Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thanks, everyone, for having me here.
This is quite an opportunity for a small Saskatchewan boy who's never really spoken in front of many people before, to come to Ottawa, to the Parliament Buildings, to speak to everyone here.
I'm just a small restaurant guy who has a restaurant we built in southeast Saskatchewan when the boom started about five years ago. We found a way to grow our restaurant business by 325% in five years, with 225% growth in employment in the last five years, and it's just a family-run business.
What I've always been happy with is the government has said they want entrepreneurs to grow. One thing with the LMO process, I felt that the government was always behind me, supporting me to make sure I had extra employees if I could not hire.
We are in a tough market where we are right now.
The foreign worker program has been the single most successful government-sponsored effort in assisting companies in Saskatchewan to overcome the manpower shortage problem throughout the province. Most drastically, it is in the outlying rural areas.
Saskatchewan is made up of a few cities and a lot of rural communities. We're considered a larger town of 2,700 people. We are situated right on the Trans-Canada Highway.
Recently, controversies surrounding the RBC outsourcing and the Chinese miners appear to have triggered a review of the foreign worker program. Undoubtedly, measures can be taken to improve the system to ensure that similar controversial practices do not recur. However, we hope this does not jeopardize the interests of the overwhelming majority that have been compliant with and cooperative with the foreign worker program.
This program does work. It's worked for us. It's worked for a lot of southeast Saskatchewan businesses that have found ways to grow drastically and make sure we keep their entrepreneurial spirit going. Our thought process doesn't change to sell. It is in growth mode.
As of February 2013, the province of Saskatchewan has the lowest unemployment rate, at 3.8%, among all the other provinces, compared to the national unemployment rate of 7%. The unemployment rate in Regina, Saskatchewan, our capital city, is 3.7%. It's the lowest among all Canadian cities. The unemployment rate in Saskatoon is at 4.7%, which is the fourth lowest among Canadian cities. Most of Saskatchewan is booming, and we do need the support of our government to help with labour shortages.
We do not have enough local manpower to staff our businesses. The shortage is dramatically more pronounced in the outlying rural areas, where we have small populations, but we still have extreme construction and building going on.
We're huge in natural resources, as you all know. There's potash and oil. We have wind power now. It's all caused construction right along the Trans-Canada Highway in a very small community. All communities have seen growth that they can barely handle.
Employers have continuously advertised their job vacancies, but the simple truth is that it's hard to find Canadian locals to even respond to the advertisements. We run lots of advertisements; we do not get much. We do advertise all around the region. It can be taxing on dollars, but mostly on time, because it doesn't produce anything for us.
I'm going to tell you something. On December 11, 2011, Tim Hortons opened a restaurant on the Trans-Canada Highway right in Moosomin. Thirty days later, the retired police officer and the retired nurse handed the keys back to Tim Hortons. They were 25 employees short. They advertised for two months and could not get anyone. Of course, if the foreign worker program doesn't work quickly enough, and it does lag, people can't survive. They can't.
It's the same with me. Two years ago my heart was falling away from the business. I had just built it. It was a 9,000 square foot restaurant. I have a lot of debt. I financed my life away. I wondered why I did it. I was the one flipping eggs. I had 60 employees. I tried to grow it from 23 to 60 to operate, but I could not operate because I could not get workers. They just weren't out there. The other industries were grabbing them up. Food service and hospitality were the last places people wanted to work.
Another factor that compounds the situation of the food service and hospitality industry is the lack of interest among the available local workforce in joining our industry, as I just said, much less pursuing a long-term career in it.
We are a stepping stone for a lot of people. Given the required hard work and modest pay in our industry, the available local workers are more inclined to pursue more rewarding jobs in the fields of oil, potash, construction. But the biggest growth in numbers of businesses is in food service and hospitality during the booms. All the other businesses grow, but we get phone calls at our restaurant from all the other industries literally asking for one of my employees to go for an interview, “Do you want a job?” They are coming right into our businesses and getting people. We are a stepping stone, so we are always 10, 15, 20 people short.
Now a young entrepreneur who wants to go to the bank and build something new can't. My heart isn't there anymore; I don't want to do it, because I'm too stressed and I can't do my job properly.” It is called maintaining disaster, almost; that is how it is. But when the LMO process came around and I was able to subsidize the market, which is at 3.8% unemployment, my entrepreneur juices started flowing again. A year ago, I built a little strip-mall building and opened a Subway.
I know that if I do my best to hire Canadian workers in my area, my government has my back. They are going to make sure I can grow my business in any way possible, because they are going to give me a foreign worker whom I can hire to bring the situation back. We are businesses that aren't taking advantage of the program; we're utilizing it, because we have to.
They are great people. We're trying to turn these people into residents, if that's their interest, through SINP, the Saskatchewan immigrant nominee program. Because of our small population, we want to retain employees and make sure we can grow our businesses.
That's the most of it. I just wanted to come—thanks for the invitation, Mr. Chairman—to tell a little bit of the Saskatchewan and small-town story of the small business guy who struggles, if he doesn't have opportunities, in a very tight labour market in the stepping stone industry, which is food service and hospitality. It is very important.