Human Resources Committee on June 1st, 2016

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Do you see this as a long-term or a short-term labour need?

[Robert Watson]

We clearly see this is as a long-term labour need, because the need is not just for workers to do source code or develop a product, it is for workers to help a hospital or a power company convert its IT system or to help somebody to develop a new system for renewable energy, to coordinate the power coming from windmills or something like that. Every sector is going through massive changes on the IT side.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

With respect to your efforts in terms of education and trying to get Canadians educating Canadians, you don't think that making the full efforts that you are making would be sufficient to meet the needs in the future.

[Robert Watson]

First of all, we have to do more to help with the students coming through the system—not only to get more students to go into the IT sector, but to get more than just young guys going into the IT sector. Diversity, particularly, is what we have to do.

However, even if we had more than our fair share coming through the Canadian system, if we want to start scaling up Canadian companies or have international companies set up centres of excellence here, we have to have more workers. It is a matter of size.

It is not a matter of our industry trying to have them come here. If they don't come here, they will go elsewhere, or they can just sit here and buy fibre optics to develop the product somewhere else. You have to allow them to come here and not only train but also—osmosis—work with Canadians here to train them and teach them what is going on.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Okay. Is your industry using the pathways to permanent residence that are already in place?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Very briefly, please.

[Robert Watson]

Yes, we do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That was a brief answer. I will take that as the answer. Thank you.

Mr. Long, go ahead.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I have a quick thing for Mr. Watson. Can we get that report? Can you send us that report you were talking about?

[Robert Watson]

It is not our report. It is a third party report. We will get that for you, for sure.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Seeing that we are at the bottom of the hour, I would like to thank this panel of witnesses for being here today and joining us and sharing their experiences.

Thank you, Mr. Watson, Mr. Webster, and Ms. Barret. We really appreciate all of your input. We will suspend for a very brief...three minutes, to get the next panel ready to go, and we will come back.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

First of all, thank you very much everybody for being here today.

I would like to make sure everybody is here. We're missing a few, I see.

From HyLife we have Jeremy Janzen, senior director, human resources, and Baerbel Langner, in-house legal counsel for immigration.

We also have, from the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council, Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst, executive director. From the Agriculture and Agri-Food Labour Task Force, we have Mark Wales. From the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada, we have Claudia Colocho and Naveen Mehta, general counsel and director of human rights, equity, and diversity.

Welcome to each of you.

I will start our seven-minute presentations.

Jeremy, are you going to speak? Excellent. You have seven minutes. The floor is yours, sir.

[Jeremy Janzen, Senior Director, Human Resources, HyLife]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to the HUMA committee for having us out here, and thank you especially for looking at this very important issue and this very important program.

I'm here with my colleague. For our company, Baerbel is our legal counsel for immigration. She has lots of great things to say. I think we're sharing seven minutes. If someone can cut me off so that I have four minutes and she has three, that would be great. Just give me the indication, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I'll just raise my hand at four.

[Jeremy Janzen]

Excellent. Sounds good.

Thanks again.

We've provided some submissions for you. There are some PowerPoint slides, but I'm not going to follow the PowerPoint. There's a letter there from a former mayor, from the community where we're operating, and some other documents, so please do take the time. They're good documents. They support what I'm going to be sharing and what Baerbel and the other folks here are going to be sharing.

I want to talk a little about our organization. I'll start by saying that I was at my son's baseball game the other day. He's a young guy. The president of our organization was there, so we sat beside each other. He said he was at a meeting. We're in Manitoba. We're based out of rural Manitoba, and he was at a meeting in Calgary. He was also presenting before a government group. They followed up with him after that meeting and asked what our number one thing right now is at HyLife. He said the number one thing is that we can continue to access workers from overseas—that we have a lot of number one things, but that's the number one of the number ones. That is just to say that this is our number one issue, as an organization, in terms of government programs that help us operate. Let me get to that.

We started in 1994. A bunch of farmers in southeast Manitoba got together and said, “Let's build a hog barn.” They built that hog barn and employed about 10 people. Fast-forward to today, and we're at about 1,850 people throughout Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota.

