Globe article on Temporary Foreign Workers

The Globe had a brief article on temporary foreign workers following the death of 10 migrant farm workers in Ontario earlier this week. One of the more interesting quotes was this one:

What took Alec Farquhar aback when he arrived in Simcoe, Ont., one Friday evening in 2009 to bring a mobile medical clinic to migrants was the size of a labour network of which he’d only been tangentially aware.

“It's like a whole different town. It's taken over by farm workers. And you get this sense of this hidden community in our midst – the people who are serving our basic needs and we don’t know who they are. I found it profoundly moving. And unsettling,” he said.

Road fatalities among migrant workers occur every couple of years. The last one that comes to mind offhand was the 2007 rollover in BC where three migrant workers died and 13 or 14 others were injured.

-- Bob Barnetson