New immigration act brings newcomer service full circle

YORKTON — When newcomers come to Edith Montesclaros at the East Central Newcomer Welcome Centre with tales of repression and fear from being mistreated at work, she listens, consoles – oftentimes in the same language – then identifies their needs and briefs them on the next steps by connecting them to the know-how and resources for work authorization, status, security and safety.

Yet none of this has been easy dealing with the complexities of the work involving different stakeholders.

In her past 16 years working in settlement services, Montesclaros started alone working without a title with SaskAbilities from preparing employers to create a culturally-sensitive work environment for their foreign workers. She now leads a non-profit with the new employment service program to make newcomers feel safe and situated with their jobs – while sharing the same mixed feelings of gratitude and anxiety with the migrant families.

“We all came in different streams,” she said, adding that being a Filipino immigrant herself makes it easy for her to understand all the stories being told, “when they are having issues or challenges… when they're missing people back home, when there's calamities back home, you understand how they're feeling.”

As the founder and executive director at the East Central Newcomer Welcome Centre based in Yorkton, Montesclaros works with a small team of nine other staff members with different cultural backgrounds working diligently together to fulfil the federal government’s ambition to attract 500,000 new immigrants to Canada by 2025 to fill labour shortages according to the Immigration Levels Plan.

For a period of time since the pandemic hit, jobs have been sitting vacant while all avenues for sourcing local talents have been exhausted – international recruitment has been crucial as a path to the province’s economic development and success.

By this April, Saskatchewan had seen an increase of 10,500 full time jobs last year, with an 86 per cent employment rate for the Canadian-born working-age population (aged 25 to 54) and 84 per cent for immigrants, according to the Ministry of Immigration and Career Training.

The welcome centre has received a steadily growing few hundreds of international incoming migrants in recent years, namely Ukrainians due to the war, along with a persistent number of people arriving from the Philippines, India and Vietnam each year.

Many remained vulnerable on their way to gain permanent residency – one step away from citizenship – as temporary workers.

Last month, the provincial government introduced the new Immigration Services Act to replace its existing immigration legislation, The Foreign Worker Recruitment and Immigration Services Act (FWRISA) aims to better “manage and monitor the provincial immigration system and establish the most robust program integrity framework in Canada,” wrote a spokesperson with the Ministry of Immigration and Career Training in an email.

“It's all about protecting everybody from those abuses,” Montesclaros said, adding the centre is glad the new Act is in place because they have heard stories of labour exploitation over the six years being the only gateway organisation for newcomers to areas covering a 150 kilometre radius around Yorkton.

“Sometimes the temporary workers wouldn’t say anything,” she said, “because everything is dependent on the employer with regards to their papers, moving forward to becoming a permanent resident… The same thing goes for the employers, they're constantly facing unscrupulous agencies, recruiters, and immigration consultants.”

Andrew Stevens, a research scholar on labour relations and employment and associate professor at University of Regina, said there is an opportunity for labour exploitation when employers were deliberately not putting adequate effort into staffing positions.

The grey area gives the employers a justification and legal grounds to use a program like the temporary foreign worker program, where under its fixed contract, the lack of mobility, Stevens said, keeps the workers stuck in their jobs.

“There was something offensive about it,” Stevens said of his past research and interviews done on migrant labour exploitation. “The temporary foreign worker program historically had been an invitation for exploitation and precarious labour. Sometimes it's at the hands of the recruiter, sometimes the employer, or both.”

In the emailed response, the ministry said the new legislation – which has yet to be passed into law – includes investigative and enforcement measures to address those who may try to exploit Saskatchewan’s immigration system.

Under the new legislation, maximum fine amounts are increased to $750,000 in the case of individuals and to $1.25 million in the case of corporations for offences in the Act.

“There's sweeping powers in there for the (provincial) government, and rightfully so.” Stevens said. “If these workers that you're talking to, or these agencies get wind of the fact that there's a worker out there who feels exploited, and here's why.”

It is however unclear if there were problems with the original FWRISA, and why a new piece of legislation is needed, rather than simply revising and amending the initial piece, which is typically the legislative process, he said.

“The changes look sensible…You don't really find much of a justification for its creation,” he said, adding that he questions why the legislation was shifted out of the Ministry of Labour, which has an entire apparatus of rights protection, staff and enforcement, but instead, the new piece was moved to a whole other ministry.

One explanation, Stevens argues, is connecting the community wellbeing and situating people in those neighbourhoods and communities, have long been a sensible element in Canada, in forming the immigration part with labour rights and protection.

Even so, Stevens said the new legislation raised a series of questions: “Did we see a whole wave of forms of exploitation that were allowed to manifest under the previous legislation? Is the government responding to those problems? Are those problems prompting people to leave Saskatchewan (and its urban centres)?”