We didn't rely significantly on the temporary foreign worker program until about 2008. It was 2008 when we moved from being farmers to being people who make food. We raised the pigs, but we sold our hogs to companies like Maple Leaf and other food processors, and they processed our pigs for us. Then we decided we wanted to be fully integrated. Our vision statement is to be the best Canadian food company in the world. To be the best Canadian food company, you have to be a food company, so we needed to buy a food processing plant, or build one.

We bought one. There was a food processing plant in Neepawa, Manitoba. We bought the plant. At the time that plant had 300 employees. We needed that plant to process all of the hogs that we produce. We produce about 1.7 million hogs a year.

With the footprint of the plant and the numbers of people at the plant, they could not process all of those hogs. We needed to essentially add about 800 folks to that plant. The town of Neepawa was 3,000 people at the time. We did scour all of Neepawa for skilled meat cutters and folks to work in our plant. The primary processing position that we needed to fill at the plant was the meat cutter. We scoured the east coast of Canada. We hired some lobster farmers. We hired mushroom farmers from Ontario. We hired construction workers from Alberta. We hired all kinds of folks from all kinds of places. Did we find 800 people? No, we did not. We needed to go overseas to find folks, and we looked for skilled people with a minimum of two years of experience, and preferably three or more.

At the time, this was pre-middle of 2014, so it was before all the changes that happened to the temporary foreign worker program. It was called the LMO process, which I'm sure you're familiar with. We had to go through that. We were fine to go through that.

I'll pass it on to Baerbel, but I'm going to quickly finish my story here. If we would go back in time, if I took you in a DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future and we went back to 2008, with the changes that have happened now, limiting us with the cap calculation, with the one-year duration, we would not exist as an organization today. That's not being melodramatic. There are other hog producers in the prairies that have closed their doors, and we were able to continue to operate because of great people and being able to access those folks locally and overseas.

[Baerbel Langner, In House Legal Counsel, Immigration, HyLIfe]

What you have is a company that now employs 1,800 people in rural parts of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It's a good-news story. This is a company that is continuing to look at opportunities to expand, and primarily into the Asian market, which is also on the mandate of our current government in terms of increasing exports of food products.

The request we have here today is that if we'd like to fulfill that mandate of the government to continue to expand exports of food products into the Asian market, as an example, and we need the workers to be able to do that. What Jeremy didn't get a chance to talk about is the initiatives that we are involved in with Sandy Bay, a first nations community that is about an hour and 15 minutes from the plant in Neepawa that we're working on with Minister Mihychuk, and a meat cutting school that's being planned for that.

I know we don't have a lot of time, and that's a challenge. We'd love to sit down with each and every one of you, and I know we've had the opportunity to do so with MP Cuzner. He was very gracious to listen to our story in more detail, and if any of you would like more information, just call us.

As for the one-year work permits, change them back to two-year work permits. If there's any thought of permanency for any of these programs, we need to go back to the two-year work permit. Even in Manitoba, where we have a wonderful PNP, a provincial nominee program that is processing workers who are there for six months and have worked successfully for six months, there's the situation of putting pressure on the PNP to process them quickly enough to get them through in that year that they're there, because once they're nominated, they're out of the cap and they can extend their work permits.

First and foremost, as you'll see in our PowerPoint slides, it's back to two years as a starting point. The other thing is that the 10%, 20%, 30% cap doesn't work for most industries, but we're here to speak right now about the meat processing industry. The cap calculation is nonsense. In the materials we've provided to you—I won't say it's nonsense; it's complicated. It's discretionary. It's not clear. You may not want to click through and look for schedule E, which does the calculation, so I've provided it to you. If you have a look, you'll see quickly that the cap calculation has challenges because it purports to count the workers on the floor as well as the ones you're asking for in the LMIA, as well as the folks you might have waiting to be deployed in a former LMIA.

