Relationship with community before anything else: Im/migrant Farmworker Justice in BC and Ontario

On October 17, 2025, the David Lam Centre, the Labour Studies Program and the Understanding Precarity in BC (UP-BC) Project, hosted a stimulating and throughout provoking hybrid roundtable titled “Im/migrant Farmworker Justice in British Columbia and Ontario: Past and Present Struggles and Change for the Future.”

Led and curated by Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez (Sociology and Labour Studies Program, Assistant Professor and organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers-BC), this hybrid event grouped a range of migrant justice community groups, academics, and community-labour organizers to share their insights on intergenerational farm worker struggles in British Columbia and Ontario.

This event was intended to merge histories and lessons for farmworker justice for present and future contexts. In a full house at the Harbour Centre, including with dozens of farmworkers logged into the event online from the farms in rural Canada and their home countries, the speakers moved attendees with their knowledge and lived experience of multi-racial, transborder, global, and intergenerational struggles for farmworker justice.

Opening: Day of the Dead altar honouring deceased migrant workers and their allies

Regina Baeza Martinez, recent SFU Sociology Master’s graduate and member of Justicia for Migrant Workers-BC, opened the space with a heartfelt land acknowledgement with tying Coast Salish Indigenous nations with the Indigenous lands that migrant farmworkers come from in the Global South.

Acknowledging that the event was taking place close to the Day of the Dead commemorations, an important Indigenous tradition throughout the Americas, the event also included a beautiful and powerful altar curated by Paola Quiros, that included names and pictures of im/migrant farmworkers and caregivers along with their allies who have passed away in recent months.

Highlights from first round of conversations:

To start the conversation, SFU historian Dr. Anushay Malik traced the formation of the Canadian Farm Workers Union in the 1970s to existing relationships and solidarities within the South Asian diaspora in British Columbia. She explained that this movement did not start with farmworkers per se. It was a concerted response among South Asian students and activists to the settler-colonial violence and racism experienced by their community and driven by the inspiration of the Naxalbari rural struggle in India. Activists including Marxist rural sociologist and SFU Professor, Hari Sharma, and Raj Chouhan, current Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, were the main catalyst to organizing marginalized Punjabi farmworkers, who comprised the majority of farmworkers at the time. 

Byron Cruz, a long-time labour organizer working with the BC Federation of Labor’s Occupational Health and Safety Centre’s Migrant Worker Program, continued with his explanation of the new face of farmworkers in BC: “Faces from Mexico, from Guatemala, from Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, from the Philippines and also from Vietnam, some Asian countries also, and those are the faces of migrant workers now, but with similar issues as decades ago.” Now the majority of farmworkers are migrants, meaning that they are in the country temporarily and not through a permanent immigration stream such as immigrants. Yet the precarity, racism and exclusion in the law remains the same for this group of workers with the addition of a closed work permit that ties each worker to a single Canadian employer. 

Chris Ramsaroop, organizer and founding member of Justice for Migrant Workers, brought into conversation the context of Ontario where the contemporary national farmworker movement commenced. He explained that Justicia was formed as a response to a wildcat strike organized by migrant farmworkers in Leamington, Ontario, which is known as the greenhouse capital of Canada. He cautioned the tendency to infantilize and paternalize migrant workers as if they do not have their own agency to fight back and resist. He relayed how wildcat strikes have been common among workers throughout the history of migrant labour programs in Canada attesting to workers’ power and agency. 

Dr. Vasanthi Venkatesh, Justicia organizer, law professor and head of the Migrant Farmworkers Clinic in the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor, offered a critical reflection of the role of the law as the main architect of farmworkers’ exploitation through a system of modern-day plantation. She explained how this system is maintained by a “legal regime of exceptions for agriculture, a regime that includes trade subsidies that not only increase the wealth of Canadian farmers, but also destroys Indigenous and subsistence farming in the Global South, dispossessing people from the land so they can later provide the main raw material for Canadian farms, an endless sea of racialized labor and exclusions in employment law, no overtime pay, no limits on working hours, no employment, insurance barriers, unionization.”

The Migrant Summit, BC - Vancouver October 18-19, 2025

Following this event, Dr. Encalada Grez and Regina Baeza Martinez co-organized and hosted an intensive 2-day Migrant Summit for grassroots migrant justice organizations and organizers in British Columbia for relationship and capacity building within the migrant justice movement  at a time of growing anti-immigrant backlash, authoritarianism, and emboldened white supremacy.

The 2 day event included workshops and knowledge exchange such as organizing through and beyond the law; grant-writing for grassroots organizations; organizing lessons from the United States with a speaker from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON); and ethical and migrant justice movement based research. A toolkit and short-film are currently in progress to share the learnings and conversations from the Summit for grassroots migrant justice organizations.

Sponsors and community support

• The David Lam Centre
• SFU Labour Studies Program
• Understanding Precarity in BC (UP-BC)
• Justice for Migrant Workers, J4MW, BC & Ontario
• Migrant Worker Centre, BC
• Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights (CDWCR)
• Migrant Journeys 
• Health and Safety Centre BCFED