Migrant agricultural workers' deaths in Ontario from January 2020 to June 2021: a qualitative descriptive study.

BACKGROUND: Nine migrant agricultural workers died in Ontario, Canada, between January 2020 and June 2021. METHODS: To better understand the factors that contributed to the deaths of these migrant agricultural workers, we used a modified qualitative descriptive approach. A research team of clinical and academic experts reviewed coroner files of the nine deceased workers and undertook an accompanying media scan. A minimum of two reviewers read each file using a standardized data extraction tool. RESULTS: We identified four domains of risk, each of which encompassed various factors that likely exacerbated the risk of poor health outcomes: (1) recruitment and travel risks; (2) missed steps and substandard conditions of healthcare monitoring, quarantine, and isolation; (3) barriers to accessing healthcare; and (4) missing information and broader issues of concern. CONCLUSION: Migrant agricultural workers have been disproportionately harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Greater attention to the unique needs of this population is required to avoid further preventable deaths.

Understanding Migrant Farmworkers' Health and Well-Being during the Global COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada: Toward a Transnational Conceptualization of Employment Strain.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada imposed certain international travel bans and work-from-home orders, yet migrant farmworkers, declared essential to national food security, were exempt from such measures. In this context, farm worksites proved to be particularly prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. To apprehend this trend, we engaged an expanded and transnational employment strain framework that identified the employment demands and resources understood from a transnational perspective, as well as the immigration, labour, and public health policies and practices contributing to and/or buffering employment demands during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We applied mixed methods to analyze administrative data, immigration, labour, and public health policy, as well as qualitative interviews with thirty migrant farmworkers employed in Ontario and Quebec. We concluded that the deleterious outcomes of the pandemic for this group were rooted in the deplorable pre-pandemic conditions they endured. Consequently, the band-aid solutions adopted by federal and provincial governments to address these conditions before and during the pandemic were limited in their efficacy because they failed to account for the transnational employment strains among precarious status workers labouring on temporary employer-tied work permits. Such findings underscore the need for transformative policies to better support health equity among migrant farmworkers in Canada.

COVID-19 Outbreaks in Canada and the Crisis of Migrant Farmworkers' Social Reproduction: Transnational Labour and the Need for Greater Accountability Among Receiving States.

In 2020, migrant farmworkers in Canada, cast as essential to sustaining the national food supply, experienced relatively high COVID-19 infection rates. Taking Southern Ontario as its focus, this article reveals how the federal government response to COVID-19 in agriculture perpetuated the effects of longstanding laws and policies requiring migrant farmworkers, circumscribed in their ability to politically mobilize on account of their institutionalized deportability, to shoulder disproportionate amounts of economic, social, and health risks. Centering the transnational character of migrant farmworkers' renewal, it identifies meaningful interventions to limit the structural disempowerment of migrant farmworkers and the externalization of their social reproduction.