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.