Cultural Safety in Service Provision for Migrant Agricultural Workers? An Empirical Exploration

Activists and scholars have long highlighted the precarity of migrant agricultural workers (MAWs) in Canada and the unique threat it poses to this group’s health and wellbeing. In response, the Canadian government recently launched a series of targeted programming and services for this population. However, little research has explored the effectiveness of these initiatives within the broader support landscape. Our qualitative narrative research involving 165 MAWs in Southern Ontario aimed to explore the extent to which support services (i.e. health, legal, community) mitigate and comprehensive address MAWs’ key needs, as well as the mechanisms through which these support organizations achieve this. Drawing on the concept of cultural safety and the collective voices of participants, our team identified two key dimensions to inform a more comprehensive approach to service delivery for this population: alignment, which focuses on priority needs, and accessibility, which anticipates and mitigates barriers to help-seeking. Our work points to the value of expanding how we envision service provision, while simultaneously addressing the intricate structural inequities that create the need for accompaniment in the first place. A cultural safety approach necessitates situating temporary migrant programs and their service provisions within political and historical contexts while advocating for sustained support frameworks and fostering deeper engagement with MAWs, who ultimately determine when cultural safety is achieved.