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These were Allahdua’s accommodations for four years as a seasonal migrant farm worker from St. Lucia, toiling several months a year on a Leamington farm. He worked up to 66 hours a week, sometimes 14-hour days, including Sundays, without overtime pay, planting and harvesting vegetables.

The living conditions were “inhumane,” said Allahdua, but speaking out was risky as he lived on property owned by his employers, with his status in Canada bound to their approval.

“The employer is not just an employer — they are also your landlord and control your immigration status,” he said. “We were at their mercy.”

A new guidance report calling for federally enforced national housing standards for migrant agricultural workers shows that this isn’t just Allahdua’s story — for decades it has been a well-documented reality for tens of thousands of migrant workers, essential to the country’s food supply, who come here each year to work on farms and provide food for Canadians.

, employers are supposed to provide migrant farm workers with adequate, suitable and affordable housing, which can be either on-farm (for example, a bunkhouse) or offsite (for example, a commercial establishment).

However, the report, released Friday and authored by a group of 29 academics, advocates and clinicians, includes worker accounts of widespread, systemic housing abuse: Workers are frequently housed in overcrowded, unsafe conditions — converted garages, sheds or containers — with several men to a room, enduring mould, rodents, broken heating and limited access to clean water. Employer control extends beyond work, with constant surveillance, restricted movement and retaliation against complaints, while inspections can be staged, allowing employers to temporarily fix violations and deter workers from reporting abuse.

The report highlights that without proper inspections, government oversight, privacy and protection from retaliation, workers will continue to live at the mercy of their employers.

A national standard for migrant worker housing has not yet been implemented — despite a study commissioned by the federal government that found “gaps in the housing inspection process” and an “extremely wide variation of what is deemed an acceptable housing standard.”

There is a “collective sense of disappointment” over the lack of progress on housing standards for migrant workers, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the dangers of inadequate accommodations linked to severe outbreaks and worker deaths, said Stephanie Mayell, a co-author of the report and PhD candidate in the Medical Anthropology Program at the University of Toronto.

“Our food system is always an important and essential concern,” said Mayell. “And we don’t have a food system without migrant workers.”

�����ٳ�dzܲ�����the federal government conducts investigations of employers using the temporary foreign worker program, employers are typically given notice before the inspection takes place. 

In January, the ESDC reported conducting 649 inspections between April and September last year, — a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 employers approved to hire temporary foreign workers during that period.

Clifford Paul Mcleish, a migrant worker from Jamaica, said his accommodation hadn’t been inspected once in more than a decade of seasonal work on Ontario farms.

In one of his lodgings, Mcleish recalled, rats crawled around the floors and tables.

“There was dirt everywhere, mud everywhere,” he said. “One night, I had to kill two rats in the same area where we cooked.”

When he and other workers tried to speak up, their employer threatened to send them home.

“We are human beings. We can’t live like this.”

The report recommends that “inspections should be proactive, unannounced, and occur at regular intervals” during migrant agricultural workers’ contracts.

These checks should occur every four months during workers’ stays, including during peak summer and winter seasons to ensure adequate heating or cooling systems are in place and workers should have a safe, confidential way to provide input on their housing without fear of retaliation, the report said.

Migrant farm workers can come for eight months a year; others have work permits for up to two years. But none can gain permanent residence through the country’s temporary foreign worker streams. Critics have long argued that without permanent status, workers lack equal rights and the freedom to leave abusive employers.

“There needs to be an enforceable set of standards,” Mayell said, “so that we can provide a group of essential workers, without whom we wouldn’t eat, the kind of dignified existence in Canada that many Canadians like to believe we do.”