ontario before and after injury. The research will help gather information about possible avenues to improve the health and safety of migrant workers given how the two programs operate within both federal and provincial frameworks. Advocates’ experience assisting workers in both programs offers important insights about whether differences between the programs create particular vulnerabilities for some migrant workers. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This research identifies opportunities and barriers that migrant agricultural workers and their advocates face in improving occupational health and safety and access to workers' compensation in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) and the agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP). Through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document review, the research will help identify whether interplay between the programs causes additional vulnerabilities for some workers. The research will help gather information about possible avenues to improve the health and safety of migrant workers given how the two programs operate in a federal and provincial framework.

Bill C-31 represents an important piece of policy in the history of Canadian citizenship. It takes its place in a dialog of policy and resistance about who ‘gets in’ and who is excluded from Canadian citizenship. By critically reading the text of Bill C-31 through other policy texts, academic arguments and research, and activist texts, this analysis elucidates historical connections between relations of capital, immigration, labour, and the criminal justice system. It works from a materialist feminist framework, critical of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as systems that work through one another in dialectical and historically specific ways. The analysis argues that Bill C-31 is a continuation of relations of capital and that a dialectical conceptualization can yield strategies for a revolutionary praxis that offers hope for the transformation of existing social relations towards new and more humane ways of relating to one another.

Bill C-31 represents an important piece of policy in the history of Canadian citizenship. It takes its place in a dialog of policy and resistance about who ‘gets in’ and who is excluded from Canadian citizenship. By critically reading the text of Bill C-31 through other policy texts, academic arguments and research, and activist texts, this analysis elucidates historical connections between relations of capital, immigration, labour, and the criminal justice system. It works from a materialist feminist framework, critical of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as systems that work through one another in dialectical and historically specific ways. The analysis argues that Bill C-31 is a continuation of relations of capital and that a dialectical conceptualization can yield strategies for a revolutionary praxis that offers hope for the transformation of existing social relations towards new and more humane ways of relating to one another.

This institutional ethnography is an inquiry into the particular migrant category of International Migrant Workers (IMW) in Canada (otherwise known as Temporary Foreign Workers). It looks at how the daily lives of IMWs who have been deemed as ‘semi-skilled’ by the National Occupational Classification (NOC) system are organized by their immigration and job status in Canada. These IMWs are working primarily in the food service, hotel or retail industries in front-line and often precarious employment in Southern and Western Alberta. The data was collected through a literature review, interviews, observations, and textual analysis. The participants that informed this inquiry are IMWs, service providers in the immigrant sector, representatives from the Alberta Government, and an immigrant recruiter/consultant. This study uses an ‘ideological circle’ (Yan, 2003), which maps out the process through which governmental ideology is filtered down to all levels of society via a set of ideas, knowledge, procedures and methods about people and processes. It provides a vehicle to identify the specific social relations that organize people in different sites. It becomes apparent through this mapping that along with the political rationalities of neoliberal criteria and the logic of globalization, and market civilization and citizenship, certain administrative logic and technologies of government such as situating IMWs as economic units in the Canadian nation-state, processes of skill codification, and devolution of immigration policies and programs, become the foundations for the ways that IMWs live their lives in Canada. In particular, we can see how and why they ‘work’ for permanent residency, how and why they become vulnerable to precarious employment in their workplace and in other ways, and how and why they become isolated through family separation. The thesis ends with a look into how social workers and social service organizations are managing ‘professional’ relationships with migrant populations whose lives are organized in the above ways, and questions whether it’s possible at all to move beyond supporting ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998).

This institutional ethnography is an inquiry into the particular migrant category of International Migrant Workers (IMW) in Canada (otherwise known as Temporary Foreign Workers). It looks at how the daily lives of IMWs who have been deemed as ‘semi-skilled’ by the National Occupational Classification (NOC) system are organized by their immigration and job status in Canada. These IMWs are working primarily in the food service, hotel or retail industries in front-line and often precarious employment in Southern and Western Alberta. The data was collected through a literature review, interviews, observations, and textual analysis. The participants that informed this inquiry are IMWs, service providers in the immigrant sector, representatives from the Alberta Government, and an immigrant recruiter/consultant. This study uses an ‘ideological circle’ (Yan, 2003), which maps out the process through which governmental ideology is filtered down to all levels of society via a set of ideas, knowledge, procedures and methods about people and processes. It provides a vehicle to identify the specific social relations that organize people in different sites. It becomes apparent through this mapping that along with the political rationalities of neoliberal criteria and the logic of globalization, and market civilization and citizenship, certain administrative logic and technologies of government such as situating IMWs as economic units in the Canadian nation-state, processes of skill codification, and devolution of immigration policies and programs, become the foundations for the ways that IMWs live their lives in Canada. In particular, we can see how and why they ‘work’ for permanent residency, how and why they become vulnerable to precarious employment in their workplace and in other ways, and how and why they become isolated through family separation. The thesis ends with a look into how social workers and social service organizations are managing ‘professional’ relationships with migrant populations whose lives are organized in the above ways, and questions whether it’s possible at all to move beyond supporting ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998).

