TRURO, N.S. – A local MP says recent comments expressed by a Nova Scotia MLA regarding the productivity level of Jamaican workers are completely opposite of what area farmers have reported to him.
“I just have a different opinion,” Cumberland Colchester MP Bill Casey said, regarding comments made in the provincial legislature by Cumberland North MLA Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin.
“I’m not going to comment on her comments. My opinion on Jamaican workers is just different, that’s all and I just wanted to make sure that was out.”
Smith-McCrossin, a leadership candidate for the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party, made a reference in the legislature on April 17 connecting low productivity rates in Jamaica to marijuana use.
“I have a best friend in Amherst who is from Jamaica,” Smith-McCrossin told the legislature. “She said to me, ‘Elizabeth, smoking marijuana in Jamaica is completely accepted, and there’s a completely different work ethic and very low productivity in Jamaica.’ I think we already have a productivity problem here in Nova Scotia. We do not need something else making it worse.”
That comment, for which Smith-MCrossin has since apologized, created controversy and spurred criticism from various quarters.
Casey said numerous farmers in both Colchester and Cumberland counties rely on the services of hundreds of Jamaican temporary foreign workers each year for the planting, cultivation, growing and harvesting of their crops, including strawberries that are exported world-wide.
The Jamaicans come here under a seasonal agricultural worker program that has been in operation for more than 50 years, and Casey said Smith-McCrossin’s comments go counter to everything the local employers have told him.
And Casey said he would not like to see the efforts he has initiated with Dalhousie to create a horticulture correspondence program that would enable more Jamaicans to qualify for work on Nova Scotia farms, to become hindered by such negativity, that he does not believe can be factually substantiated.
“We’ve worked hard on this. I’ve put a lot of time into it. But the point is, the employers value these workers,” he said. “They find that they learn fast, they’re diligent and dependable. And, they would like to have more. And we’ve been trying to help them and then these comments are not helpful.”
Casey said farmers who hire Jamaicans for the temporary positions would not be able to operate their businesses without them.
“These are positions that the employers have not been able to fill at all locally. They are not taking anybody’s jobs because they have not been able to fill them,” he said.
