I can maybe step in and answer for food and beverage manufacturing.
On the retirement question, you're correct. We always anticipated a retirement cliff. Even before COVID started, we were starting to look at these issues to try to understand how we make sure we have the workforce of the future.
With COVID, though, the retirement cliff seemed to advance by a number of years. Going into COVID, we were facing about a 10% structural vacancy rate. In the last two years alone, that has increased to 20%. We have seen an exodus out of our sector and in many cases out of the workforce itself.
With respect to local workers, this certainly has been a challenge that a lot of industries are facing. In some respects, it appears we are almost at full employment levels. At this point in time, we really have to understand how we can expand the Canadian workforce. There are a number of different things.
One is looking at groups of people who are just not ready for the workplace right now. How do we remove the barriers they're facing and really empower them to join the workforce, whether in my sector or others?
In the past we've spent some time talking about how we need to do that. I guess crisis is a great motivator. It's becoming clear to everybody that we have to get very serious about how can we identify groups of Canadians who are not participating in the workforce and how we can help them get to that point.
In terms of the foreign workers, we are not a huge relier on foreign workers. Less than 10% of our workers are TFWs. The challenge we really face as a sector is that most of our workers don't qualify for immigration streams. They wouldn't gather enough points. Again, we face this challenge with our immigration streams and our point systems where we've chosen to focus on particular groups of workers or workers with specific skills.
We need skilled trades and scientists, but often we need general labourers and, for the most part, they can't get in through the immigration system. Often our companies will use the TFW program not for temporary jobs, but to bring people into Canada and then try to find pathways to permanent residency for them.
In our emergency foreign worker program, we're asking, frankly, for no more than a band-aid. We really need to start to understand how we can structure our foreign worker programs so we are attracting and bringing people into the country who can settle here, bring their families with them, really become Canadians and contribute to different Canadian communities.