I appreciate that, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much.
Our constituents in the agriculture industry represent about 300,000 farming enterprises across the country. Our enterprises employ another approximately 300,000, for a total of somewhere close to 600,000 people in the workforce.
There have been significant issues emerging around the agriculture industry on labour and skills development for quite some time. We became part of the sector council almost five years ago to deal with and be proactive in our approach to addressing some of these concerns. I think we've been successful at this stage.
The cutbacks in the sector council program came as a bit of a shock to us, as it was such a proactive and positive kind of activity that we were undertaking. There were serious gaps in labour market information, which we have since filled. There were significant areas of skill shortages for various reasons, which we have been able to get some movement on.
The sector council is all about collaboration—with government, with training institutions, and with organizations whose set goal is to take care of some of these larger issues. Of course we are good now until the end of fiscal year 2013 with funding from HRSDC on that sector council program, but after that we're cut loose along with the other I think 34 sector councils in the country to survive on our own. We're working very hard to do that.
I hope there's a message embedded in there somewhere that we will be soliciting support from government to continue with the kind of work we've been doing.
That is, in broad strokes, our purpose and what we do. We've gathered significant labour market information statistics around the shortages. We have a significant shortfall—a “deficit” is what we call it—of farm workers, something around 10%. That's twice the national average of all other occupations that we can find. That's a significant deficit. We have indications that the demand for farm workers for farm enterprises going forward will be about 2% a year.
Time being so precious here, I hope we can get some questions to further amplify some of our issues around that.
Let me now defer to Portia for some quick comments.