Leamington and Kingsville: Ontario's Greenhouse Towns Built on Mexican Labour

Drive along Highway 3 through Essex County, Ontario, and the horizon fills with glass and polyethylene long before you reach downtown Leamington. This is the largest concentration of commercial greenhouses in North America — 1,969 acres (797 hectares) of greenhouse vegetable production, growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and increasingly cannabis and cut flowers, according to the Wikipedia entry for the town. None of it runs without seasonal labour, and for six decades a large share of that labour has come from Mexico.

A town that measures itself in Latin American percentage points

By the 2006 Census, Leamington had the highest percentage of Latin American residents of any place in Canada, at 4.9% of its total population — a figure cited in the town's Wikipedia entry. That's a real, sourced number, but it needs the same caution this publication applies elsewhere: "Latin American" is a pan-ethnic census category, not a synonym for "Mexican." We were not able to reload the specific 2006 StatCan table behind that 4.9% figure during this research session, so we can't break it down here by exact country of origin, and we did not find comparable, separately sourced 2021 figures for either Leamington or the neighbouring town of Kingsville specifically. What we can say, sourced to the same Wikipedia entry, is that "the majority of migrants come from Mexico and Jamaica, and are employed as seasonal farm workers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada," and that the presence has been substantial and lasting enough that, in the town's own words, "several Mexican and Jamaican shops and a Mexican consulate have opened to serve the migrants."

That consulate is not a symbolic gesture. Mexico's diplomatic network in Canada is compact by design — an embassy in Ottawa and consulates-general in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, plus consulates in Calgary and, notably, Leamington, according to Wikipedia's "List of diplomatic missions of Mexico" and the "Mexico–Canada relations" article. Most of Mexico's consular offices abroad sit in national capitals or the largest cities of a country. Leamington, population well under 30,000, is neither. Its inclusion in that short list is itself evidence of how concentrated and how administratively significant the Mexican agricultural workforce there has become — consular services (passport renewals, notarized documents, emergency assistance) follow the workers, not the other way around.

The program behind the greenhouses

The legal machinery that brings these workers to Leamington and Kingsville each growing season is the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), established in 1966 under the Pearson government, initially as an arrangement between Canada and Jamaica, later expanded to Mexico and other Caribbean countries, per Wikipedia's SAWP entry. Canada and Mexico signed their own bilateral agreement permitting temporary Mexican farm labour in 1974, according to the "Mexico–Canada relations" Wikipedia article — eight years after the program's Jamaican origins, and the starting point for what is now a well-worn seasonal circuit between rural Mexico and rural Ontario.

By 2009, roughly half of all agricultural migrants admitted under SAWP were Mexican — about 15,800 people that year, out of a program that admits more than 29,000 agricultural workers annually (the Wikipedia SAWP entry does not specify which year that 29,000 figure describes, so we treat it as an approximate, undated "typical recent year" reference rather than a precise current count). What stands out in the same source is how circular this migration has become: 75% of Mexican SAWP workers have re-entered the program for four years or more, and 57% for six years or more. These are not one-off visits. For many, Leamington and Kingsville are a seasonal second home, returned to year after year under the same employer, sometimes for a decade or longer.

Why greenhouses specifically

Ontario's greenhouse belt exists because of Leamington and Kingsville's microclimate — moderated by Lake Erie, with a frost-free season long enough to make year-round glasshouse production commercially viable in a way open-field agriculture in most of Canada cannot match. But glasshouse tomatoes and peppers are labour-intensive in a way that grain or oilseed farming is not: planting, pruning, and above all harvesting are done by hand, on a schedule set by the crop rather than the calendar. SAWP was built to solve exactly this kind of structural labour shortage — Canadian growers who cannot reliably fill these roles domestically, and Mexican workers for whom several months of Canadian wages represent a substantial income relative to comparable work at home. The Wikipedia SAWP entry notes that the sectors reporting the most persistent labour shortages are "fruits, vegetables and horticultural" — precisely the crops that dominate the Leamington-Kingsville greenhouse belt.

What "community" means when it's seasonal

A community built on a seasonal, circulating workforce looks different from an immigrant community built on permanent settlement. Most SAWP workers hold closed work permits tied to a single employer and return to Mexico between growing seasons rather than settling permanently in Ontario, which is part of why the census figures above capture only a partial picture — a worker present in Leamington in June but counted as a Mexican resident on census night (typically in spring) may or may not show up consistently in year-to-year population statistics, depending on timing. What has clearly taken root, regardless, is the permanent infrastructure that serves a population which is itself temporary: the shops, the consulate, and, as later articles in this series cover, the food.