This thesis uses worldview conflict theory to examine an unsuccessful lobbying campaign of the Coalition for Change for Caregivers and Temporary Foreign Workers. Using Nudler (1990, 1993), Blechman, Crocker, Docherty, and Garon (2000) and Docherty (1996, 2001), a worldview conflict analysis was developed and applied to the campaign. This research addresses two questions: 1) Is communication between the parties being impeded by the negotiation of reality? 2) Could the application of a worldview conflict analysis show the parties a way to communicate without negotiating reality? Data collected from publically available documents (Coalition, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Minister of Human Resources and Skill Development Canada) were analyzed using content analysis, Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) metaphor analysis, and worldview conflict analysis. Similarities between the parties’ worldviews (regarding what is valuable, construction and structure of the world, and enforcement of ethic) indicated ways they could communicate without negotiating reality. / Graduate

No description available.

This narrative inquiry uses the talking circle, a discourse process indigenous to the North American prairies, to explore the experiences of recent international migrants to rural Alberta. The immediate intention is to address questions of rural revitalization and the creation of welcoming communities. At a deeper level, it explores the role of history, cultural negotiation, and power relations in community development. It examines place as a critical element of human experience, which has been severed under modern economic regimes. Recommendations for how we might best respond to rural migration challenges include processes for listening and responding to needs, for building trustworthy relationships, and a call to recognize Aboriginal history. Findings also point to the importance of facilitating options for migrants with temporary status in a transient global context. The study advises that learning through attentive intercultural discourse could be integral to recreating democratic communities and establishing sense of place. / Adult Education

For many years Canada has quietly rationalized importing temporary “low-skilled” migrant labour through managed migration programs to appease industries desiring cheap and flexible labour while avoiding extending citizenship rights to the workers. In an era of international human rights and global competitive markets, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) is often hailed as a “model” and “win-win” solution to migration and labour dilemmas, providing employers with a healthy, just-in-time labour force and workers with various protections such as local labour standards, health care, and compensation. Tracing migrant workers’ lives between Jamaica, Mexico and Canada (with a focus on Ontario’s Niagara Region), this thesis assesses how their structural vulnerability as non-citizens effectively excludes them from many of the rights and norms otherwise expected in Canada. It analyzes how these exclusions are rationalized as permanent “exceptions” to the normal legal, social and political order, and how these infringements affect workers’ lives, rights, and health. Employing critical medical anthropology, workers’ health concerns are used as a lens through which to understand and explore the deeper “pathologies of power” and moral contradictions which underlie this system. Particular areas of focus include workers’ occupational, sexual and reproductive, and mental and emotional health, as well as an assessment of their access to health care and compensation in Canada, Mexico and Jamaica. Working amidst perilous and demanding conditions, in communities where they remain socially and politically excluded, migrant workers in practice remain largely unprotected and their entitlements hard to secure, an enduring indictment of their exclusion from Canada’s “imagined community.” Yet the dynamics of this equation may be changing in light of the recent rise in social and political movements, in which citizenship and related rights have become subject to contestation and redefinition. In analyzing the various dynamics which underlie transnational migration, limit or extend migrants’ rights, and influence the health of migrants across borders, this thesis explores crucial relationships between these themes. Further work is needed to measure these ongoing changes, and to address the myriad health concerns of migrants as they live and work across national borders.

For many years Canada has quietly rationalized importing temporary “low-skilled” migrant labour through managed migration programs to appease industries desiring cheap and flexible labour while avoiding extending citizenship rights to the workers. In an era of international human rights and global competitive markets, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) is often hailed as a “model” and “win-win” solution to migration and labour dilemmas, providing employers with a healthy, just-in-time labour force and workers with various protections such as local labour standards, health care, and compensation. Tracing migrant workers’ lives between Jamaica, Mexico and Canada (with a focus on Ontario’s Niagara Region), this thesis assesses how their structural vulnerability as non-citizens effectively excludes them from many of the rights and norms otherwise expected in Canada. It analyzes how these exclusions are rationalized as permanent “exceptions” to the normal legal, social and political order, and how these infringements affect workers’ lives, rights, and health. Employing critical medical anthropology, workers’ health concerns are used as a lens through which to understand and explore the deeper “pathologies of power” and moral contradictions which underlie this system. Particular areas of focus include workers’ occupational, sexual and reproductive, and mental and emotional health, as well as an assessment of their access to health care and compensation in Canada, Mexico and Jamaica. Working amidst perilous and demanding conditions, in communities where they remain socially and politically excluded, migrant workers in practice remain largely unprotected and their entitlements hard to secure, an enduring indictment of their exclusion from Canada’s “imagined community.” Yet the dynamics of this equation may be changing in light of the recent rise in social and political movements, in which citizenship and related rights have become subject to contestation and redefinition. In analyzing the various dynamics which underlie transnational migration, limit or extend migrants’ rights, and influence the health of migrants across borders, this thesis explores crucial relationships between these themes. Further work is needed to measure these ongoing changes, and to address the myriad health concerns of migrants as they live and work across national borders.