Meet the migrant workers who keep Quebec's farms from going "bankrupt"
Meet the migrant workers who keep Quebec's farms from going "bankrupt"
They live hidden among us, spending most of their lives away from home.
We came upon him in the ditch across from an apple orchard.
He’d fallen asleep behind the wheel of his truck and woke up sideways. It may have been hopeless, but he was determined to power his way out of the tall grass and mud, spinning his tires until the rubber smouldered.
His head poked out the side window when we approached him.
“Ça va?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Are you okay?”
He waved and I could see his hand shaking violently. He spoke only Spanish. It occurred to me then that he was probably a farmworker in Quebec for the summer and that he’d be in a world of trouble if his boss found out he’d crashed the orchard’s truck.
So my pregnant girlfriend, Marie-Pier, climbed into the driver’s seat and he and I pushed, managing to get only a few inches forward. We stopped to catch our breath. The rain came pouring down.
Shit.
***
“There wouldn’t be agriculture in Quebec if it weren’t for foreign workers,” Daniel Laviolette said. “The only reason I’ve turned a profit these past 10 years is because of them. Without them, forget about it. We’d all be bankrupt.”
Laviolette owns a landscaping business in St-Placide and lives on a property with his wife and half a dozen workers from Central America. Every morning before sunrise, they load up the truck and head out for a day of laying down sod in the hot sun. And almost every night they’re back around 7 p.m.
When I met up with Laviolette Wednesday, he’d given his employees the afternoon off because it was “too damn hot to work.”
Laviolette has a point. Despite a pandemic, there were 13,094 temporary foreign workers employed on Quebec’s farms last year, according to Statistics Canada. That’s over 17 per cent of the sector’s labour force.
When you live in the city, it’s easy not to notice how much of the food you eat depends on workers who live here up to eight months of the year. We buy fruit, vegetables, poultry and beef harvested in farming hamlets off the island of Montreal, by people who work six days a week for $13.50 an hour.
“They make an incredible sacrifice for this industry and for all Quebecers,” said Laviolette. “Every year when I drive them back to the airport, I have tears in my eyes. I spend the next week on the farm looking for my guys, forgetting they’re gone.
“Knowing them has been the most rewarding experience of my career.”
Fernando Ruono lives in a mobile home on Laviolette’s farm. We sat across from each other in his kitchen Wednesday, communicating in French over the hum of an air conditioner.
“I live in the countryside in Guatemala and one day — 12 years ago — our village was visited by a company that does… how do you say reclutamiento?”
“Recruiting?”
“Yeah, recruiting. They took me to work with chickens at first. In Marieville. I like it better here. I’ve been here 11 years.”
Ruono is away from his wife and three children between April and November every year. And when he’s back home, he drives a cab for American tourists. With each passing harvest, it’s getting harder and harder to say goodbye to his kids.
“My daughter is 16 now and we FaceTime every night,” he said. “Sometimes I help her with her homework. It’s not easy but with the money I earn here, I can send her to private school and one day to university. They’re my pride and joy, those kids.”
It would take Ruono two weeks of hard labour in Guatemala to earn what he does in a day of laying down sod in the suburbs north of Montreal. Sometimes, he dreams of bringing his family to Quebec and starting a new life for them here. But he’s not sure it would work out.
“I’ve been practicing my French for 12 years and it’s not 100 per cent,” he said, speaking a French rich with Quebecois inflections. “And then there’s the cost of living, hiring immigration lawyers, it’s a complicated process. But it’s something I’ve thought of.”
***
We were getting nowhere on human power alone.
Even after a young man stopped to help us push the truck, it only moved us forward another few inches. So I walked to the orchard and knocked on the door to see if we could borrow a tractor.
No answer.
Another few hundred metres down the road, a farmer told me his tractor wasn’t working. When I got back to the truck, Marie-Pier had managed to Google Translate her way into a conversation with our new friend, Ricardo.
He came to Quebec from Mexico City and worked on an apple orchard a few towns over. Ricardo sent most of what he earned back home to his wife and two children. Paying $350 for a tow truck was out of the question.
“Tu cinturón!”
“My belt?”
“Yes! Your belt!”
He mimicked using my belt to pull the truck. Things were getting desperate. Darkness would settle over the valley before long and he’d be expected back at the farm.