Removing from the bigger picture, the question for the newcomer workers, he argues, will be if they can trust the employers in smaller communities to respect the Act, or if they have better chances accessing their rights and protection at work in other bigger cities or even outside the province.

International immigration has been an “unequivocal political success story” for Saskatchewan since the early 2000s, Stevens said, the record numbers we are seeing may help bring attention to the needs of the group.

FWRISA, initially formed in 2013, in Steven’s opinion, was one of the best laws in Canada to protect newcomers from exploitation from employers and from recruiters, in addition to establishing labour law – however, with weak enforcement that cannot reach the workers, the law falls flat.

Poorly resourced enforcement might mean the government fails to translate and engage with community organisations, or to communicate with the employers on the fundamental rights they have to offer newcomers, he said.

Constantly under uncertainty and temporariness, the workers are too fearful to fight for their rights in face of even the slightest possibility of deportation.

“They [The temporary foreign workers] might not know their rights, they do access them,” Stevens said.

When Montesclaros first came moved to Canada in 2008, arriving in Melville, she struggled to find services even with the help of her Canadian husband, who was born and raised in Melville. The government agencies they reached out to didn't know where to point them for resources.

“It was tough…Employment or support for newcomers, because there was none when I arrived here the first time,” she said. “So my best friend before it was the telephone directory.”

What really triggered establishing proper settlement services in the area was the time when the local health authority hired 63 Filipino nurses, “that's when the community said: ‘what are we going to do with these individuals, they're coming here, big number 63. So we need to help them settle in the community,’” Montesclaros said.

“…and the community, I remember, close to 60 organisations met and said: ‘We need services.’ That's when SaskAbilities stepped forward,” said Montesclaros, who quickly agreed to take on the responsibilities when offered the role and carried the service forward while bringing hopes to newcomers.

In addition to making the existing protections for the temporary workers more effective by adding new levels of fines and consequences, detailing what’s considered an offence, the act explicitly mentions inter-jurisdictional co-operation between the provincial and federal government, “which is essential,” Stevens said.

“Because immigration is a complex entanglement of provincial and federal jurisdiction if you're including labour rights, as well as the process of coming into Canada.”

The vague legislation unveils a system overwhelmed as the high numbers of incoming immigrants continues to grow. Over 1.3 million new immigrants settled permanently in Canada from 2016 to 2021, the highest number of recent immigrants recorded in a Canadian census.

Naturally, the legislation on migrant worker rights as labour rights falls into the provincial jurisdiction. There are however no federal guidelines as to how much protections for the workers have to be in place at the provincial level, Stevens explained.

In this case, Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program (SINP) is seen as the provincial government being granted the power to have an intake process for immigration, he said, which otherwise would be absolutely possessed by the federal government – the layers of governance require exhaustive efforts in communication to avoid conflicting legislations.

“So this requires collaboration,” Stevens said. “What's interesting is that it (the provincial legislation) has to also align regional and provincial needs with what is the big picture federal national responsibility.”

“But at the end of the day, that's all abstract. The day-to-day experience is probably going to matter more than this whole idea of immigration to Canada.” he said, which means the gateway organisations “are essential, in probably more ways than they had anticipated.”

The settlement workers are found in local schools, libraries, community centres while hosting information sessions back at the office on tax, water safety, driver training.

There are ten satellite offices for the East Central Newcomer Welcome Centre across east central Saskatchewan. The staff members travel to the smaller towns and offer consultations and assistance regularly, or on-call, if urgent.

“We hope we can do more travelling, but the problem is, of course, the number of staff members. So we can't really do that,” Montesclaros said, adding the team has made extensive efforts in finding potential newcomers speaking their languages in public spaces like grocery waiting lines.

This year marks Montesclaros’s 20th year living in Canada. According to the 2006 census, there were 20 Filipinos living in the City of Yorkton back then.

“I remembered a small group of us will have a get together in one small house for Christmas. Now, if everybody arrives, we won't fit in a small gathering place.”

“So we need a huge place to gather to celebrate Christmas or our Filipino fiesta.”

While rural Saskatchewan is shrinking, the towns are being revived by international migration, Stevens said.

Having moved away from the province for sometime himself, Stevens has been fascinated by “how different the face of the province was.”

“There's such a positive atmosphere,” he said. “Even in small towns, gas stations were increasingly owned by South Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese families.”

This meant there had to be some forms of occupations in the community that would allow people to stay and build a community, Stevens said.

However, with the housing affordability crisis looming in the province, Stevens is worried that the shared anxiety may divert its way to an anti-immigrant sentiment that is emerging – where housing is actually a provincial responsibility.

“That's where the federal government's housing policies and initiatives are so important to make the immigration policies at the local level and at the provincial level succeed, but if we start walking in that direction, the attitude could shift.”

“They’re not stealing jobs. In fact, they're coming here not finding jobs, and they might be leaving.”

Cleo Ding, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canora Courier