A father of three, Josh Oulton was born and raised in Nova Scotia. He followed in his grandparents’ steps and runs the 300-acre TapRoot Farms in Port Williams, an hour’s drive from Halifax.

Hailing from Jamaica, Anthony Ellis, too, has three teenage children and the same agricultural roots as a helper on his father’s vegetable farm back home, when he is not working for Oulton in Canada.

The two men not only share an employer-employee relationship but are “family” — and now the poster boys of a social media campaign by the Canadian Horticultural Council to raise public awareness of Canadian agriculture and pay tribute to the hard labour of migrant workers like Ellis. The campaign builds on a couple dozen short videos profiling the stories of migrants workers and their employers.

“I’m working with a wonderful boss,” paused Ellis, 40, before correcting himself. “He’s not only my boss. He’s my brother. He makes me feel like home here.”

While media campaigns by agricultural industry groups are not new, few involve migrant farm workers, let alone celebrate the unsung heroes’ contributions to keep Canadian farm operations afloat when the sector struggles perennially for seasonal workers. Last year, 60,578 migrant workers were brought in for farming-related jobs, almost half of them in Ontario.

“Many Canadians have no idea what farms look like,” said Brian Gilroy, president of the 14,000-member horticultural council. “We want to showcase the life on (the farm), and to celebrate the work we do and the pride we have.”

With the sector’s labour shortage anticipated to reach 114,000 openings by 2025, the council passed a resolution last year to recognize Canada’s five-decades-old Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program to “build up the political and public support necessary to ensure the program’s continued success for the next 50 years.”

Labour activists have been critical of the migrant worker program with some calling it indentured labour because workers are tied to a particular employer, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation.

“Employers are engaging in a smoke and mirrors game by using the voices of migrant farm workers to expand the status quo of migrants being tied to one employer. At the end of the day, this campaign serves the interest of employers not workers,” said Chris Ramsaroop of Justicia for Migrant Workers.

“The awareness campaign is simply a response to growing pressure that grassroots organizations have raised about working and living conditions that migrant workers face in Canada and the growing recognition that Canadians want to ensure there is dignity and respect for the workers behind our food.”

If employers are serious about honouring the contributions of migrant workers, said Ramsaroop, they should urge government officials to give migrant workers the mobility to work for any employers and raise their minium wage.

However, the horticultural council’s Gilroy said the media and critics only focus on stories about abused workers, and overlook the positives of the migrant worker program. “There is a small number of farmers who do not use the program properly, but 99 per cent of employers are good ones,” he maintains.

Michael Hicks, who has been commissioned to direct the videos of the awareness campaign, and his crew have travelled since the summer to farms in Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Quebec to search for workers and farm owners for interviews.

There was the Guatemalan worker in Quebec who used the money he made to build a high school back home, and Mexican workers who played with the growers in a Leamington, Ont., baseball league.

“This is about people telling their stories. We want to get the word out what’s going on down on the farm, the kind of the things the workers support and do when they are not working here,” Hicks said.

“Their work ethic is nuts. They are so committed to providing for their families. The sacrifices they make for their families, being away for eight months a year, are not insubstantial.”

Oulton said he did not hesitate when he was approached for the awareness campaign because he felt strongly Canadians need to know more about agriculture and the significant role played by migrant workers in the industry.

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“Most people are multiple generations away from the farm and have no knowledge about farming. Migrant workers get things done without a whole lot of training. Even though they come through the government’s low-skilled program, they are already so skilled,” said Oulton, who has used farm workers from Jamaica since 2005.

“Many Canadians have little connections with food. I have had someone looking for Brussels sprouts in the middle of summer at a farmers’ market, and I tried hard not to laugh.”

Ellis said he’s grateful for the job opportunity in Canada that has helped better the lives of his family and others he financially supports in Jamaica.

“One Canadian dollar equals 95 Jamaican dollars. Coming to Canada has helped me a lot. I wouldn’t have been able to build a home and buy a car back home,” said Ellis, who has worked for Oulton for eight months a year since 2005. “My kids know the reason why I’m here. I go away to make things better for them.”