Complicated Encounters

For 10 years, Nova Scotia has seen a steady increase in temporary foreign workers (TFWs) across a range of rural labour markets. In the fishery’s processing sector, this has run alongside persistent local unemployment, prompting Canada’s auditor general to suggest that rural labour shortages, justifying TFW recruitment, have been exaggerated. A counter-point, many communities across rural coastal Nova Scotia have, since the 1960s, consistently experienced close to zero population growth—a consequence of economic downturn; restricted employment opportunities; changes to federal labour policy limiting employment-benefits for seasonal workers; out-migration; and a low birth-rate. While immigrant recruitment initiatives have redressed similar conditions in other Canadian jurisdictions, in Nova Scotia, similar efforts have been frustrated by insufficient resources and persistent xenophobia. From this, and like in other regions with restructuring economies, a tension exists between resident- and migrant workers, with the former regarding the latter as competing for scarce jobs. Exploring the integration of TFWs into a labour market that is, from the vantage point of local workers, one of scarcity, our research is situated at the intersection of these realities. 

This study focuses on TFWs in Nova Scotia’s fish processing sector, with a focus on the social and relational dynamics generated through the encounter between local workers—those long-integrated in the sector, and their newly recruited migrant co-workers. Mirroring traditional divisions of labour in the fishery, the migrant workers in question are mostly women. As such, their recruitment maps onto long-standing divisions of labour in rural, coastal Nova Scotia, but is also reflective of new opportunities made available through Canadian immigration policy. Generating in-depth ethnographic data, we ask: What are the experiences of labour, both local and migrant, in Nova Scotia’s processing sector? How have changes in processing, corresponding to structural adjustment in the fisheries, shaped these experiences? How do these different groups of precariously positioned workers encounter each other? And what are the social and relational outcomes of those encounters


Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Co-Investigators: Dr.Catherine Bryan and Sadie Beaton