The house where the undocumented workers live isn’t hard to find.
Located just 100 metres from one of Leamington, Ontario’s main intersections, the sprawling structure has clearly seen better days. The paint is peeling, shingles are curling, and some of its filthy windows are cracked.
Yet it is home for nearly 20 foreign farm labourers — most of them lacking the proper permits to work in Canada. Men who are now trying to balance concerns about COVID-19 with fears that the act of getting tested might get them deported.
“If I get sick, there is no solution,” says one resident. “Because I don’t have money.”
The 43-year-old came to Canada from Guatemala a year ago under a government program. His permit has since lapsed, but he continues to work, moving from farm to farm as a temporary hired hand, and sending his modest wages back home to support his wife and 11 children. He asked not to be named because of his immigration status.
And despite the outbreak in Southwestern Ontario that has now sickened close to 1,000 migrant farm workers — most in Leamington and neighbouring Kingsville in Windsor-Essex County — and killed three of them, the man says he has no plans to get tested for the novel coronavirus.
“I don’t show any symptoms. I don’t know anyone who has it, and I feel there’s no need to at the moment,” he says. “I don’t see it, so it doesn’t exist to me.”
Provincial ‘action plan’
Agriculture is big business in Windsor-Essex, with more than 175 farms, greenhouses and wineries contracting some 8,000 official migrant workers to help raise and harvest the crops every year.
So as coronavirus cases began to spike among workers, Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveiled a three-point “action plan” last week, dispatching mobile testing units to farms, promising benefits and supports for ill workers who are put in quarantine, and altering rules to allow farmers to keep asymptomatic labourers on the job.
WATCH | Trudeau on the temporary foreign workers who died from COVID-19:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says “rules weren’t followed” in the cases of temporary foreign workers who were infected with and died from COVID-19. 0:45
But none of his measures target undocumented workers, who are unlikely to present themselves for testing, and don’t qualify for free provincial health care, let alone any sort of government employment assistance.
It’s a gap that could make it more difficult to bring the farm outbreak under control, given the large number of so-called paperless labourers in the area, and help keep Leamington and neighbouring Kingsville the last two places in the province stuck at Stage 1 of the pandemic lockdown.
Santiago Escobar is a national representative with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, and a co-ordinator of the Agricultural Workers Alliance. He spent two years working out of a satellite office on Leamington’s main street, and says the local population of undocumented workers was much larger than the province or Ottawa liked to let on — as many as 2,000 workers, by his and other advocates’ estimates. A big number that Leamington Mayor Hilda MacDonald has also been citing.
“I think is it’s common knowledge that most of the workers that are hired through a temp work agency are undocumented,” says Escobar. “And due to their precarious status, unscrupulous employers and temporary work agencies are taking advantage of these workers.”
‘No masks, no gloves’
Rogelio Muñoz Santos, a 24-year-old from Chiapas, Mexico, arrived in Canada on a tourist visa in February. His family have told Mexican media outlets that he found a Spanish-language post on a Toronto Facebook page offering farm jobs paying $13 an hour — $1 an hour less than Ontario’s minimum wage — for a 70-hour week. He arrived in Leamington in early April.
Santiago Escobar, of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, says unscrupulous employers and temp agencies are taking advantage of undocumented workers. (Oliver Walters/CBC)
He ended up living in a local motel, arranged by his recruiter, with four men sharing two beds and a bathroom, at a cost of $600 each per month, deducted from their pay.
His co-worker, who asked to be identified only as “Juan” because of his own undocumented status, recently told CBC’s French-language service Radio-Canada about how they both fell ill in early May as a flu-like illness swept through the farm where they were working.
“I didn’t want to work because I was already feeling sick. Everyone was getting ill, but they sent us to work all the same,” Juan said, noting that they travelled in vehicles containing as many as 20 people at a time. And no one took any measures to protect them from coronavirus spread. “No masks, no gloves, or goggles or information.”
