Agriculture Committee on Jan. 28th, 2021

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Thank you very much for that, Jason, and I couldn't agree with you more on our long-term objectives.

I have a friend who produces a very interesting kind of beef. It's called snow beef. I don't know if my colleagues on this committee have heard about it. This is a friend I grew up showing cattle with, and he is having a lot of problems with CFIA. Obviously, you are now CFIA approved, but can you talk about that process to get certified and how, for Ian and for snow beef...? That, for everyone, is a cross between Wagyu and Holstein. It's delicious. That's a little plug. But he can't sell his product outside of Saskatchewan right now and he's having a really tough time with that. So can you just give us a little bit of the experience you had and how other smaller companies are trying to get into the beef market? You might have a bit of a footprint, but obviously that is an issue, with the red tape, interprovincial trade barriers, and some of those issues that smaller producers are facing trying to get into that market.

[Jason Aitken]

Absolutely. I can unpack a whole bunch of different things there, Warren. I love the idea of snow beef. Differentiation—it feeds back to the point. When I lived in Japan, I walked through the Kobe beef slaughter plants in Gunma. They actually let people go into the carcass cooler. They go in and video auction out the carcasses with flashlights to look at them and then they take them off. Think of the Japanese fish market. It creates this high-valued product, and I think we need to innovate and instill more of that. Whether it's for snow beef or something else, creating something that is unique is going to draw attention, and I'm just trying to create a viable platform. So whether it's snow beef or grass-fed beef, something that's differentiated and special gets valued and it gets to market, and that's what we want to do.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I have about a minute left. Can you give me two examples of why it would be tougher to set up a smaller processing plant in Canada than in other jurisdictions in the world right now? You talked about depreciating assets and a few of the tax changes that we saw. How do we make Saskatchewan and Canada more attractive, to make sure that we have people who want to start up processing plants here?

[Jason Aitken]

I have lived this for about a decade, raising capital. I'm an immigrant to the province of Saskatchewan in many ways. I've lived outside of Canada for many years. The financial institutions of Canada are extremely risk-averse. In the U.S., much more risk is taken. We need to increase the risk appetite, because if you don't take the risk you don't get the massive rewards, and the rewards far outweigh the risk. We have Shopify and other companies that have built incredible platforms. There has to be an understanding that there's going to be risk. Things can go wrong, and there have to be supports when that happens.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Steinley, and with regard to your snow beef, there was a report last week that I watched on the French agriculture program La semaine verte. It's a really unique product. Everybody wants a piece of it, I guess, so it's a great example.

Now we have Mr. Louis for five minutes.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you to our witnesses for being here.

I would like to start my questions with Mr. Sarsfield.

That was a very inviting and compelling story about your company. I think it made everyone a bit hungry when you described the products that you have. In my riding of Kitchener—Conestoga in Ontario, we have Wellesley Brand Apple Products, which makes apple butter and ciders and syrups, and also Martin's Family Fruit Farm, which is a processing plant with a juicing line. It makes me realize how much your staff.... From the way you describe your employees as family, I can tell how much that means to you.

One of the things you mentioned was that your local staff were able to train to keep up with the tech and the automation that you have. I wonder—because we talk about labour all the time—if you could expand on how you're able to have the training to have your staff keep up with the automation and the technology that you're bringing into your plant.

[Jeff Sarsfield]

I guess it's just that we have some key people who have stayed with the business from day one, so it's more working with each other and picking the key people in order to get the knowledge, the handle, to look after some of the new technology that comes our way. It definitely can be challenging when you do lose some of those key people because we do have a Michelin plant close by, and they can prey on us for labour for their facility, as well, where we have similar skill sets.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

That leads me to my next question about the skilled labour. Are there current labour trends or projected shortages that we can look out for because, again, so much of processing capacity relies on human capital, on the people themselves? Are there specific trends that you see that we can look towards to build skills in people down the road?

[Jeff Sarsfield]

In most of our applications, we have hired technical people for certain positions, and then we rely on them to cross-train others. It's still a major investment, and we have to make sure that they're looked after to keep them in place so that they don't move on. Overall, with labour for manufacturing, it's becoming more and more difficult each year. However, I definitely do believe that, versus manual jobs, the technical jobs are...and paying a higher wage is definitely the answer versus low wages and no automation.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Again, yes, supporting your workers seems to do that.

