Thank you, Ryan.
The main thing that mushrooms and meat processing have in common is that we both provide full-time permanent jobs. For mushrooms, we've been very excited to work on the agri-food immigration pilot with meat processing. We feel that this is a new recognition and inclusion of agriculture within Canada's immigration strategy.
We hope that with Minister Mendicino and this committee's support, we can fix issues to allow more workers to access it.
We met with the department on Friday, and we're very pleased with the progress in some key areas. I also want to compliment Service Canada's Katie Alexander and her department on the LMIAs. They've really turned the department around. It's very helpful to the farm workers and to the farmers.
We're proud of our mushroom workforce, from entry-level harvesters who require six months or more training, all the way up to growers, who know soil science and compost. Unfortunately, this sort of education on the farm is not recognized by the immigration department.
We were informed on Friday that they cannot help us with what we need to make the education assessment more flexible during COVID for our workers. For this reason, we are now asking for an additional immigration path to be opened up within the agri-food immigration pilot, recognizing two years of Canadian farm and plant experience, due to valuable on-the-job training that the workers receive, to replace the education criteria. We know this is possible, because the new pathway to PR program for the 90,000 does not include any education criteria.
We're asking why we can't try something similar within the agri-food immigration pilot to see if we can fill our 2,750 spots.
We're grateful that our occupations are included in the PR program—the new 90,000. This new program will be subscribed very quickly, though, and our workers are not adept at accessing these programs.
We do not want to see timelines for either the main temporary foreign workers or our ag pilot affected negatively by the new PR program. This is because we're already struggling with work permit issues for the agricultural stream within the temporary foreign worker program. We need the immigration work permit extensions to be improved and benchmarked for our agriculture workers already in Canada, because sometimes it drags out for six to nine months.
We thank the department for helping us on a case-by-case basis, but we have a lot of cases. Recent timeline extensions have seen some improvements. We continue to ask for a 30-day benchmark for our renewals and extensions, so that our temporary foreign workers do not fall to implied status and lose their personal ID, which is happening. They are working to put food on your tables and mine.