Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and standing committee members.
I am a third-generation farmer on our family farm. I'm 42 years old, with an agricultural university education and a young family. I farm with my father, who is 70 years of age and looking to retire. We grow ginseng, tobacco and cash crops on a total of 1,100 acres.
Combined, my father and I own nine farms and lease four others. Annually we employ 20 offshore Mexicans and 68 Canadian workers, plus contract labourers during peak seasons. Our employee hours in a total year rank in the neighbourhood of 73,000 man-hours, and our annual wages are over $1 million.
We rely heavily on SAWP for our main labour force, because it's manual labour and because of the labour shortage in our area. SAWP has been great for us over the years. It has been beneficial, and we've been part of that program for more than 35 years.
Most of our offshore workers are here for up to eight months at a time. Some of them have been working for us for 25-plus years. We pay our offshore employees hourly wages to make sure that they are all making minimum wage per hour. Our bunkhouses are inspected annually and are most times nicer than what most people live in.
We dug into the temporary foreign worker program in 2014 to try to get somebody to help supervise the farms because of the growing paperwork. Since Dad is retiring, I need to spend more time in the office and doing the litigation part, and we need somebody to do my job. I do not have any family coming behind me; my girls are young.
After running job ads for several months with no valid responses, we turned to the temporary foreign worker program to find a suitable candidate. In the spring of 2015, the ServiceOntario office in Simcoe, Ontario told us we would never be able to bring in a temporary foreign worker because we do not qualify and a local labour source should suffice for our operation. While continuing to advertise for a farm supervisor, we received a response from an immigration consultant in Toronto, who helped lead us to hiring Llewellyn.
We first started talking with Llewellyn the fall of 2016. He came for an on-site job interview in the spring of 2017, and in 2018 his work permit was rejected by the High Commission in South Africa after over three months of waiting, for the same reason the other gentleman mentioned: non-sufficient funds to support himself. Well, that doesn't really make sense, because he's coming here to work and has already put forth the money to come to do an on-site interview.
It took another three months to reapply and get his permit, and his family was finally able to get here in the spring in May 2018. The cost for us was over $5,000 in fees, and for Llewellyn it was over $10,000.
Right now, Llewellyn is working on our farm, and his wife works at a local medical centre doing books.
At this time I'd like to turn it over to Llewellyn.