You're triple-counting, arguably. There's a bit of discretion in the calculation, but that's what it boils down to. If we're going to go to 10%, guess what? We may be at 3%. That's a whole discussion I'm happy to have with any of you. I do want to give kudos to the department because they've been working with me on this point. I met with Janet Goulding again this morning, and I know she and Jacquie Manchevsky are further reviewing it, and that's good news.

I will be quick to finish up. The cap should not exist, especially in the meat industry. A simple solution might be to have the meat cutters have the same exemptions as the swine techs do, so they would be out of the cap if there is still a desire to continue with a cap calculation.

The other option, of course, is to move it out of this department, put it under Minister McCallum's mandate, and have an LMIA exemption for those industries that are found to be suitable, which, based on the research, we would submit the meat processing industry is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

[Baerbel Langner]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We'll move on to Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst for seven minutes, please.

[Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst, Executive Director, Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council]

I am the executive director of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council. Thanks for inviting the council to speak with you today about the importance of temporary foreign workers working within the agriculture and agri-food industry. Our testimony as part of this review is important, as over 40% of all temporary foreign workers who come into Canada work within this industry. We're a huge industry and a huge user of the program.

The agriculture and agri-food industry, including the seafood sector, is a very large and important contributor to Canada’s economy and its success. It encompasses several industries, including primary agriculture, aquaculture, food and beverage processing, etc. The sector employs over two million Canadians and accounts for one in eight jobs in Canada, or 12% of total employment. Regionally, the industry is an important source of economic activity in many provinces and contributes over $108 billion to Canada’s GDP. It is a huge driver of our Canadian economy as well as our provincial economies. It's a high-impact sector, with incredible growth potential as demand for Canadian food and agriculture products increases worldwide. That's a really important point.

Although the industry is in high demand, industry stakeholders like HyLife have expressed significant concern about the immediate labour challenges facing the industry and businesses within the industry, and the risks to their viability and growth into the future. The industry needs workers in order to remain globally competitive, to take advantage of export opportunities, and to ensure the security, safety, and sustainability of food for all Canadians.

Based on extensive labour market information research with industry, the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council has clarified the labour shortage situation and its impacts for the primary agriculture side of the industry. Ten years ago, the gap between the demand for workers and worker supply was approximately 30,000 workers. Today that gap is 59,000 workers, which means it has nearly doubled in 10 years. Based on increasing demand both domestically and internationally for Canada's food and agriculture products, the gap is expected to double again in the next 10 years, to 114,000 workers by 2025.

Although employers are expending extensive efforts to recruit and hire workers, Canadians are less available in rural areas and less interested in agriculture-related occupations. The industry currently mitigates this large worker shortage by hiring temporary foreign workers. The agriculture industry today is supported by 45,600 temporary foreign workers. These workers are accessed through the seasonal agricultural worker program, as well as the agricultural and regular streams of the temporary foreign worker program. Without these workers, businesses would struggle and Canadian businesses and jobs would be at risk.

The use of temporary foreign workers helps alleviate the gap between available agricultural jobs and available workers, but it doesn’t eliminate the problem. Even with the use of temporary foreign workers, there are still significant unfilled vacancies within the industry. There are 26,400 positions that are required to support businesses, yet they are going unfilled by either Canadians or temporary foreign workers. Currently the agriculture industry has the highest job vacancy rate of any industry in Canada, with an unfilled job vacancy rate of 7%, the national average being 1.8%. The council’s research clarifies that Canadian producers are losing $1.5 billion annually, or 3% of the industry’s total farm cash receipts, due to unfilled job vacancies. The research clarifies that worker shortages are critical today, with dire consequences for business viability, industry sustainability, and future growth.

When Canadians are not available, temporary foreign workers play a critically important role in meeting the needs of agricultural employers. Temporary foreign workers allow the sector to reduce the labour gap, particularly at seasonal peaks. Given the projected future labour gap, the need for foreign workers will grow. The council, along with 75 other industry associations, including HyLife, supports the implementation of the Canadian agriculture and agri-food workforce action plan, a recommendations report developed by the industry that is designed to address the immediate and pervasive issues of the inadequate supply of workers currently impeding businesses in Canada.

