That highlights a little bit of what I wanted to open with: our company overview, where we're located. We're a dry and liquid bulk carrier, so we haul your fuel to your gas stations, we haul fertilizer to farmers throughout our provinces, we haul into the diamond mines in the Northwest Territories. We cover Manitoba to Vancouver Island, and into the Yukon and Northwest Territories. We do have a partner company by the name of RTL Robinson in Yellowknife. All totalled, we're about 1,000 people strong, and of those, 600 work specifically for Westcan.
We hire professional long-haul truck drivers through the temporary foreign worker program. We're also involved in the provincial nominee programs in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and most recently, in British Columbia. When you talk about pathways, we identify this as our pathway to have families immigrate to our country and become sustainable, long-lasting members of our society and our economy. That is our pathway. We use this program as a means to get people through the door on a two-year work permit, and then at the time determined between us and our foreign worker, we decide when we're going to apply to the PN program.
Typically it's around the six-month mark for us, because we have a six-month or 180-day probationary period for anybody who works for our company, whether you're from Canada, from the United States, from Wales, from Ukraine. So that's the time we typically apply to the PN program.
We have most of our foreign workers receiving their permanent residency in Canada within the first two years, anywhere from that 12-month to 24-month mark. I'll use Moose Jaw as an example. We have 15 foreign workers working in our Moose Jaw terminal, of which seven have their permanent residency; four of those received permanent residency within the last two months. We think that's a success.
Throughout our company we have 91 foreign workers driving for us or working in our office. We've hired not just Sandra but spouses of our drivers in Edmonton as well as in Calgary. I don't think there are any in Lloydminster or Saskatoon.
So that's a little bit about what we use as the pathway.
We are bulk LMO approved through Service Canada in all three provinces. We have an allocation of 60 in Alberta, 60 in Saskatchewan, and 10 in British Columbia. We've seen a lot of growth, a lot of change. We started in 2004. We sat at the lobbying table to get truck drivers allowed to come through the program. We did so diligently in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and then most recently with the B.C. Trucking Association. We are a carrier member that lobbied that government to a successful end result. We're very proud of that fact, and we were very happy to be able to work with our government members to further our progress on both sides.
We've experienced lots of improvements. We require many of the drivers who want to work for us to come over on a research trip to experience exactly what our company has to offer and what Canada has to offer. That's our response to trying to reduce the turnover, improve our retention rates.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks we've encountered and an area for improvement on the Service Canada side of things would definitely be the spousal work permit issue. Under the low-skilled to semi-skilled occupations, when we give a driver a contract to sign, get an LMO to him, and have him come over here with his family, the spouse doesn't automatically get a work permit. It has contributed in some of our locations to up to 90% of our turnover for the drivers who have left. Ninety percent of them would identify that the inability of their spouse to settle in our communities and in Canada was one of the biggest factors in going home. It's not the driver himself, working. He's settled. You know, you're working, you're training. Trucking is trucking--trucking in the U.K. is similar--so that wasn't an issue. Children are not an issue. They go to school, they make friends, they have accents, they're the most popular kid on the block for most of it.
The biggest settling issue was the spouse sitting at home. They cannot participate in volunteer programs where they're working with older people or children. They can't work part-time. They can't go to school, which would look like they're going to try to further their stay in Canada. So they can't do a degree program.
If we hire from an English-speaking country already, it's not an attractive option to take ESL courses, which is one of the things that spouses can do. But Sandra didn't need to learn how to speak English, so she was left sitting at home, and there's only so much decorating you can do, and spending of money, when you are working in a one-income family.
So that is probably one of the biggest things that as a company in this program we would like to see--spousal work permits afforded to the spouses of our drivers at the time we hire them. It's the two-for-one approach--from the government's standpoint, anyway.
I was reading the Edmonton Journal this morning from your committee meeting yesterday there. One of the issues was the gentleman presenting being phoned at the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation; he was away overseas recruiting when one of the people we brought here could no longer satisfy his work permit to get the job.
Isn't it ironic? Here we are trying to get more people in when we have a whole bunch of people sitting and unable to work. We've already done background checks. We've already done medicals on them. It's basically wasted effort, and we're losing some valuable skills sitting at home for that first year.
We don't, as a company, want to circumvent and go the PN route from day one. We want to have a defined pathway so that we can assess a fit for our company and for Canada. We think it's in the best interest of all Canadians to have the six-month probationary period to see if they are a good fit before we just stamp somebody with a permanent residency card and say they're free to do as they wish in our country. As a company, that's one of our checks and balances, and that's why we would lobby our federal government to allow it on the Service Canada end of things.
We're unique in truck drivers, and I do appreciate that not every industry is faced with that stumbling block.
Other areas are inconsistencies or variances between provinces, even though we're dealing with Service Canada. There are variances when we're contacting the Service Canada office in Alberta versus Saskatchewan.
With regard to the wait times for renewal, I like to think of us as a frequent flyer in the temporary foreign worker program. We've had two Service Canada reviews in the four years we've been doing this program. We've welcomed Service Canada representatives into our company to see the processes we have put in place to improve retention and to improve recruitment and our hiring process.
One of my suggestions for an area of improvement would be to adapt a frequent flyer program. As a carrier in Alberta, we're members of Partners in Compliance. That's a government initiative between the provincial government and certain carriers in Alberta. They do regular audits on our company to make sure our safety standards and codes are there. In response to keeping a high standard--a high level of service and safety--we're allowed to bypass some of our scales in a defined way. My suggestion would be something like that.
We find our wait is with the E-LMOs and with the volume that we're experiencing. We're waiting on renewals of LMOs that we've already had approval on for the last four years, and it's limiting our ability to communicate with the people we want to bring into our country. We're saying, “Don't sell your house yet, because I've sent away my LMO request to assign your name to one of our bulk LMOs; sometimes it's five days to get the LMO back with your name on it, but sometimes it's five weeks.” For example, right now we're waiting for LMOs back in Alberta from Service Canada with our names assigned from March 6. It's April 2, and we haven't heard anything. Sometimes, as I said, we get them in five days. That is another area we would try to improve.