Rogelio Muñoz Santos, a 24-year-old from Chiapas, Mexico, was admitted to Erie Shores Hospital in Leamington on June 1 with breathing difficulties, and transferred to an ICU in Windsor the next day. He died in hospital on June 5. (GoFundMe)
The pair didn’t have a relationship with the farmer, only with the temp agency recruiter — a Spanish-speaking Canadian who paid them in cash. And when they fell sick with the novel coronavirus, isolating themselves at the motel, a public health nurse would call to check up, but no one brought them food or supplies.
“They abandoned me,” Juan said. “Same with Rogelio. They did nothing for me or for him.”
Muñoz Santos was admitted to Erie Shores Hospital in Leamington on June 1 with breathing difficulties, and transferred to an ICU in Windsor the next day. He died in hospital on June 5. It took more than three weeks for his body to be returned to his family in Mexico. He was finally laid to rest on June 27.
Barriers to fighting farm outbreaks
Dr. Ross Moncur, the chief of staff and interim CEO at Erie Shores Hospital, says there have been a series of barriers to overcome as health officials try to fight the farm outbreaks. Many workers have been reluctant to get tested for fear of losing weeks of income should the results come back positive. And some farmers have resisted, as well, concerned about the potential fallout during their busiest time of year. “What happens to their workforce?” asks Moncur. “Does it mean that they literally have crops rotting in the fields for the next few months?”
But undocumented workers are proving the hardest to reach.
“The biggest impediment there is that they don’t have [provincial health insurance] coverage, and so their assumption is that this type of testing is not available to them,” Moncur said, noting that his hospital will treat anyone who needs care, regardless of their immigration status.
A man who asked to be identified as Juan, spoke with Radio-Canada about how he and Muñoz Santos both fell ill in early May as a flu-like illness swept through the farm where they were working. (Radio-Canada)
That message, however, doesn’t seem to be getting through. CBC News spoke to a number of undocumented workers in Leamington. None of them had been tested. And few seemed aware that the local hospital was providing free COVID screening just a few blocks away from where they live and shop, complete with Spanish signage and interpreters.
Some were taking a fatalistic approach to COVID-19. One worker, a 39-year-old from Mexico who entered Canada on a tourist visa 10 months ago, says he’s leaving things up to a higher power should he fall ill.
“First, I would pray to God. If he sends me, allows me to go to hospital, I’ll go to the hospital,” he says. “But we are all going to die one day. We never know how. So it might be here or it might be in Oaxaca. We just don’t know.”
Signs at Erie Shores Hospital are posted in different languages. Chief of staff Dr. Ross Moncur says the hospital will treat anyone who needs care, regardless of their immigration status. (Jonathon Gatehouse/CBC)
Asked specifically about their efforts to reach undocumented workers, Ontario Health, the agency overseeing the testing told CBC News that it is working with “key stakeholders” in the agricultural industry “to understand the full breadth of needs” and “other factors relating to the temporary worker experience in Ontario.” The agency stressed that testing is available to all workers, regardless of immigration status, but remains voluntary.
Justine Taylor, the science and government relations manager for the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers, says the Leamington-based organization has been encouraging its members to have all farm labour tested for coronavirus, regardless of how they have been hired.
Officially, the group doesn’t support the use of undocumented workers, although Taylor acknowledges that it is a “very complicated” issue for farmers, who often struggle to find enough hired help during their busiest periods.
“There is a need there,” Taylor said, adding that her association wants to work with governments to close the undocumented “gap” and “ensure that all workers are protected.” One path, she says, might be to follow British Columbia’s lead and create a provincial registry of recruiters and make farmers hire only from the accredited firms.
All such measures, however, will address the future, not the current crisis.
Erie Shores’ Moncur says there is a sense of a missed opportunity in Windsor-Essex, that these farm outbreaks — and deaths — were all too foreseeable.
From the very beginning, local health officials understood that agricultural workers were a “high-risk population,” he says, due to their living and working conditions. But the system was consumed with fighting COVID-19 in long-term care facilities, where more than 300 outbreaks have killed some 1,600 residents.
“We may have had a false reassurance that because they were relatively young and relatively healthy, that agrifood workers would be OK,” Moncur said. “That theory was certainly tested.”
And with hundreds of new cases this past week — 175 of them on a single farm — the region’s battle against COVID-19 is only beginning.
