- Shore Lunch
In this picture the audience is guided to the former site of the PPG paint plant. Although the buildings are demolished and the rubble removed the ground shows signs of labs and manufacturing. Patches of tiled floors and drains, the tops of concrete holding tanks. The pavement of the former parking lot with plants and grasses growing through cracks shows how the site is restoring itself to a field.
This final site of Shore Lunch provides a resting spot with a lookout pointed towards a vista of the plants and trees taking over the site. This red shack also points to the home of one of a person from Chimnissing, Beausoleil First Nation who would organize workers each season from the island to pick fruit in west Oakville and in Clarkson. This movement of workers from First Nation communities to farms in central and southern Ontario took place in the 1940s to the 1990s.
Clarkson was especially known for strawberry cultivation and at one point was declared the trawberry capital of Canada.
To acknowledge this history, each day this kiosk would be supplied with a basket of Ontario strawberries. Visitors could indulge, along with another food item inside the camp kits was also an offering of strawberry popcorn.
Contemplation Three
The stillness of the shack, it is past the gate.
Sit on the white bench in the shack.
Open the little white box and raise a piece of strawberry poscorn to the hills and to the real ones.
Eat the popcorn while you stare out at the vista - the plants, shrubs, trees and smoke stack.
Today, migrant workers travel from Central America and the Caribbean to work on farms. They do so through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. This program permits the movement of workers into Canada, however their living and working conditions are often unhealthy and unaware of their worker rights many workers are exploited. Activist movements such as Justice 4 Migrant Workers and Harvesting Freedom advocate for migrant worker rights.