Last Wednesday, the federal government announced a new time-limited program for a limited number of international students and migrant workers to apply for permanent residency. The details are here. 

Our full responses is here.

We strongly condemn Canada’s announced ‘reforms’ to its immigration system. A one-time only, short-term access to permanent residency for 90,000 people is a smokescreen that fails to address Canada’s racist and exclusionary immigration system.

These reforms do nothing to address how the current point system discriminates against both undocumented communities and migrants deemed ‘low skill’ and ‘low wage.’ More troublingly, the reforms do nothing to change the indentureship of thousands of migrant workers in Canada.

In particular, migrant agricultural workers who work under a system of indentured labour will once again see no improvements to their working and living conditions as a result of the continuation of a closed work permit system that binds workers to one employer. Instead, migrant farm workers are put into competition with over 90 other occupations for a measly 30,000 spots, when over 50,000 farm workers have entered Canada on tied work permits during the pandemic alone.

Please sign and share our response here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUbS4Mw86-tYitr7SZgo–3Fs1ewr8TIazhaLq8lZLqkDuvA/viewform