…After hours in scorching fields, they return to sweltering, overcrowded housing — rest is almost impossible.

“You leave work tired and you’re going back to work tired,” Junior, a Caribbean farm worker, said in an interview with The Lake Report.

Fearing retribution, Junior would not give his last name or identify the farm at which he works.

In a town like Niagara-on-the-Lake, where agriculture thrives, many farms rely on migrant workers each season.

Now, Canada’s largest migrant-led coalition is sounding the alarm on new government changes to the nation’s various temporary foreign worker programs that they fear could worsen their working conditions.

The Migrant Rights Network, a cross-Canada alliance of organizations of migrants, released a report at a virtual news conference Wednesday, outlining current conditions and why the federal government’s proposed changes to the country’s programs risk making circumstances like Junior’s even worse.

Junior said verbal abuse and harsh living conditions are among the biggest challenges he faces…

The coalition said most of the new proposed revisions reinforce employer control and low pay — a system that last year was compared to “modern slavery” by Tomoya Obokata, the UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery…