Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for inviting us here today. I don't have a brief, so what I will do is try as best I can to give you a perspective from a business standpoint, and in particular our business' standpoint.
I am with Sunterra Meats. We have a series of companies in the province—agriculture, meat processing, and retail—and I'm the general manager of the Innisfail plant. We've been involved in hiring foreign workers for I guess about two and a half years now. I would characterize our experience with the temporary foreign worker program, at least as it relates to our business, as nothing short of fantastic. That would be the way I would characterize it.
Back in 2003, BSE in our country hit and created a great number of problems for the livestock sector, in particular the cattle or ruminant sector. Our company, being in the meat processing industry, tried to be a part of the solution at that time and attempted to expand our business, in particular to be able to process additional cattle at a really crucial time.
We found, when we embarked on that expansion, that the ensuing labour challenges that we had in Alberta and in our sector were a huge stumbling block to our being able to deliver on the strategy we'd embarked on, as far as that growth and our being able to play a reasonable role in assisting with the glut of cattle, if you will, and the BSE issue that our agricultural sector was facing were concerned.
At the same time, our sister plant in Trochu, which is a hog processing facility, was experiencing the same or even greater labour challenges, and in 2006 actually had to discontinue operations at their plant for a good 50% of their business, in particular the value-added part of their business, just because the labour challenges made it so difficult.
We developed a strategy around utilizing temporary foreign workers as part of our go-forward strategy for not only stabilizing but trying to grow our business. Today we're very stable, from a labour standpoint. If I look back on the challenges we faced in 2005-06 and at where we are today, I'd clearly say it's been a huge success. The temporary foreign worker program in our business has been a huge success.
One of the things we've noticed, from a people standpoint, is that the folks we have working for us always bear the brunt of labour shortages, particularly in our type of industry—it's a manual labour industry—and morale takes a hit. We lost a lot of what I would say were very good people, people we'd invested a fair amount of time in, from a skills standpoint.
We're actually seeing some of those folks come back, because word travels pretty quickly. They understand that our business has stabilized and that from a labour standpoint there aren't the same strains and pressures that were placed on them when they were with us previously. We've seen several of the people we had with us previously come back to our business. That's a huge boost for us, too, because they come back with skills that we already helped them to develop.
I would say that we don't really view it as a temporary program. We very much see it as a program that will be part of our strategy at least for the foreseeable future, and I see that as being several years, not individual years. So from our perspective, the provincial nominee program that exists here in Alberta is very much a part of our go-forward strategy. We recruit and select on the basis that we want these folks to be a part of our team long term, not just on a temporary basis, obviously recognizing that in some cases it will be temporary, but we really don't see it as a temporary strategy from our business standpoint.
I would say that as far as managing the foreign recruiting process is concerned, clearly the processing times we face are extremely slow, and sometimes they burn up a lot of resources just from our constantly trying to stay in contact with the government folks. Their resources are stretched at the best of times, and processing times in the embassies seem to be even slower yet and less predictable. When you're trying to build a business strategy that involves labour and have the qualified labour going forward, that predictability is very important. But we're lacking, as far as predictability is concerned, at this stage of the game.
I would also say that from a resource or a program perspective, we're looking at where dollars are best put from a training standpoint. Clearly, in the foreign worker arena, we have a lot of language challenges, etc. Those are areas I think that should be given consideration going forward, in terms of how those temporary foreign workers are supported through a variety of other government training programs.
That's my overview.