Milking Prison Labour

Canada’s prison farms are being reopened. But when prisoners will be paid pennies a day, and the fruits of their labour will likely be exported for profit, there’s little to celebrate.

- Erin Innes

In June of 2018, the federal Liberals announced that “the cows are coming home”: closed nine years earlier by the Harper government, the prison farms at Joyceville and Collins Bay institutions in southern Ontario, just outside of Kingston, would be opening again.

For many in Kingston, it seemed like a victory. Since February of 2009, when the Tories first announced the sudden closure of all six federal prison farms in the country, a coalition of local farmers, residents, and community advocates called Save Our Prison Farms (SOPF) had been holding public meetings, organizing, and even getting arrested trying to keep the farms from closing, and then fighting to have them reopened.

Organic farmer Dianne Dowling, member of the National Farmers Union (NFU) and former president of the Kingston local, was one of those spearheading the effort. “The prison farms represent about 1,500 acres of some of the best farmland in the area,” says Dowling. “Our [union] local had been working to build the local food and farm system in the area for several years, through events and projects, and we did not want such good farmland going out of farming.” The campaign grew and began attracting national attention, and when cows from the original herd were being auctioned off in 2010, more than 100 groups and individuals contributed money to form the Pen Farm Herd Co-op, which was able to purchase some of the cows and keep the bloodline going in the hopes of one day restoring the herd from its original stock.