Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the committee for inviting Maple Leaf Foods to participate this morning.
Maple Leaf Foods, as you may know, is a large—I believe the largest—food processor and exporter in Canada. We have 23,000 employees in the country and globally, and we have leading market shares in a range of products—in pork, poultry, bakery, packaged consumer foods. We were recently named one of Canada's ten most admired corporate cultures.
On the business front, we're facing intense competitive pressures, mostly due to the appreciation of the dollar and the rapid rise of input prices, but we're driving a new business model to improve our competitiveness and drive out costs and move up the innovation scale for more consumer value creation.
Our operations in western Canada, especially in Manitoba, are essential to our future. The primary processing of pork as well as many of our secondary processing operations are based in Brandon. We will create 800 to 900 new jobs in Brandon by the end of 2009.
Like most employers in Western Canada, we are facing a major labor shortage. As a large employer, we also have sophisticated and finely tuned strategies to hire and train our employees.
We employ many aboriginal Canadians in western Canada but we want to do better. We have been actively working to establish a role for a first nations coordinator to improve our relations with the first nations community and to develop a more effective recruitment model.
But foreign workers are key. We need them in our plants across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. They're essential to our operations and to the future of the communities that depend on our plants.
We began using the temporary foreign worker program about three years ago. We now employ 1,373 skilled and unskilled workers in these operations.
On the skilled side, we have about 150 workers, particularly in our hog production operations. Across all these operations, we have workers from the U.K., Philippines, and Germany. We will add another 900 foreign workers before the end of 2008.
On the unskilled side, we have about 1,000 workers at our operation in Brandon. These foreign workers come from El Salvador, China, Ukraine, Colombia, and Mauritius. We will shortly receive a group from Honduras.
The recruitment and settlement of these workers present some enormous challenges. We work very closely in collaboration with three levels of government, particularly the City of Brandon. I'm very pleased that my colleague Sandy Trudel is here from the city. She can answer questions in relation to settlement of the workers in Brandon.
In Brandon virtually all of our foreign workers qualify for the provincial nominee program, thereby achieving permanent residency such that they can bring their family members to join them. We invest in these new Canadians with the hope that they will become our long-term employees and successful new residents of Brandon.
Now, our initial recruitment efforts did face some challenges and problems. We made some mistakes and we learned some things. We made some mistakes in China in terms of our dealings with third-party recruiters--exactly some of the issues that were mentioned here this morning. Some of these recruits were charged fees of which we were unaware. But we are now much better organized. We understand the program much better. We have strong working relationships with third parties, particularly the International Organization for Migration. We also understand the program and the requirements for a strong labour market opinion.
As well, we've become better organized ourselves. My colleague Susan Yaeger is here. She is our manager for international recruitment, and has a team of people to support her in all aspects of this process. We have established excellent relationships with HRSDC, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Service Canada, Canadian embassies abroad, provincial ministries of labour and immigration, as well as many union leaders and community stakeholders.
Before going to questions, I want to outline what we see as the challenges and opportunities with respect to the program. We've certainly seen some important improvements, particularly allowing the temporary work permit to be extended to two years from one year. Under the program, there's also been a greater acceptance of unskilled workers, who are very much needed by our industry. But we still find an inconsistent approach to the treatment or the acceptability of unskilled workers when we deal with the provinces under their provincial nominee programs.
I will list some areas of improvement, which we can elaborate on later.
First, we would like the LMO requirements to be more clear and consistent across the provinces, across the Service Canada staff who are processing these LMOs. A standard template would help.
The definition of “occupations under pressure” and the availability of the recently announced fast-track, or electronic, LMO process are not consistent across the provinces. In particular, we face the fact that while in Alberta and B.C. there's now a fast-track LMO for most of the job categories we employ, this is still not the case in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. In Saskatchewan, for example, meat cutter is not deemed an occupation under pressure, and yet the labour issues we face there are no different from those in Alberta or Manitoba.
There ought to be pre-published wage rates for different occupations to avoid the judgments that are made rather arbitrarily with respect to adequacy of wages. While we do not employ foreign workers in Quebec, the Quebec government has decided the meat industry simply doesn't pay adequate wages and therefore has denied the meat industry in Quebec any opportunity to participate in the program, even though it pays wages that are among the highest levels in North America for the meat industry. We've had similar challenges with respect to this in Alberta.
An employer should have the ability to move workers between plants to accommodate different requirements in different plants, if the employee is willing to move. The program should not allow one employer with an approved LMO to poach foreign workers from another employer that has incurred all the effort and expense to recruit them. We're starting to see evidence of that.
At the provincial level there should be more consistency and transparency in the definition of minimum language, education, and work experience requirements--again, this varies across the provincial nominee programs. There should be a consistent national policy on third-party recruiters, exactly the point that's been raised here. We welcome the initiative in Manitoba--it's more tightly regulated--but we're concerned about a patchwork of standards across the country on this that should be harmonized.
Finally, with respect to program administration, again we've seen improvements. We've seen the officials managing the program grow and learn and become more effective. At the same time, there are some significant problems--again, more consistency, transparency, and timeliness in the review and approval processes by Service Canada and HRSDC across the provinces. We need to see clear service standards and performance measures.
For a large, responsible employer like Maple Leaf Foods, we'd like to see an opportunity for concurrent processing of LMOs and work permits. This was announced by Minister Solberg in February 2007, and yet we subsequently learned it is not being applied to unskilled workers for fear there could be exploitation of workers who have to pay for a work visa only to find out their employer has been denied their LMO. We don't think this is at all appropriate in our case. We pay all these fees. There is never a chance that a potential recruit is going to be out of pocket.
After waiting for four months, yesterday we received a letter from HRSDC asking for clarification. The answer points the issue over to CIC. Again, the issue is that nobody's in charge of the file and everybody's denying accountability for an answer. Again, we'll wait to see CIC's answers.
We haven't observed improvement in communications between program managers and the embassies abroad, but this could still be improved. We find there's inconsistent understanding on the part of visa officers as to the parameters of program announcements. Again, there are no consistent service standards and processing.
Finally, we face a major problem in Alberta. The time delay we're facing on LMO approvals has become unacceptable and very difficult for us. We are facing significant plant shortages in labour. We're facing serious questions about the viability of plant operations, and yet the time it's taking to get any answers is far too long. Applications we submitted last November and December have yet to be responded to, and this problem continues to grow.
