That's fairly broad, but thanks for the question. It's really critical.
One of the challenges we face as farmers is that the Canadians we would like to employ typically do not live where the farms are. That's one of the first challenges we have. We don't have a lot of people available locally. The seasonal agricultural worker program, which was started here, has been around for over 50 years. It recognized that. Previously we had waves of immigrants come to this country, and typically they would go and work on farms. As they got older and retired, their children typically worked in town. We haven't had that in quite some time.
We're accessing every group in society we can in farms—women on farms, the indigenous community where they're nearby and localized. That's one of the things CAHRC has done. We've also worked with the organizations that are bringing in immigrants, trying to let them know that there are some good jobs on farms, and also with youth. This is one of the big concerns we have with these proposed changes. The group we are trying to attract back to the farm is generally the 18- to 24-year-old group. That aspect of the reasonableness test has us really concerned. Typically on a farm operation you may have no employees except at harvest time and planting time. Those are probably the two key periods in most farming operations. You may need the kids to come home. You may be working around the clock. You may be working under weather restrictions. You may have no employees the rest of the time, and yet the comment we've heard from Finance is that the expectation will be that if an 18- to 24-year-old is going to get remuneration, as dividends or whatever, they'll have to be employed kind of Monday to Friday or on a full-time basis year-round. That's not the farm type of employment. We are very seasonal, oriented to a very specific time period.
That's a challenge that we face. The intergenerational transfer issue obviously is huge, because probably three-quarters of those 220,000 farms change hands routinely. We're probably the one sector of the economy where that's the greatest issue. Most farmers are not getting any younger: $50 billion in farm assets is going to need to change hands in the not-too-distant future.