Good morning. Thank you for inviting the Canadian Meat Council to testify today.
I'm Marie-France MacKinnon, vice-president of public affairs.
CMC represents federally inspected meat processors and packers across Canada. We employ 70,000, while red meat consumption and export support about 288,000 jobs.
From the COVID pandemic to the loss of export markets, floods, border issues and unprecedented labour shortages, our meat plants across the country have been put under immense pressure and challenge for the past two years. We've been resilient, but it has exacerbated our meat processors and the supply chain. Yet, our essential workforce kept us fed throughout this pandemic, and this is in large part thanks to the temporary foreign workers who work in our plants.
Three years ago, we worked really hard to get the agri-food immigration pilot and we demonstrated to government that we deserved this pilot. We had three ministers at the table. We had the union. We had departmental officials. Everyone agreed. At that time, we had 1,700 empty butcher stations. That's 1,700. Last year at this time, I ran the numbers, and we had 4,500. We ran the numbers again in October, and we're now at 10,000 empty butcher stations. This number is alarming.
I challenge any industry or sector to compare the work and effort that our members do for recruitment and retention, yet we're still faced with 10,000 empty butcher stations. Despite best efforts, we have a chronic labour shortage. All meat processors would love nothing more than to hire a Canadian. It would be a lot easier, and you can't imagine the financial and time burden that would be alleviated. Canadians just don't want to work in meat plants, so we're stuck with using this temporary foreign worker program, yet there's nothing temporary about jobs in our sector. Our jobs are full time. They are permanent. We're mostly all unionized. A Canadian and a temporary foreign worker have the same pay, the same benefits and the same chances for advancement.
The biggest and most important factor affecting us is this cap imposed on our sector. We're allowed to hire only up to 10% of our job vacancies. Our plants are now facing a 20% to 35% job vacancy rate, so 10% doesn't quite cut it. On top of that, add an extra 10% due to the latest COVID wave.
This cap is really limiting our ability to have made-in-Canada protein. It means more meat being processed in the U.S. and more food imports for Canada. Picture a beef or pork shipment to another country. Well, in that container, you might as well add jobs, rural growth, economic growth and lost GDP, because we're not just exporting meat. We're sending jobs to other countries when we could actually be doing more value-added cuts here and grow our exports. This cap is capping our processing capacity and our sector's growth potential. It's an economic issue for Canada.
There have been 11 reports over the past six years that have asked to fix this cap: the 2015 labour task force, the HUMA committee, The Conference Board of Canada, the value chain round table and the Barton report and the agri-food economic table, to name only a few.
Now more than ever, we need government to provide some relief to the agri-food sector by raising the cap to 30%. It's great that Quebec received 20%, but that's not even enough for our Quebec members, who are well over 30%, and now this gives that province a competitive advantage over other provinces. Allowing us more flexibility with the cap is just good public policy. Canada has set an ambitious goal to grow its agri-food exports to $75 billion by 2025. Meat processors are well poised to help grow the exports, but the roadblock is this cap.
We came to government with a solution. We've presented our solution, but we needed results yesterday. Our empty butcher stations aren't just affecting us. The impact is from farm to fork, from producer all the way to consumer.
Our members have enough to worry about. Having a full workforce would certainly help them navigate all of the ongoing supply chain issues that we keep facing and would allow us to grow, to work at full capacity, to innovate and to look at automation and at AI, but we can't do that when our focus is on managing day-to-day operations.
Thank you.