Good afternoon. I am the corporate director of human resources at Olymel.
I actively participate in anything to do with recruitment. I will mainly talk about the temporary foreign worker program, or TFWP. Olymel feels that the TFWP does not make it possible to adequately meet its current workforce needs in the regions. Mr. Banville talked to you earlier about the high number of positions we want to fill.
Our brief submitted yesterday contains more recommendations on a number of issues, and I will not discuss all of them. I will focus today on the two biggest issues—the limit set by the TFWP when it comes to the hiring of temporary foreign workers and their access to permanent residence.
The TFWP arbitrarily set at 10% the percentage of temporary foreign workers we can hire, and that is a major problem for us. We have come up with a recommendation on that limit. Since our slaughterhouse activities are a logical continuation of primary agriculture, as Mr. Banville pointed out, we want the limits to exempt the positions related to primary agriculture listed under the national occupational classification, such as food processing labourers and industrial butchers.
Should our recommendation related to this be rejected, we also propose to increase the limit to 30%, which would apply to the entire company, not only to the workplace. This could be another solution, but we by far prefer the first recommendation I submitted to you.
As for the permanent selection of temporary foreign workers, Olymel applauds the measures adopted by the federal government, whether we are talking about pilot programs or recently announced measures to allow temporary foreign workers doing essential work to apply for permanent residence. However, nearly all of our temporary foreign workers are currently unable to participate in those two programs because of the Canada–Quebec accord.
Quebec recently created a pilot program related to processing—