Yes, I certainly can.
Immigration is very important labour for our country, but the reality is that we are out in the rural areas, where there isn't public transportation, and very often immigrants are going into the large centres where there are vibrant immigrant communities that support them and can give them all the supports they need.
Therefore, it's very difficult to have them come out to the farm. I have done this; I've supplied work for farms. Very often the people you get are ones who have their very first jobs, who have never worked before, and we can provide some of them with a reference when they're finished. But there just aren't enough of them who are even interested in trying that. We are very much reliant on the temporary foreign workers who come in from other countries. In particular, in horticulture, we tend to use SAWP, which is a stand-alone program that is very well regulated and the contracts are done with the sending countries, so those countries know exactly what their citizens are walking into.
They're long and ongoing programs that have been with us for 50 years. We are well familiar with these workers; many of them come back year after year. If there is a position that opens that we cannot fill and that becomes a year-round position, very often we will go to those employees and see if we can help them immigrate to fill those positions. But the reality is that on my farm, I start harvesting asparagus in May and I finish harvesting carrots and broccoli and squash in October, and that's it. Canadians, rightfully, would like a job that will pay the bills year-round. There is nothing wrong with that, except that it leaves us looking for someone to do a job in a time frame when there is no one available.
Some people have suggested students and that kind of thing, but it also doesn't doesn't encompass the time frame, May to October, for any of the school years that are encompassed. It does mean that we go looking outside of our sources. Certainly, here on our farm, we've been using the SAWP program since the early 1980s, so there's been a demonstrable lack of local labour for 40-plus years.