ReFrame 2025
Severn Court (October-August)
Theatre Trent 2023/24
Arthur News School of Fish
Promotional still from "The Canadian Dream" by Ilse Moreno, courtesy of ReFrame Film Festival

ReFrame Review: The Canadian Dream

Written by
Ian Vansegbrook
and
and
January 20, 2025
ReFrame Review: The Canadian Dream
Promotional still from "The Canadian Dream" by Ilse Moreno, courtesy of ReFrame Film Festival

The Canadian Dream is a 2024 documentary from Ilse Moreno about the experience of her father, Alberto, in the Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker (CTFW) program. 

Her father came to Canada in the 2010s to work in a greenhouse in Leamington Ontario, and was exposed to chemicals after he wasn’t given proper PPEs by his employer. After reporting this back to the office that hired him in Mexico, the email he sent was shared with his employer, who used it to mock him. 

Eventually, Alberto’s employment was terminated and he was sent to Toronto to fly back to Mexico, which he refused, instead turning to Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW), a “volunteer-run political collective comprising people from diverse walks of life,” which among other things “strives to promote the rights of migrant farm workers.” 

J4MW helped Alberto find a lawyer and eventually, he became the first migrant worker to win in court against a Canadian farmer.

The Canadian Dream tells this story primarily through snippets of video Moren’s father filmed during his time working for the greenhouse, and through an intimate interview filmed between Ilse and her father in their home, with some interspersed stock footage. 

It’s a short documentary, not even nine minutes, and uses its time well. It never gets stuck in the weeds, and it does a good job of succinctly summarizing her father’s experience. Moreno  doesn’t try to give a broad run down of the Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker, just a microcosm of the system.

I chose to review this documentary because I found I was uniquely linked to it. I grew up on a farm with migrant farm workers roughly an hour away from where the documentary was filmed. At night, you can see the lights of the greenhouses in Leamington in the sky, almost 100 kilometers away. The documentary was practically filmed on my front porch. 

As The Canadian Dream shows, the current system for migrant workers is flawed. Foreign workers aren’t provided with all the rights a Canadian citizen would be provided (overtime in most cases, for example), and many of the rights they are provided with are only superficially provided. 

What good is healthcare if they can’t drive to it? I’ve never seen public transport on a dirt road, and not everyone brought here through the CTFW program is provided access to a vehicle, nor does everyone have a driver’s license. 

There’s also the way the system is administered. Both our Canadian government and the governments involved in the program have lapsed in their duty to care. Often any issues that arise end up in an infernal bureaucratic e-mail chain back and forth, sometimes out of what seems to be total indifference. 

And all of these systemic issues before even mentioning the ever-present language barrier. Often farmers don’t speak Spanish, and have to rely on informal translators, or Google translate. When a migrant worker steps off the plane, they essentially enter the custody of their employer. It’s up to the farmers to provide them with transport into town, to help them administratively to set up bank accounts and phone plans, to give them access to grocery stores and provide housing. 

In the documentary, Alberto compares his working conditions to a prison. In a system with this many uncertainties, it’s not hard to imagine how these injustices can arise. Bad actors are left to their own devices, and the good actors are left to pick up the slack. The documentary does a good job of showing this. Alberto was abandoned, by both our country and his, and it was only through charity that he was able to receive justice. 

One facet that the documentary touches on strongly throughout is the domestic angle. Every migrant worker I’ve ever spoken with has had the exact same response: Family. The average yearly pay in Mexico is roughly 15K CAD. At minimum wage in Ontario, working 40 hrs a week for 6 months pays 16.5K CAD. And note the 40 hours—most migrant workers, depending on the season of course, put in more than 40 hours a week. It’s a sacrifice on behalf of migrant workers to leave their families and homes to come here to work, to put food on the table for them and us. 

The Canadian Dream is an intimate look into a groundbreaking Canadian court case, and into the flaws of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. If that interests you, watch it. It showcases one of the most severe lapses in the system, and hints to the failings that occur to this day.

ReFrame 2025
Severn Court (October-August)
Theatre Trent 2023/24
Arthur News School of Fish
Written By
Sponsored
ReFrame 2025
Severn Court (October-August)
Theatre Trent 2023/24
Arthur News School of Fish

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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