Advocacy during COVID

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was heightened media focus on the poor living, housing, and labour conditions, as well as precarious migration status, of migrant agricultural workers (MAWs) in Canada. These were not new concerns but reflect persistent structural injustices in Canada’s agri‑food sector, which has perennially positioned MAWs as both “essential” and disposable, realities the crisis only magnified. Organizers and advocates working with Central American and Caribbean MAWs in Southwest Ontario built on decades of social solidarity to address both pandemic-related needs and longstanding harms experienced by MAWs amid gaping public policy gaps. Organizers and advocates also leveraged the crisis to mobilize renewed public and public policy attention to the shameful social, working, and human rights context of MAWs in Canada.

Our project (nicknamed SMAPL) compiled an extensive database of local and international journalistic and social media coverage of these struggles from 2020 to 2025, together with the local, provincial, and federal policy responses to the demands made for improving the conditions faced by MAWs. Our research assistants also created a consolidated visual timeline of key pandemic moments, protests and many other advocacy efforts, and government policies. Here is a PDF of an April 2026 presentation of our findings in progress.

All of these resources can be freely utilized (with attribution/citation) by organizers and advocates ~ provincially, nationally and internationally.