Canada
Ontario
Migrant agricultural workers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: Can social mobilization serve as a policymaking lever?
For more than 50 years, Canadian agriculture has relied on migrant workers from countries such as Mexico and Jamaica to perform the difficult and low paid manual work needed to sustain the labour-intensive agricultural sectors. In 2022, there were nearly 65,000 migrant agricultural workers employed in Canada, approximately 30,000 of whom worked in Ontario. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant agricultural workers in Ontario were at least 10 times more likely to contract the virus than residents, and numerous workers died in the various waves, among the youngest fatalities in the province. These grave circumstances stimulated social mobilization and activism by migrant worker support groups and their allies, who worked to meet workers’ practical needs (e.g., food security), while simultaneously engaging in direct political actions at all levels of government to demand changes in policy to increase access to health care services, improve workers’ housing, and reform the immigration system to provide all workers with “status for all”.
Our research in Ontario examines the interactions between municipal, provincial, and national policymaking and political mobilization by and around racialized migrant agricultural workers who experienced the COVID-19 pandemic in disproportionately harmful social, occupational, and health terms. To this end, we are taking a mixed methods approach that includes interviews with activists/ advocates who support migrant workers, as well policy-makers and other key stakeholders. We created a detailed policy timeline to share with participants. We are also compiling comprehensive media and historical reviews of sources covering key policies related to activism to uncover whether and how certain efforts informed policy changes and what alternatives emerged. Drawing from critical political economy theory (e.g., Gramsci), we prioritise questions of power, ethics, and justice in our analysis of historical and contemporary structures and relations that constitute – and can potentially transform – the world order. We employ a decolonial approach and engage with alternative logics to think about democracy, knowledge, struggle, and resistance with ideas and perspectives from across the Global South (e.g., Freire). To conceptualize and critique the power dynamics and structural racism faced by migrant agricultural workers we draw on critical race theory (e.g., Robinson). Our preliminary findings reveal most activists/ advocates identified the call for “status for all” (on arrival) as the paramount policy demand.
Montreal
The Montreal case study outlines the history of the CoVivre program, an initiative that aims, from the outset, to establish links between the academic sector, the community-based organization and the philanthropic foundations to take action with the most vulnerable populations in Montreal during the COVID-19 pandemic. Acting as a facilitator and catalyst for the action, the CoVivre program employed an approach focused on reducing health inequalities by connecting research data with concerted action (Bolduc et al., 2022).
The principal researcher of the Montreal case study, Laurence Monnais, was called upon to intervene, first and foremost as an actor in this project, contributing to reflections and actions regarding vaccine hesitancy. In this sense, the Montreal case study found its impetus in action, and the research project was set up only in a second phase. The action-oriented perspective preceding the research phase of the study allowed for the adoption of an “ethical methodological posture” by establishing “conditions of reciprocity” with the communities studied beforehand (Fauvel and Yoon, 2018).
Methodologically, the project is based on an analysis of archives and ethnographic notes collected during the implementation of the CoVivre and a series of semi-structured interviews with activists, policy-makers and key stakeholders directly involved in the day-to-day coordination of the CoVivre and projects partners.
The research results, co-constructed and produced based on action, will contribute to preventing the disregard of the efficiency of grassroots initiatives from the “very local” level and beyond the state, facilitating the “recycling” of “good” public health and reflecting on the roles of community leaders and organizations in shaping to future of public health intervention.