Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being here. It's always a joy to be with you, but....
I would never suggest to use the “but” word. I try to sit on mine.
The temporary foreign worker program has been talked about on the processing side of things. I'm sure you've had the same meetings with the same people I have had. I understand it's not wholly your program. The agricultural sector worker program in my neck of the woods, as you well know, has been in existence for a long time in the tender fruit industry and the wine industry. It doesn't look the same as a caregiver program. I can tell you from personal experience that my father brought his family to this country because he got landed citizenship to bring a set of skills he had to build ships in this country, but for this particular program, temporary foreign workers in the agricultural sector—if we can loosely term it that way—don't get that same privilege.
I would suggest, sir, that perhaps one of the things you can take back to your colleagues is that they ought to look at the 1960s.
You know, going back to the future sometimes means going back to the past, because that's how people brought skills to this country, including my father and his family, which included me, and that actually enabled folks to come here. We showed up on these shores with a lovely little blue card that said we were landed immigrants, which gave us certain rights and privileges and obviously obligations. We were thankful for that, by the way, at the time.
Perhaps we should look to that program again when it comes to the processing sector. Many of the sector members I've spoken to, including the Canadian Meat Council, have said to me that's what they'd rather see, because they're in a cycle of retraining over and over again, even if the program works. Every two years, they're out and there are new ones, and that just doesn't make any sense I think. So maybe...that's just a suggestion.
So there was my “but”.