Excellent. Thanks very much. Thanks for allowing us to speak to the committee today.
The mushroom industry is a very labour-intensive industry. Part of that is because mushrooms actually double in size every day. They require ongoing harvesting all the time. Our mushrooms are grown in climate-controlled facilities in farms across Canada. We contribute close to a billion dollars to the Canadian economy and create nearly 4,000 permanent full-time jobs. We employ 900 workers through the temporary foreign workers agriculture stream when we cannot find Canadians.
Canada's mushroom growers are high tech. We use state-of-the-art technologies to grow the best mushrooms in the world. Because of this, and because of our passionate workforce, we have Canada's fourth-highest produce export. We're actually the second-largest exporter of mushrooms in the world by value.
Our report shows that our mushroom harvesters can earn up to $29 an hour. Supervisors earn between $35,000 to $80,000. These are competitive wages. They are not cheap labour.
Our mushroom farms are constantly recruiting, yet we have around a 20% job vacancy, in spite of all of our efforts. We have a permanent problem, yet we are forced to use the temporary foreign worker program, which is very expensive. Research shows that the cost is close to $8,500 per worker to bring in our temporary foreign workers, and because of COVID-19, we believe that these costs are even higher now.
We need to continue to use temporary foreign workers to fill these job vacancies for food, because the industry and our workers do not have the same access to immigration programs that other sectors have. For mushroom farms, one of the top immigration barriers for our workers is the education criteria that's in the federal express entry and applied to many of the provincial nomination programs.
I'll pass it over to Janet.