You did mention automation. What kind of encouragement can we give as a government? What can we do to help you? You have this situation where you're saying that you're at capacity and that you're looking to grow, but that you need that investment. For a company as successful as yours, how can we help you with advancing the technology that you'll need to make that next step?

[Jeff Sarsfield]

Like I mentioned before, it's just that continued support that we did have. We were able to take advantage of the latest funding that had mentioned the expiry of December 30. We just came in under the wire for a major robotic palletizer, which was a $400,000 capital expenditure, and we were able to claim $100,000 of federal grant money towards that. That was basically why we did proceed with that project when we did, so it guess continued projects' being available to us will give us the opportunity to keep investing in that automation.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Fantastic.

We just touched on the temporary foreign workers. I didn't hear you mention if you use them and, if you have, whether you have any advice on what we could do to help streamline that process in the future.

[Jeff Sarsfield]

We're fairly new to the foreign workers. We just brought our first nine people in from Mexico, and they've been at our production facility for about four weeks now. So far they've integrated with our local staff quite well.

I guess there is, longer term, a need to get that number up over the 10%, because we see the trends going against local people working in these types of jobs.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Mr. Perron, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to come back to Mr. Sarsfield.

Earlier, we talked briefly about the percentage of the workforce, and you're talking about that right now. You say that you are starting to hire foreign workers and that this is a strong trend because there are fewer local workers available. I asked you if raising the maximum proportion of foreign workers from 10% to 20% was enough, and you said you would prefer it to be higher than that.

But, if you don't even have 10% foreign workers yet, do you really need them?

[Jeff Sarsfield]

The bigger challenge right now is that we have to provide them housing, because there's a shortage of housing in our area. We're looking at building some housing in order to increase that amount. As soon as we know we can cover off the housing, we'll be putting in an application to have at least another 25 people in the program in order to meet our sales commitments for this current year.

As I mentioned before, it's the trend we've seen over the last four years, and whether COVID has.... You know, it was trending this way even before COVID, so it's definitely had an impact on us in this time, but I don't expect it's going to be night and day once we get through the current COVID issues that we're faced with.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

What improvements would you like to see to the temporary foreign worker program? You're familiar with it, since you are currently hiring these workers yourself.

For example, visas could be issued for a longer period of time, say three years, and could be renewable. This would increase your ability to predict the availability of labour.

Would this help you?

[Jeff Sarsfield]

Yes, the longer the term is, the better, because currently there are some very intelligent people within that group who we can train to do higher skilled jobs. We've seen that even with these first nine people we've put in the plant. Some of them have the ability to be team leads and so on, but under the current program they're only allowed to stay here for 12 months. The longer we can keep them, the better, given the investment of training them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Sarsfield.

Now, Mr. MacGregor, please go ahead for two and a half minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Sarsfield, with all the automation upgrades that you've gone through with your business and plans for the future, as well as what you might know from industry associations and other processing plants, can you give us a sense of what kinds of skill sets are generally in the highest demand right now to really solve this labour crunch? Is it really the technical aspects—having electricians and mechanics?

I'm just wondering whether there are particular labour streams the federal government needs to concentrate on, and I'd like to get a sense of that from you.

[Jeff Sarsfield]

It has put higher demands on the maintenance side of our operations. So far we've been fortunate. We have built a real good team of mechanics and programmers, but as we grow we need more and more of them, and the other manufacturers in this area are looking for the same people. It hasn't been an issue for us yet, but definitely—going forward, as we need more and more—there needs to be more training for that.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

With the temporary foreign worker stream, are a lot of companies in your position starting to see a lot of workers returning year after year and establishing those long-term relations with them? What I'm alluding to is that the government is trying to establish a pilot program for a pathway to citizenship. Is that something that you think would be useful to try to encourage those temporary foreign workers to put down some roots in communities such as yours so that they become part of a loyal workforce and part of the company going forward?

[Jeff Sarsfield]

Yes, definitely that's what we would like to see, long term, that they actually would become part of the community.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Chair, I'll leave it there.

Thanks so much.