HALIFAX—Dozens of complaints from temporary foreign workers alleging poor living and working conditions on Nova Scotia farms — uncovered in a Star investigation — have never been shared or investigated provincially. And Premier Stephen McNeil says his government needs to “do a better job” of ensuring migrant workers know how to seek protection from the labour board.

Between 2009 and 2018, temporary foreign workers lodged thousands of complaints with the Mexican government about their Canadian employers.

In those years, the Mexican labour ministry recorded 89 complaints connected to Nova Scotia farms, including being forced to work without pay, living in a snake-infested bunkhouse, and not being allowed to go to the bathroom during working hours.

“We were put in a hotel for 15 days ... after that we were put in an abandoned church where there were 36 of us. It did not have bathrooms,” read one complaint from 2012.

Separate accounts from 2016 and 2018 complained of bunkhouses with no running water. Workers said in one case their employer told them to get water from a river after work. In another case, workers said water was made available, but it was “very dirty.”

A 2018 complaint read, “The rooms have no windows and the beds are just metal frames with mattresses that are in a bad state. There are five rooms and two stoves for 14 people.”

All the complaints were translated from Spanish.

McNeil said any labour issues that arise in Nova Scotia should go directly to the Nova Scotia Labour Board.

“If there are people who don’t know the mechanism to actually report (labour issues) in Nova Scotia then we need to do a better job of telling them,” he told reporters Friday at Province House.

Temporary foreign worker schemes have attracted criticism for being exploitative, offering low wages for difficult work and little chance of gaining permanent residency in Canada.

Still, McNeil said he’d personally only heard positive accounts of the temporary foreign worker programs in his province.

“Temporary foreign workers I’ve talked to appreciate and value the opportunity to come to Nova Scotia,” he said.

Labour Minister Labi Kousoulis said, “We can only investigate what we know,” and it’s incumbent on the Mexican government to share specific details of problems on Nova Scotia farms.

The Star’s investigation looked only at the seasonal agricultural worker program, but Nova Scotia’s fisheries are also heavily dependent on a migrant labour force.

McNeil and Kousoulis both highlighted the importance of all temporary foreign worker programs to Nova Scotia.

McNeil’s own riding, Annapolis, is in the middle of one of the richest agricultural regions of the province. He recalled having seasonal agricultural workers coming to the Annapolis Valley “as far back as the early 90s.”

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“In many cases, the temporary foreign workers are a base workload, for particularly agriculture and fishery operations, to support others who are in that community there,” he said.

Kousoulis went even further, saying without temporary foreign workers, the agricultural and fisheries industries “would pretty much collapse.”

With files from Sara Mojtehedzadeh

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