When Conwade Bramwell, a 23-year-old Jamaican, was selected for Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program at the peak of COVID in 2020, he quickly resigned from his full-time job as a hotel bartender.

Bramwell had met several Canadians in Jamaica and looked forward to spending time in the country—and building a chance for a better life.

When Conwade Bramwell, a 23-year-old Jamaican, was selected for Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program at the peak of COVID in 2020, he quickly resigned from his full-time job as a hotel bartender.

Bramwell had met several Canadians in Jamaica and looked forward to spending time in the country—and building a chance for a better life.

“I saw Canadians as lovely people while growing up,” he said. “So, quitting my job for an opportunity to go to Canada and work was like a no-brainer. … But it’s never easy to leave your family and go somewhere else to work.”

His excitement was short-lived: The work proved punishing, abusive, and exploitative—leaving him bitter toward the country he’d once dreamed of visiting.

Bramwell said the first encounter with his employer was far from what he expected. His boss was hostile, and the atmosphere among the workers was tense and fearful. The first day at the Ontario farm, Bramwell said he spent 10 hours of hard work handpicking peaches and plums from a ladder. He didn’t get back to the cramped room he shared with three other workers until late, and crashed out immediately, only to start work again at 7 a.m.—after which conditions got worse.

“Why are you moving so slowly? Even my dead granny can move faster than you,” Bramwell recalled his employer commenting that morning. He added that his employer would force him and his coworkers to finish work earlier than they should, since the work was paid at an hourly rate.

“Whenever there’s a lot of work, he’s always pushing and telling us to work faster,” he said. “We will finish the work long before it should be finished and then we will be sitting in our house not having any work to do. [For example], my contract last year was for three months, but my employer made me finish the work for two weeks.”

As in the United States, agricultural work is unattractive to Canadians, leaving the country’s agricultural sector, worth $87.7 billion a year, heavily reliant on migrant farmworkers. The migrants are recruited under the federal government-run Temporary Foreign Worker Program, mainly the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). The SAWP was established in 1966 and allows Canadian farms to employ migrant workers from 11 Caribbean countries and Mexico temporarily for periods of up to eight months.

Every year, more than 27,000 migrant farmworkers come to Canada through the SAWP, and the workers accounted for nearly........

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