The effort is guided by a national labour task force, and includes recommendations that are practical and essential to ensuring the safety, sustainability, and affordability of food for all Canadians and that support Canada’s continued position as a leader and significant contributor to food production for the whole world.

Mark Wales, the council chair, will now present further information about the important role that temporary foreign workers play within the sector, especially at this time when the industry is facing such significant job vacancies. He is also the co-chair of Canada’s agriculture and agri-food national labour task force.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Wales.

[Mark Wales, Labour Task Force, Agriculture, Agriculture and Agri-Food Labour Task Force]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members, for inviting the Agriculture and Agri-Food Labour Task Force to participate in your temporary foreign worker program review.

I am a farmer from Elgin County, Ontario. I’m the chair of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council and the co-chair of Canada’s Agriculture and Agri-Food Labour Task Force.

The agriculture industry is a high-impact industry that is facing very critical workforce shortages, as Portia has mentioned. Currently the industry relies on international workers through the temporary foreign worker program to fill a portion of its vacant positions. Based on extensive research and industry consultation, improvements to accessing international workers are required for the agriculture and agri-food industry to succeed and grow.

The current mechanisms of the temporary foreign worker program are restrictive and difficult to use. Industry recommends that the agriculture and agri-food industry be removed from the existing temporary foreign worker program and a new, dedicated Canadian agriculture and agri-food workforce program be created to address the unique aspects of our industry. I am pleased to share the industry’s concerns and recommendations with you today to inform you on your review.

The agricultural and agri-food industry is a large and very impactful sector of the Canadian economy, contributing almost 7% to our country’s GDP. It is also the key driver of most provincial economies, producing food and agricultural products that support ever-increasing demand in Canada and around the world. Unfortunately, at this time the industry is struggling to address a both protracted and extensive labour shortage. Businesses are unable to find Canadians to work on their farms and in their processing facilities.

The industry, as Portia has mentioned, has tens of thousands of vacant positions that remain unfilled, vacancies that cost the industry billions of dollars in lost sales. As a farmer, there is nothing more discouraging than planting a crop and not having enough people available at key harvest times. That leads you to make decisions to not grow certain things.

Industry stakeholders have expressed significant concern about the immediate labour challenges facing Canadian agriculture and agri-food businesses and the risks to their viability and their growth in the future. This issue is critical and is affecting all aspects of the industry, including all commodities across the value chain. These shortages mean significant risks to the sector.

This issue has been well researched and documented in the Canadian agriculture and agri-food workforce action plan and is supported by the new agriculture labour market information research that the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council has recently released, which Portia spoke to.

The agriculture and agri-food industry has many unique workforce challenges that contribute to the current shortage. The industry, as mentioned, operates mainly in rural locations with limited availability to Canada’s workforce. Jobs involve handling live animals and plants, which will perish without dedicated attention. There are seasonal aspects to the work because of Canada’s climate, and the work is sometimes physical and strenuous. For these reasons, the industry struggles to meet its labour demands.

Hiring Canadian workers is the first priority of our industry. Employers expend extensive efforts to recruit and retain Canadians. However, when Canadian workers are not available to meet the workforce requirements for the industry, international workers are sought as needed to fill vacant positions.

The agriculture and agri-food industry uses various streams of the temporary foreign worker program, including the seasonal agricultural worker program, otherwise known as SAWP. Commodities not on the national commodities list and processors use the main part of the temporary foreign worker program.

The seasonal agricultural worker program is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. SAWP is one of the longest-standing and most successful labour mobility programs in North America. Authorities from Canada and each participating country in the Caribbean and Mexico co-operate to run the program, in close coordination with employers, all the while safeguarding the labour rights of employees. Current research clarifies the value of the program to Canadian businesses and to the workers who participate in the program and bring their earnings back to their home countries. Both the SAWP and the agricultural stream programs have regulated wages, regulated housing, and a serious compliance regime. The labour task force recommends no changes to SAWP.

