Shortages of farm labour are a real problem across the country. There's a difference between seasonal workers and permanent workers. The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council has estimated that we're short about 50,000 full-time, year-round agricultural workers in Canada as well as a number of seasonal workers.
I know there are areas of the country that have chronic unemployment as well. The area I'm from, which is Malcolm Allen's riding—Thorold, Welland, that sort of thing—is one of those areas that traditionally have very high unemployment. But I just don't see 50,000 people leaving a place like Welland, and two of them going to one little place in Alberta, two of them going to another little place in Saskatchewan, and showing up every day and moving...so it's a problem. We have shortages and we have oversupply, but they're just not in the right places and they're not the people with the right skills necessarily, because a lot of the unemployed people tend to be in the cities.
Agriculture work, I tell you, is not easy work. It's very difficult work, and I just don't see that we're getting those people.
So part of the answer for us is really having a strong foreign worker program. There has been a lot of talk in the last year about the temporary foreign worker program, which maybe is a misnomer because we don't have only temporary jobs. We have some permanent jobs, so we need to find ways to bring people in for these jobs, and also to create a pathway for them to become either permanent residents or citizens and fill those jobs permanently.