Some Ontario doctors have started offering a free shot that can protect babies from respiratory syncytial virus while Quebec will begin its immunization program next month.
The new shot called Nirsevimab gives babies antibodies that provide passive immunity to RSV, a major cause of serious lower respiratory tract infections for infants and seniors, which can cause bronchiolitis or pneumonia.
Ontario’s ministry of health says the shot is already available at some doctor’s offices in Ontario with the province’s remaining supply set to arrive by the end of the month.
Quebec will begin administering the shots on Nov. 4 to babies born in hospitals and delivery centers.
Parents in Quebec with babies under six months or those who are older but more vulnerable to infection can also book immunization appointments online.
The injection will be available in Nunavut and Yukon this fall and winter, though administration start dates have not yet been announced.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
-With files from Nicole Ireland
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Polio cases are rising ahead of a new vaccination campaign in Pakistan, where violence targeting health workers and the police protecting them has hampered years of efforts toward making the country polio-free.
Since January, health officials have confirmed 39 new polio cases in Pakistan, compared to only six last year, said Anwarul Haq of the National Emergency Operation Center for Polio Eradication.
The new nationwide drive starts Oct. 28 with the aim to vaccinate at least 32 million children. “The whole purpose of these campaigns is to achieve the target of making Pakistan a polio-free state,” he said.
Pakistan regularly launches campaigns against polio despite attacks on the workers and police assigned to the inoculation drives. Militants falsely claim the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Most of the new polio cases were reported in the southwestern Balochistan and southern Sindh province, following by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and eastern Punjab province.
The locations are worrying authorities since previous cases were from the restive northwest bordering Afghanistan, where the Taliban government in September suddenly stopped a door-to-door vaccination campaign.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the two countries in which the spread of the potentially fatal, paralyzing disease has never been stopped. Authorities in Pakistan have said that the Taliban’s decision will have major repercussions beyond the Afghan border, as people from both sides frequently travel to each other’s country.
The World Health Organization has confirmed 18 polio cases in Afghanistan this year, all but two in the south of the country. That’s up from six cases in 2023. Afghanistan used a house-to-house vaccination strategy this June for the first time in five years, a tactic that helped to reach the majority of children targeted, according to WHO.
Health officials in Pakistan say they want the both sides to conduct anti-polio drives simultaneously.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of people with private health insurance would be able to pick up over-the-counter methods like condoms, the “morning after” pill and birth control pills for free under a new rule the White House proposed on Monday.
Right now, health insurers must cover the cost of prescribed contraception, including prescription birth control or even condoms that doctors have issued a prescription for. But the new rule would expand that coverage, allowing millions of people on private health insurance to pick up free condoms, birth control pills, or “morning after” pills from local storefronts without a prescription.
The proposal comes days before Election Day, as Vice President Kamala Harris affixes her presidential campaign to a promise of expanding women’s health care access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to undo nationwide abortion rights two years ago. Harris has sought to craft a distinct contrast from her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, who appointed some of the judges who issued that ruling.
“The proposed rule we announce today would expand access to birth control at no additional cost for millions of consumers,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Bottom line: women should have control over their personal health care decisions. And issuers and providers have an obligation to comply with the law.”
The emergency contraceptives that people on private insurance would be able to access without costs include levonorgestrel, a pill that needs to be taken immediately after sex to prevent pregnancy and is more commonly known by the brand name “Plan B.”
Without a doctor’s prescription, women may pay as much as $50 for a pack of the pills. And women who delay buying the medication in order to get a doctor’s prescription could jeopardize the pill’s effectiveness, since it is most likely to prevent a pregnancy within 72 hours after sex.
If implemented, the new rule would also require insurers to fully bear the cost of the once-a-day Opill, a new over-the-counter birth control pill that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved last year. A one-month supply of the pills costs $20.
Federal mandates for private health insurance to cover contraceptive care were first introduced with the Affordable Care Act, which required plans to pick up the cost of FDA-approved birth control that had been prescribed by a doctor as a preventative service.
The proposed rule would not impact those on Medicaid, the insurance program for the poorest Americans. States are largely left to design their own rules around Medicaid coverage for contraception, and few cover over-the-counter methods like Plan B or condoms.