Not all agriculture and agri-food businesses can access the SAWP program, so other streams of the temporary foreign worker program are also used to fill vacant positions. The streams and rules are cumbersome and complex, yet access to international workers is essential to Canada’s farmers and processors. Without foreign workers, agriculture and agri-food businesses would have too many unfilled positions and would close.

Research clarifies that international workers secure Canadian jobs: every foreign worker in the seasonal agricultural program creates two additional Canadian jobs, every beef sector worker creates 4.2 additional Canadian jobs, and every butcher creates six additional Canadian trimmer jobs in meat processing plants.

These are important statistics.

When Canadian workers are not available, access to international workers is vital to meet Canada's food and agricultural production. The need to improve access to international workers is clear. Recent changes to the temporary foreign worker program have made things worse and have resulted in extensive challenges for the industry that are constraining the ability of Canadian agriculture businesses to succeed.

The industry struggles with the cumulative duration rule, which blocks Canadian-trained, uniquely skilled seasonal workers, such as beekeepers and grain farmers, from returning to their jobs after four years. These are positions that businesses depend on and for which they are unable to find Canadians.

Additionally, the 30-20-10 cap on the number of temporary foreign workers within a business is restricting operations such as meat processing plants, which are already facing excessive shortages.

Furthermore, there is a need to improve pathways to permanency to allow successful foreign employees access to viable ways to become permanent residents in Canada. Businesses want to keep their workers, and they are supporting them in various ways, including extensive language training. They are unable to retain their workers when pathways to permanency are limited or non-existent for some agricultural commodities.

When farms and processing plants are unable to fill positions, their ability to continue to operate is jeopardized. This is bad for business and bad for Canada.

Canada's Agriculture and Agri-Food Labour Task Force has expended extensive effort reviewing and analyzing workforce issues facing all aspects of the industry. The task force is composed of industry representatives from every aspect of the agriculture and agri-food value chain. This group has documented a solutions-oriented action plan that includes clear recommendations on much-needed improvements in securing workers for the industry. The agriculture and agri-food workforce action plan is backed by over 75 agriculture industry associations.

I'm going to conclude because time is limited.

Canada depends on the agriculture and agri-food industry in terms of economic activity and the valuable food and products it produces. Currently the ability of the industry to thrive is being thwarted because there are extensive job vacancies. The labour task force recommends that government partner with industry to fix the labour situation and deliver on the Canadian agriculture and agri-food workforce action plan to allow Canada to expand its market share and become the food supplier of choice to the world.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

We're moving on now to representatives from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union of Canada.

You have seven minutes.

[Naveen Mehta, General Counsel, Director of Human Rights, Equity and Diversity, United Food and Commercial Workers Union Canada]

Good afternoon.

Mr. Chair, vice-chairs, and members of the standing committee, thank you for the opportunity to present our views today on behalf of UFCW Canada. We've also provided the standing committee with broader written submissions.

My name is Naveen Mehta. I'm general counsel and director of human rights for UFCW Canada. In this role I've had the privilege and honour of advocating for a sustainable and progressive immigration system for the last decade.

As you may know, UFCW Canada is one of the largest private sector unions in the country, with thousands of migrant worker members and more than any other union in Canada. We're in a unique position in that we can give you a genuine account of how our immigration system could work for the benefit of Canadians, the Canadian economy, employers, and workers.

I have the privilege of being joined by Claudia Colocho, who is a member of our union and of Maple Leaf Foods in Brandon. She's going to detail her experiences as a temporary foreign worker, or migrant worker, in a unionized workplace where both the union and the employer work together to ensure utilization of a robust provincial nominee program for almost every migrant worker member of that workplace. Claudia is here to give you a sense of what a sustainable and progressive immigration regime could look like when it comes to being aligned with labour market needs and providing a significant opportunity for permanent residency.

Given the working relationship between UFCW Canada and our employers, such as Maple Leaf meats, Olymel, HyLife, and Cargill, Claudia's story is not a sad one, as opposed to the heart-wrenching experiences of other migrant workers in non-unionized settings that you've heard over the last two weeks.

With that, I'd like to turn it over to Claudia.