I had only started to notice them when we moved to the countryside. We’d drive past them toiling away in the fields most days. On Sundays, their only day off, we’d see the workers at Wal-Mart stocking up on groceries for the week. They wore Nascar baseball caps, sleeveless shirts and Crocs — soft, comfortable clothes after a week of the grind. Occasionally we exchanged polite nods but that was as far as it went.
They lived in their world and we in ours.
Now we stood face to face with someone whose labour afforded us a lifestyle we took for granted. Marie-Pier sat with Ricardo in my dead grandfather’s car, hiding from the rain. She persuaded him not to keep pushing his boss’ vehicle and we called a tow truck.
***
Gabriel Yos won’t be there when his son turns four next week.
He’s been working in Quebec for each of the child’s birthdays. And, truth be told, it isn’t getting any easier to be away from the boy.
“He’s old enough to ask for me now. He’ll say, ‘Come back, come back, papa,’” said Yos, who also hails from Guatemala. “It’s hard to explain that to a child, that you’re working for the family. But it’s what I have to do.”
Yos has been around Laviolette’s farm almost as long as Ruono. His French is functional, and considering he works and lives alongside other Latinos, he’s clearly made an effort to acclimate to his summer home.
“I didn’t know people spoke French in Quebec when I landed here,” said Yos, who was putting away some equipment when we spoke. “It was a bit of a shock. So I tried to pick it up and I’m doing okay, not 100 per cent but I understand well enough.”
Laviolette says that, at the beginning of the work season last year, Yos seemed a bit off.
“He was down, not himself. I could see it right away when he got here,” Laviolette said. “So I took him aside and said, ‘Gabriel, we work together. I know you. What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘The missus is sick. I don’t have the money to pay for her treatment.’ She needed $1,200 up front to be treated because they don’t have medicare down there.
“You can’t mess around with that. So we went to the bank. I transferred the money. There was never a question. This guy gives me everything he has, so it’s the least I could do. He’s a proud man. He didn’t accept charity. He asked me to dock his overtime hours and he paid me back.”
Of course, the system is far from perfect and Laviolette acknowledges as much. He’s heard of farmers who make their workers sleep in a barn and he’s been on job sites where contractors refuse to work with “Mexicans.”
“One contractor was yelling at my guys, talking about them like they were pieces of equipment,” said Laviolette. “I tried to reason with him. He wasn’t hearing it, so we packed up our stuff and left the job. When he asked me who was going to finish the work, I said, ‘Not my problem.’
“He called me a few minutes later and I said, ‘We’re all born naked and we’re all gonna die naked. You and I aren’t any better than them, so if we come back you better remember that.’ The next day he was handing my guys bottles of water and we got back to work.”
This year alone, there were hundreds of instances of abuse reported to a government tip line that monitors the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). There have been COVID-19 outbreaks at food processing plants, warehouses and other sectors that employ foreign workers to toil away in cramped conditions. Many have died and been maimed on the job and, advocates say, the labourers often fear retribution if they speak out.
It used to be that workers could call a 1-800 number and leave a voicemail message in English or French before waiting an undetermined period before hearing back from someone in English or French. Given that most aren’t fluent in either of Canada’s official languages, the tip line was ineffective.
A new service allows them to speak to an agent in Spanish and get information about access to healthcare and information about their rights. The federal government has also instituted new rules that allow inspectors to access payroll records and other third-party information if they suspect foul play.
The TFWP has been around since 1973 but it was initially meant for jobs in the medical field and other specialized professions. It was expanded in 2002 and again in 2006 to include “low-skilled” labour, a sector that now makes up the vast majority of the TFWP.
Demands for foreign labour exploded in Quebec when the province was hit with a labour shortage in 2018. That year, applications for the program jumped by 36 per cent and a total of 17,600 permits were issued.
With the demand for labour still high and Premier François Legault refusing to increase Quebec’s immigration quotas, the TFWP is more popular now than ever. And this despite a pandemic that makes international travel costly.
On the ground in Quebec’s farming regions, Laviolette said the work wouldn’t get done if it weren’t for people like Yos and Ruono.
“Next door they’ve got 250 workers from abroad, and the same goes for the orchards,” said Laviolette. “We can’t get native-born Quebecers to do this work. We’d all be out of business if that were the case.”
***
We did our best to make small talk as we waited for the tow truck.
He offered to go get a friend of his to tow the truck with his vehicle and once again insisted we could use my belt as a pulley.
That seemed imprudent.
So we did our best to strike up a conversation. Marie-Pier explained she was pregnant, showing Ricardo her belly and explaining the baby was due in October.
