Eamon Mac Mahon

My parents and I arrived in Grande Cache, Alberta, in 1976, the year I was born. The town had been recently carved out of the dense wilderness to service the new coal mine where my father had found a job. From the back window of our bungalow, the boreal forest stretched north, largely unbroken, for hundreds of kilometres to the tundra, a dark tangle of trees, mysterious and forbidding. One neighbour found that a wolverine had eaten through his cabin’s roof and ripped open cans of food.

The Virgin Australia flight bound for Papua New Guinea departs from Brisbane bearing a full load: gigantic sun-cured men in golf shirts; neckless security hacks scribbled over by tattoo artists; inscrutable, terrifying power suits. Over a muggy sweep of brine, the plane arcs toward a nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and a farrago of smaller islands scattered across Melanesia.

Ontario migrant workers endure 12-hour days, low pay and cramped living quarters—all in the hopes of earning enough money to support their families back home Above: Agapito Alvarado at the Niagara winery where he works Every year, some 25,000 migrant labourers from Mexico and the Caribbean come to Ontario through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. They spend six to eight months of the year on farms in Niagara and Simcoe and Prince Edward County, and send as much money home as possible.