Yes. Until the invitation to this meeting came, I was in Montreal with Asta, Olymel, and the rest of the Quebec industry. We've already been in Mississauga. We've been in Calgary, and there's one more meeting coming in Winnipeg, so we've been working on this since about March 2013 trying to demonstrate, first, that we are turning over every leaf in this country to try to find Canadians who want to do the work.
I have spoken to many, and our first problem is that these jobs at slaughter plans are in rural Canada for the most part. We no longer have a whole lot of kids coming off the farms, and we no longer have access to immigrants who don't have college education, which we used to have up until the 2000s. These two big sources have dried up. We had to find a new source. Temporary foreign workers were there.
We ran, I would argue, the most successful pathway to permanency program in Canada for many years, in which we provided language training and settlement services. When they got their permanent residency, these people would then have a job and a skill that was in permanent demand in their communities, and they spoke one of the languages. That's become really difficult in the last couple of years to do, and we have, in just 15 plants today, 1,500 empty positions that we're looking to fill, including at Asta and Olymel.
Not only does that affect the 1,500 jobs in the plants, but it also affects all the other jobs in the economy that a butcher on the line creates. We have had four years of discussions about how to either get meat cutters and butchers approved as doing an in-demand, semi-skilled job—these are not unskilled people, because if you've ever gone there and looked, you'll find that they're not unskilled—under the IRCC program for express entry—