Well, we want to try to lose the stigma. There are two parts to agriculture and agri-food. There is the seasonal program, which is seasonal due to the nature of the business. The crops are planted in the spring. They grow through the summer. They're harvested in the fall. That's a season. A lot of seasonal workers come. There's a need for that program, but there's also the year-round work that we have: year-round on the fisheries side, year-round on the livestock side, and year-round on the meat-processing side. That's a program we need. We've talked about this in the past. A few years ago, when I testified, we talked about a dedicated agriculture and agri-food workforce program whereby we'd lose the stigma of the “temporary”. It's not temporary.
Our goal is to bring folks here, and if they like Canada and we like them, we create a pathway for them to become a permanent resident, year-round, in Canada. On the agriculture side there are some programs available, especially in light of the new one that just recently opened up as well. The challenge on the meat-processing side is that we have a cap on the percentage of farm workers we can have. That really inhibits the ability to grow or maintain consistent production. The company I work for, Sunterra Farms, has a meat-processing plant in rural Alberta, in Trochu. It's a small town. It's difficult to attract people to rural Canada, period. When we bring in workers, they come and they settle in that community. They've grown that community. It's been a big benefit. Then, once they're there for a year or two, they find that it's home, so they stay there. Trying to get people to move from a city to rural Canada is really difficult.
Our goal is to make sure we have a program that doesn't impede the ability of the businesses to grow or succeed. We grow hogs as well. A lot of hogs we send across the border and grow in the U.S. We'd like to grow more in Canada, but we can't raise more in Canada because we won't be able to process them in our plant. It's already at maximum capacity. We can't grow that plant because we can't hire more workers from overseas; we're already at the 20% cap.
Our goal is to be able to bring those people in, and as soon as they all have a pathway to permanency as quickly as possible, we would no longer count them in terms of the cap, and we would continue to focus that way.