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Every year, responding to pressure to work outside their home countries, temporary migrant workers come to Canada to complete essential work that sustains the Canadian economy and communities. These workers harvest produce, care for families, construct houses, cook meals, and more.
In 2023, 184,235 migrant workers entered Canada through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). These workers stay for short periods without their families. Their precarious immigration status prevents them from accessing many of the protections and services that are in place for Canadian workers. Most Canadians know nothing of the exploitation these workers face.
In 2025, with input and collaboration of former and current migrant farmworkers, Collaborative Network to End Exploitation is partnering with Mixed Company Theatre (MCT), Toronto’s theatre for social change, to develop Harvest Justice, a Forum Theatre production about the experience of migrant farmworkers in Ontario.
The production will use the pedagogy of Forum Theatre – an interactive, participatory, UNESCO recognized tool for communal dialogue, learning, and catalyzing social change – to tell stories and highlight the root causes of injustices migrant workers face, equipping audiences with the tools they need to join the migrant worker movement for a more just, equitable, and sustainable Canada.
In participatory Forum Theatre workshops, migrant workers will share their experiences and challenges with MCT’s facilitators through games, exercises, and conversations designed to foster a safe, supportive, and open environment. The migrant worker participants will guide the content of the workshops by sharing their experiences in a non-hierarchical setting. Through this process, participants, facilitators, and the playwright will all share and learn. What we learn in these workshops is woven into the final script.
The script will then be presented, in a facilitated reading, to the migrant worker participants, artists and partners. This will provide an opportunity to engage in critical dialogue and offer any feedback to refine the script.
Next, our play will be presented in Guelph to a wide audience that will include migrant workers, Canadian citizens, and others who live on this land, regardless of their immigration status.
Audiences will experience MCT’s interactive approach that catalyzes the audience to develop real-time strategies for empowering social change around the challenges faced by migrant workers. In an MCT production, a story with no resolution to the challenges presented is performed. The story is then presented again—only this second time, audience members can intervene in the story, as “spect-actors,” to develop new attitudes, knowledge and to create a positive alternative ending. A trained FT facilitator (called the Joker) prepares and encourages audience members to replace the actors on stage and to change the story in a constructive way, inspiring and empowering all audience members to go forth and take action for positive social change. We call this process “Rehearsing for Reality”.
After initial performances in Guelph, we will perform the play in Toronto. In spring of 2026, we plan to tour the production in south western Ontario to communities where many migrant workers reside.
