Thank you, Jim.
My name is Gregg Badger. I'm the chief operating officer and the placement services partner of Ronald A. Chisholm. Chisholm is an associate member of the Canadian Meat Council. Our company has been around since 1938, and we're one of the largest food traders in the country, trading some $700 million in meat and dairy products around the world.
We recognized some four years ago that our suppliers and customers, the meat processors, were suffering from a lack of labour. Labour turnover and labour shortage were limiting the value-added activity that is occurring in the meat sector. As Jim mentioned, probably some $3 billion of value-added is left on the table each year.
Thanks to the temporary low-skilled foreign worker program, this issue has started to be addressed. The industry has made a successful start in securing foreign labour, but there is a lot more labour to come and a lot more to be done to pick up the gap. For example, for a Maple Leaf Foods or an Olymel to start a second shift in Brandon and in Red Deer respectively, they have to hire hundreds of foreign workers, and other plants are in the same boat.
We were very pleased to hear recently from Minister Solberg and Minister Finley. They announced changes to the temporary program, most importantly moving the temporary period from a 12-month period to a 24-month period. This is a huge benefit to the packers and producers and is much appreciated. They've made some other improvements to the program to try to increase processing times by putting applications online, and so on. These will be helpful, but there is still more to be done.
As I say, the 24-month period is a big help; it allows the costs to be amortized over a longer period. But some of the biggest challenges now are in getting these workers into the country in an efficient manner. So in terms of our suggestions of other things we would like to see happen, the top of the list would be better coordination, which I know is being worked on, but there needs to be more coordination between Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Service Canada, and HRSDC to facilitate work permit applications and approvals, both in Canada and abroad.
Citizenship and Immigration needs to be more in tune with the process, more involved, not only in creating approvals but in assisting in the enforcement of the rules of the program set out by HRSDC. There have been improvements, but there can still be more consistency among Service Canada and HRSDC offices across the country in terms of the application of the rules of the program and especially in processing times.
In Alberta, for example, it takes upward of 12 weeks for an employer to get an approval, and it can often take longer. Then when employees apply overseas, they're looking at anywhere from six weeks to four months, depending on the embassy. So that means that an employer that makes a decision to hire is waiting anywhere from a minimum of three to six to nine months before workers hit their plant. That means lost productivity as that time goes on. So increased resources and increased coordination between HRSDC and Citizenship and Immigration are important.
Some other matters in our material are more administrative in nature. The other major issue employers would like to see is limiting HRSDC to the job description, working hours, and wages, leaving out matters such as airfare and some other requirements that are in the program that make it more of a burden on the employer than it needs to be. Employers have to spend a lot of time and resources to go abroad and hire workers; they don't think additional burdens are fair.
We see that $51 million is allocated in the budget, and we hope that gets allocated mostly to resources for better processing times.
Thank you.