Beyond the Rhetoric of Essentiality: Canada’s Neoliberal Migrant Worker Policy during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a part of its responses to COVID-19, Canada’s federal and provincial governments, including Ontario’s, have introduced measures aiming specifically to safeguard the health of migrant workers, supposedly out of the recognition that they are ‘essential’. Among other things, publicly funded healthcare is temporarily expanded to cover some of the previously uninsured workers, and public dollars are allocated for improving occupational health in the agri-food industry, where many migrants are employed. Several immigration programs have also been launched to offer certain migrant workers a pathway to permanent residence in Canada. This chapter critiques these government interventions, as well as the narrative of ‘essentiality’ that underlies them. It argues that these pandemic measures perpetuate the logic of neoliberal labour flexibilization, which has long permeated Canada’s migrant worker program. They do so by paying inadequate attention to so-called ‘essential’ migrant workers’ existing vulnerabilities, thus allowing employers to skirt public health rules. At the same time, they paint ‘non-essential’ migrants as undeserving of government consideration, which reinforces these migrants’ marginalization. A supply of exploitable workers is therefore maintained during the pandemic. Ultimately, it is the interest of market capitalism that proves to be what is truly essential.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".