Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Marcel Groleau, and I am the general president of the Union des producteurs agricoles, or UPA, which represents Quebec’s 29,000 farms. Joining me is Denis Roy, an immigration consultant at the UPA.
From the outset, we want the Government of Canada to understand one thing: temporary foreign farm workers are essential workers not only for Canada’s agri-food sector but also for the food security of Canadians. The pandemic has made clear to everyone just how important they are. I think every federal department and agency in the country now understands that.
In responding to the pandemic’s many challenges and in making decisions, the government has regularly failed to take foreign farm workers into account. To this day, numerous problems persist when it comes to COVID 19 testing, which farm workers must self-administer while in quarantine. The decision to use a Toronto-based company to serve people in Quebec has had disastrous consequences. We hope that Ms. Bibeau’s announcement today will remedy the situation, which has been very hard on farm employers in Quebec and on foreign workers.
Now that I have made that important point, I will turn to the labour market impact assessments, or LMIAs, and the application process.
The UPA operates 12 agricultural employment centres across Quebec, which, every single day, help 2,500 farmers find workers to alleviate the labour shortage.
Until 2015, the UPA had been the federal government's partner for 40 years, receiving all LMIA applications from farm employers in Quebec. Today, the UPA helps 1,500 employers overcome the administrative complexities of filling out 3,000 LMIA applications a year. We are thoroughly familiar with the process.
The unemployment rate in Quebec is currently 6.4%, the lowest in the country. Agricultural production is growing annually by 8.7%. In regions like Chaudière-Appalaches, a farming area in central Quebec, the unemployment rate is close to 4%. The labour shortage is expected to last for at least the next decade. It is no surprise that the number of temporary foreign workers in Quebec is increasing 10% annually. That number will only go up, so it’s time to reconsider the administrative requirements of the seasonal agricultural workers program.
Employers prefer to hire the same workers, those who come back every year at the same time to do the same work. Why not allow those employers to submit LMIA applications for work permits that would be valid for two seasons, two years? That would be an easy way to reduce the red tape for employers, workers and public servants, one that would make a real difference. A change like that would cut down on processing time and the valuable time lost with each of the many steps in the process. All that extra time compounds the stress farmers are already under. Every hiccup along the way can delay the desired arrival of the foreign worker, or worse, jeopardize their arrival.
Bear in mind that a farmer’s work depends on the weather, a factor they have no control over.
With respect to a more streamlined process, we submitted recommendations to the department in 2019 to simplify the LMIA application. We identified at least 24 questions that could be removed from applications involving the agricultural sector. That would shorten the form from 12 to six pages.
Currently, employers and workers have to negotiate three different programs. In Quebec, our position is clear: reforms should be based on the farm stream program. We therefore recommend simplifying the process by removing the list of agricultural products eligible under the program and referring to the definition of primary agriculture set out in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. It took at least 10 years for maple syrup production to be added to the list.
Must we remind the government that Canada’s agricultural sector includes a multitude of family farms? The UPA works actively to help preserve and develop sustainable human-scale farms.
Nevertheless, the biggest challenge these small businesses face is accessing enough labour to meet their production needs. Small farms are not in a position to offer a worker 40 or 50 hours a week. The government needs to change farm program rules to allow several farmers to share a single worker. Such a measure could easily be implemented on dairy or livestock farms, for instance. A farm worker could split their time between two farms, as per the employers’ needs and priorities; they could do the morning milking shift on one farm and the night milking shift on another. Of course, the farms would have to be close to one another.
Of course, the farms would have to be close to one another.