“Un bebe?” he asked, his eyes lighting up.
“Una bebe!” she replied.
“Bebita!”
Ricardo was still shaking, but he’d settled down some. For a while, all he would say was “muchos problemas” but now we could mangle enough Spanish to exchange the basics. He missed his kids, he was too nervous to eat the slice of pizza we offered, he’d be flying home in September.
For some reason, I remembered the Spanish word for journalist and he nodded his head in approval.
“Periodista? Que es bueno!”
When the tow truck arrived, the driver was kind enough to inspect the truck for any major damage.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “Nothing noticeably wrong with the alignment. Maybe the oil is leaking, but that could have happened anywhere. Hopefully, the boss doesn’t notice.”
The driver hooked the truck’s front axle to his rig and I hopped in the vehicle to keep it steady as he pulled me out of the ditch. Still shaken up from the crash, Ricardo wasn’t feeling up for a drive.
So I got behind the wheel and he sat next to me. Marie-Pier followed us.
Driving through the dark country roads, we were too tired to even try to talk. So we sat back and listened to Emerson, Lake and Palmer on CHOM 977, nodding our heads in silence, a Mexican and a Quebecer bonding over English prog rock.
I remembered what it was like to actually sweat for a living, to spend my days dreaming of that moment I’d kick off my steel-toed boots and get into a pair of sneakers. It felt like stepping into a cloud. That was a few summers in the life of an incredibly privileged white boy from suburban Canada.
Ricardo never had the breaks I did.
“Remember this,” Laviolette would later tell me. “It is sheer luck that you and I were born on this patch of land and they weren’t. Even if you grew up poor here, it isn’t the same as what they’ve seen.
“When I’ve been to Guatemala on recruiting trips, people line up for a kilometre outside the church. There’s no community centre, just a church. There must be 5,000 people in the line and they’ll only take 50.
“We’ll never know what it is to stand in that line.”
We pulled up to a farming hamlet near Oka, passed the church and the old firehouse, sputtering along until the street lights disappeared in our rear view mirror. He signalled for me to park the truck on a gravel path that led to a white bungalow behind the orchard.
“Thank you!”
“A la proxima,” I replied, exhausting what little Spanish I had left.
He waved to Marie-Pier, put on his cap and walked inside.
***
There isn’t much downtime for the workers on Laviolette’s farm.
“I came here to make money and send it home,” Ruono said. “Maybe we go to the pizzeria every now and again, we do our groceries on Sunday, but if we’re not out there working, we’re in here resting, watching Netflix, talking to family.”
Behind Ruono, another worker laid on the couch with his shirt off, watching TV. Down the hallway, Ruono’s cousin took a shower after their shift was cut short by the sweltering heat.
Laviolette said he’s consulted with lawyers about a path to Canadian citizenship for Ruono.
“It’s a long, complicated process but we, as Quebecers, would be lucky to have someone like Ruono among us,” he said. “Getting to work with him has been a great privilege of my adult life. I’m not a rich man, I’m a farmer. My kids chose other careers and I understand that. There is a part of me that feels like we’re family, the workers and I.
“The other day, I butchered a chicken and we cooked it and brought it over to them for Sunday dinner. Sometimes my wife will park her car and they’ll run over to help carry the groceries. Lots of these guys come from farms as well.
“There’s something universal about that connection to work and the land.”
***
Well, it looks like we’ll be headed to the polls on September 20th. Which means, of course, that we here at Rover Industries will do our level best to bring you original, insightful and delightfully weird coverage of the snap election. Stay on the lookout for guest contributors, more frequent newsletters and possibly me having a heart attack because our baby is due less than a month after we elect a new government. Or the same government. Don’t quote me on any of this, I didn’t do so well in my civics class.
This brings me to my next point. We want to improve the newsletter and I’d like to start by launching a mailbag segment where you all ask me anything you want (preferably something about journalism or politics but there are no dumb questions so whatever). Just email me the question at heytitocurtis@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to get you a decent answer by next. Mail!
Once we know when the debates will be and whether COVID-19 protocols change, I’ll be able to set a date and location for a debate-night viewing party. That could be lots of fun. Right? Right? Right!
Meanwhile, Joseph Dubois and I have been kicking around Montreal North, trying to make sense of the sensationalist coverage around gun violence in the neighbourhood. Expect something to drop next week.
In the meantime, stay hydrated and wear sunscreen.
Your friend,
Chris