Thank you for the opportunity today to appear before the committee to discuss Canada's current labour market and its impact on our company.
All Weather Windows is Canada's largest privately owned window and door manufacturer. Our company was founded in 1978, starting with a 10,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Edmonton, Alberta. It has since expanded to 1,200 employees located in 10 locations across Canada. Today, All Weather Windows has two leading manufacturing plants, in Edmonton and Mississauga, with a combined capacity of nearly 400,000 square feet. They produce award-winning window and door products for dealers, builders, contractors, and homeowners.
We also have a commercial division that supplies and installs curtain walls, window walls, and commercial storefront entry systems, which has allowed our company to diversify our operations into the commercial glass industry.
Based in Edmonton, Alberta, we have been recognized as one of Canada's 50 best managed companies for the last four consecutive years and as one of Canada's 50 most engaged workplaces for the last two years. We received the Energy Star Manufacturer of the Year award for windows and doors in 2010 and 2011.
The current labour shortage in Canada, and more specifically in the western provinces, has impacted our ability to fill critical positions. We have experienced difficulty filling many semi-skilled and skilled positions across our company. For instance, we have struggled to fill vacancies for skilled glass trades professionals in our commercial division operations. In fact, we have been unable to fill several vacancies for commercial glaziers in our Winnipeg, Manitoba, location for more than six months. In this particular instance, some of the difficulty lies in our inability to attract people to move to Winnipeg because of lower wages as compared to other parts of Canada, namely Alberta, B.C., and Ontario.
Additionally, we are having difficulty filling other positions, such as commercial project managers, maintenance technicians, and research and development specialists. The difficulty in filling these roles is a lack of candidates who have the required qualifications and experience to perform the duties required.
With respect to hiring for our production lines, we have encountered another issue. Due to the shortages in the labour pool, particularly in Alberta, we have been hiring people who speak zero English—not bad English, but zero English—which creates production, training, and safety issues. We have responded by pairing people with other employees who have the ability to translate for them, but this is less than ideal and is a consequence of the labour shortage.
The highlighted examples slow our ability to move forward with projects and initiatives.
In response to these challenges, we have undertaken several different strategies to try to fill these roles, with varying degrees of success. Some of the strategies include using job boards and newspapers. We have had mixed results filling positions through these traditional job posting methods. We use national websites, such as Workopolis and Monster, industry associations, niche websites, such as Kijiji and craigslist, and job aggregators, such as Indeed and Simply Hired, to name a few. Our recruitment efforts in newspapers have declined substantially over the last two years due to the high cost and the low degree of success in filling vacancies.
Employee referral and word of mouth tends to be our best and most reliable source for filling production-related positions. It has resulted in many professional-level hires as well. In fact, approximately 65% of our production worker hires come through this channel.
We have filled a few positions this year using agencies, although this tends to be the most expensive recruitment method. It usually costs between 20% to 25% of the starting employee's first-year base salary. Search firms, as well, appear to be having greater difficulty finding qualified applicants to submit to us.
We have had some success recruiting through more professional social media networking sites, such as Linkedln. This pipeline seems to be better for recruiting for more senior-level roles in our organization.
We have built some relationships within the local community that have helped us to recruit recent Canadian immigrants. An example is the Edmonton Mennonite Center for Newcomers.
We have post-secondary partnerships. We have been working with post-secondary institutions to ensure that graduates coming from these schools have the skills necessary to immediately enter the workforce. We have supported both the technical colleges, such as the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and the universities, such as the University of Alberta, through scholarship programs and support for internships.
As well, due to the diversity of the employees we recruit, we have also worked with NorQuest College to help facilitate English as a second language classes—or ESL—for some of our production staff.
With respect to foreign worker recruitment, we have failed at two previous attempts to acquire labour market opinions, or LMOs, to hire skilled labour. Each time we failed because the wage we were offering for the position did not meet the prevailing wage as calculated by HRSDC. We are again in the process of completing an LMO to give us the ability to recruit commercial glaziers internationally.
With respect to career fairs, we are taking part in a Working Abroad Expo, along with other construction and manufacturing employers from Alberta and Manitoba, on October 6 and 7 in Dublin, Ireland. We are hoping to recruit skilled labour in the glass trade for our commercial business.
All Weather Windows applauds the recent changes announced by the government, including changes to the temporary foreign worker program and the fast-tracking of the LMO for select employers. That said, we believe more could be done to create a modern and supportive framework to help fill our need to hire semi-skilled and skilled labour, including the following.
Expand pathways to permanent residency by expanding the Canadian experience class to give low- and semi-skilled temporary foreign workers the right to apply for permanent residency after three years of work experience with his or her employer. Consideration should be given to employer recommendations, satisfactory background checks, appropriate prior experience in country of origin, and minimum language proficiency requirements.
Create a process to notify employers of any changes to processes or information utilized in the calculation and submission of their initial LMO application. This gives employers the opportunity to update applications and avoid costly delays, particularly in the case of prevailing wage rates.
Implement a timely and responsive appeal process, with a full detailed report, for employers and temporary foreign workers—or TFWs—who are denied applications, while remaining responsive to industry-specific labour shortages.
Amend the advertising criteria for LMOs to allow companies from the same sector to advertise jointly rather than as individual organizations.
Consider broad information sources in determining the appropriate salary or wage level, including the industry sector surveys that often can be provided by employers and employer associations.
Temporary foreign workers should be allowed to enter Canada with nominal paperwork and delay. Also, pre-qualified trusted companies should be provided the ability to be exempt from the bureaucratic processes that delay entrance today.
The immigration system must be more efficient in selecting the qualified personnel that industry needs and in streamlining them through the immigration process.
These policy changes will help create a more flexible and responsive labour pool of domestic and foreign-trained workers that will allow not only our company, but others as well, to fully capitalize on the economic opportunities before us.
Thank you. I look forward to our discussion.
