Thanks, Luc.
I appreciate being invited to attend this evening. I'll just give you a little bit of history in regard to how beneficial the temporary foreign worker program and the Atlantic pilot program have been.
Over the last 10 years, my group of six restaurants throughout Atlantic Canada—P.E.I., Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick—have utilized the program to bring in over 50 temporary foreign workers who have made their way through into the provincial nomination program, and then through to, in many cases, their PR. It's been successful, it's been rewarding, and it has been a tremendous help to the consistent operation of our businesses. It's been very appreciated by the Canadian component who have worked for us.
Prior to the program, we were struggling to maintain operation and closing parts of our dining rooms just because we could not get the manpower and the fuel to put into the system and the restaurants. We would cut back hours. In one of the travel plazas, which is the Big Stop, we went from running 24 hours to 18 hours because we just couldn't find enough people. Consequently, Canadians lost positions as servers in those situations as well.
Life started to return to normal once we started to utilize the program and had the benefit of having the temporary foreign workers in the program. Then they became provincial nomination certificate holders as well and permanent residents eventually.
Our business activities became very professional, and it was easier to operate. The good story about that is that many of the Canadians who work side by side with the culinary talent we were able to bring in ended up being inspired by some of the skills sets they were able to work with and consequently moved on to get their own culinary degree. I've been able to work with them, see them develop in the industry as a whole, and become chefs in higher-end hotels or higher-end restaurants.
The previous program worked well, and I thank you for all of the work we did with that one. I was really pleased with the Atlantic pilot program, excited to get engaged with that, and start to use it. It slowed down the applications for the LMIAs in the process, because we had the opportunity to use the Atlantic immigration pilot program. Then it all stopped and got to a snail's pace as far as the processing was concerned.
The application process is extremely complex. If you want details in regard to that, I'm open to help you with all of that. We handle them all in-house with one of our administrative people, so it's not an immigration consultant we use. I've become very familiar with the process.
Under the new program, there's language testing that needs to be done and the credentials that need to be done. That has to be facilitated by the candidate in the country they're in. They have to find a spot where they can get that done in the country where they reside. That could be a two-week or two-month situation. Then they need the money to do their language testing skills. That's followed by a skills credential process that they need to complete online to validate that they fit the skill set required in the occupation. After this is all completed, then they have to do a settlement process, which is an online process and quite often very intimidating for the candidate. We can only help them with so much of it. You have to rely on them to fill out each piece of this complex process. That's where it became very difficult.