Thank you so much for inviting the Canadian Meat Council to testify today.
We represent federally inspected meat processors and packers across Canada. Our essential workforce has kept us fed through this pandemic. This is, in large part, thanks to the many temporary foreign workers who work in our plants.
Committee members, there is nothing temporary about the jobs in the meat processing sector. Our jobs are full time, permanent and mostly all unionized, yet we have a program that is called “temporary”. I know you've heard this before.
Currently, we're looking at over 4,000 empty butcher stations at our plants across Canada. That's actually only a snapshot, considering we only surveyed about a dozen members. This has increased from 1,600 two years ago. We have some plants with a job vacancy of over 20%.
I challenge any other industry or sector to compare the work and the tremendous efforts our meat processors are making for recruitment and retention. Their efforts go above and beyond to try to recruit Canadians, yet we are still faced with this shortage.
Our meat processors pay excellent wages and they are all unionized jobs. Butchers can start at a minimum, but they move up to $28 per hour. Supervisors can earn between $49,000 and $85,000. Again, all wages are union approved. Despite our best efforts, we have this labour shortage.
Trust me, every single meat processor in this country would love nothing more than to hire Canadians. You can imagine the financial and time burden that would be alleviated. Canadians just don't want to work in meat plants. Even our country's top butcher program, Olds College in Alberta, has told us this. Their students don't want to do internships with us, nor do they want to take our jobs.
We're stuck using this temporary foreign worker program. It's the only way to place butchers in rural Canada for meat processing plants. I'd like to point out that every temporary worker we give a path to PR to stays in rural Canada with our employers for over 10 years. Our research shows this.
There are extremely limited immigration options for our workers, whose skills and experience in meat cutting are not recognized by the immigration department.
We have a cap issue. The cap, as you all know, is applied to us. We can only hire up to 10%. It's a handful. It may be 20% to fill job vacancies. For the plants that are at 20% job vacancy, with the cap at 10%.... You can see how the math just doesn't add up. That is just to fill current vacancies and turnover. It doesn't include any plans for expansion.
We are not allowed to use any other program because our workers don't fit the express entry or the provincial nominee program, which is focused on university education, not meat cutting skills. It's unfair for our meat processors and it's unfair for Canadian consumers. It's limiting our ability to have made-in-Canada protein. It means that more meat is being processed in the U.S. and in other countries. We have more food imports coming to Canada.
If you can picture a beef or pork shipment going abroad to another country, you might as well imagine that in that shipment and in that box there are jobs, rural growth, economic growth and GDP. We're not just exporting meat. We're sending jobs to other countries when we could actually be doing those value-added cuts here in Canada. Plants could expand. This cap is really capping our processing capacity and our sector's growth potential.
We're thankful for the agri-food immigration pilot that we got to launch a year ago, but it's just not working. Limited applications have been processed. We've been trying to correct issues for the past year. Thankfully, we had a good meeting with the minister, and we have a working group that is working it.