What Does a Canadian Farmer Look Like?

by Jillian Linton

THIS ESSAY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN PRINT IN DECEMBER 2020, IN ISSUE TWO

A Foodland Ontario commercial from 2013 opens with the words, “It’s closer than you think,” while showing a lush, green, pastoral landscape with a conveyor belt of fresh produce moving through it. The next shot cuts to a sun dappled orchard and features an older white man and a young blonde woman, presumably his daughter. They are picking apples and placing them in baskets on the conveyor belt. A basket of apples rides through the landscape of Ontario fields and ends up in an idyllic multicultural classroom where a young Brown boy, picks up and eats the apple while a voiceover extols the virtue of fresh local Ontario produce. Although the commercial is only 15 seconds long, it succeeds in reinforcing the image of pristine family farms, free of migrant labour and imposes an idea that white rural space provides food for racialized consumers. As an example of visual media promoting local food, this commercial aligns with the misleadingly idyllic discourse of Canadian rural farming identity.

In their studies of farmers’ markets in California, researchers Alison Hope Alkon and Christie McCullen coined the term the white farm imaginary, a specific narrative that celebrates white contributions to farm and food labour, while simultaneously ignoring those of people of colour, dismissing the historic exploitation of slave populations and the current labour of racialized farmers and migrant farmworkers. While Canada is not the same as the United States, our own white farm imaginary persists on this side of the border. Our narrative similarly obscures uncomfortable truths about our agricultural history and ongoing inequality in our current local food systems allowing them to go largely unchallenged.

In the historical narrative, farming identity in Canada has been closely tied to the Anglo-Saxon nuclear family farm. This family unit was the explicit foundation of the British project of settlement for its colonies, created through the tailoring of immigration policies and dispossession and displacement of Indigenous people. The economic success of this colonial project developed into an agrarian narrative that celebrates the abundance of the land and the industrious work of early white settlers to tame it. This narrative ignores the long history of Indigenous horticulture, including the Huron or Wendat who were growing and harvesting food hundreds of years before the arrival of settlers. It also conceals the violent land theft and the targeted restrictions placed on Indigenous peoples that prevent them from continuing to practice their traditional foodways even to this day.

This farming history also ignores the existence of racialized people, their varied agrarian archive and their perseverance in the face of antagonistic immigration and state policies. Rarely are we told stories of the Black Loyalists in Guysborough, Nova Scotia who were intentionally given barren tracts of land unsuitable for cultivation, limiting their self-sufficiency and pushing them towards hired farmwork, servant roles, or other trades. In Ontario, early liberated Black farming communities had varied success, but communities like Dawn or Buxton allowed fugitive slaves and free Blacks to settle and build lives despite continued racism from white residents and government officials. Likewise, few farming histories discuss the tradition of restricting land rights for Chinese immigrants while underpaying them as farmworkers, at 50 to 60 percent of what their white colleagues would receive. Or how Chinese-Canadians pushed past job market exclusion and racism, grew their market gardens on the West Coast to supply up to an estimated 90 percent of all fresh vegetables in British Columbia by the 1920s. While historical farming narratives portray white family farmers as battling against hostile terrain, much of that battle was to steal Indigenous peoples’ land, consolidate resources and eliminate the threat of racialized immigrants gaining any significant control.

The modern day stories we tell ourselves about farming are similarly skewed. In Ontario, many agricultural operations rely on racialized migrant workers largely from Mexico and various Caribbean islands to supplement their labour needs in the growing season (18,000 men and women were hired in 2019 as part of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program - SAWP). Activists, researchers and journalists have spoken out consistently about the labour rights violations, health risks and ongoing exploitation made possible due to the complicated rules of this program, including the fact that it is not a route to citizenship.

Racialized immigrants who are able to settle here and then choose to farm speak of the combination of frustration and fatigue they feel working within a system that does not feel built for them. They complain of racist microagressions and the overwhelming lack of support, including fewer resources and the impossibility of gaining access to land.

Also, health outcomes for racialized people remain consistently worse than national averages. Black Canadians are 3.5 times more likely to be food insecure than white Canadians. A decade long study found that 48 percent of First Nations families experienced food insecurity citing environmental contamination, government regulation and the loss of traditional knowledge as some of the barriers preventing them from practicing their traditional food provisioning.

Analysis of local food articles from the Toronto Star written between 1990 and 2015 found that most painted a very similar picture of who farms in Ontario. Most farmers interviewed, represented or portrayed in the articles were white and part of multi-generational family farms. Of the 244 articles that were given closer analysis, the search engine found fewer than five articles used the terms “First Nations,” “Indigenous,” “Aboriginal” or “native” people and none make any reference to their historical ownership of the land. Immigrant farmers were occasionally mentioned, but usually as a novel category of growers cultivating exotic produce in urban areas.

Some articles actually portrayed farming as a kind of “Canadian Dream,” the original path to Canadian identity achieved by working the land as white settlers once did. As with the historical narrative, these articles extol the virtues of farmers and their produce but gloss over the uncomfortable facts of our exploitative migrant labour system and the way capitalist structures within the system disproportionately affect racialized and Indigenous communities. Our local food system may produce perfect juicy peaches, but at what cost?

Eating local food is often flagged as one of the ways to lessen the environmental repercussions of our diets. However, as easy as it might be to buy into the uncomplicated narrative of happy, smiling family farms and ignore the ugly history and complicated reality that is our current food system, a more critical eye is needed. Despite the idyllic imagery of historic and current discourse, farming in Canada for white and racialized individuals alike is increasingly typified by low-income work and high levels of debt, with increasing domestic labour shortages every year. SAWP undermines labour rights and debates over whether Ontario grown is necessarily always the more environmentally friendly choice, it is time we start supporting activists fighting for systemic improvement in our own backyards.

These issues require collaboration across groups who have different barriers to access and different privileges, all within a system built on disputed territories. As one immigrant food activist* put it, “It’s sort of like stolen people on stolen land. Like bringing stolen people and people who had their land stolen together to look at how we can work together to support each other as we do food justice work.” There are power dynamics firmly entrenched in our food system that determines who wins and loses. If we can begin to tell more complicated truths about our past and present food system, uncovering these power dynamics, maybe we can start to collectively build a different, more equitable one.

*anonymous from the author's own Ontario-based research project: “Local Food, Global People: Immigrant Counterstories in the Greater Toronto Area.”