We've had an ag labour-front round table this year that has been working hard on this issue. From our perspective, one of the government's issues—and they are working at breaking it down—is the different silos that people who deal with our program appear to be in. We go through various departments, such as ESDC and IRCC, and things have to be handed from one side to the other. Sometimes there is not enough communication about what's going on there.
New things come up. This year there's biometrics; it's going to be a new issue for us. ESDC did not find out until about spring, so it couldn't start letting IRCC know the implications of the change. We're going to have to deal with that this year. So, communication between departments would certainly help.
From a farmer's perspective, one of the things we would like to see is some clarity on where we are in the process. We send in our applications, and then we sit and wait. We don't know how far things have moved along, whether they have or haven't. It's about having some kind of tracking system to know when the LMIA has been approved, whether the information has been sent down to the sending country, whether that information has been forwarded to IRCC, and whether IRCC has received it. If we know that things are in progress or that they've stalled somewhere, we could ask questions or answer questions that need to be answered so that things can proceed. Those kinds of things would certainly help us and give us a much better time frame and frame of mind. Many of us were sitting there last spring wondering when we were going to have people show up. We were sitting with crops in the field and we were losing those crops. It was very difficult.