Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 3rd, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Good afternoon, everyone. I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 27 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

The Board of Internal Economy requires that committees adhere to the following health protocols. Please maintain a physical distance of at least two metres from others. Wear a non-medical mask unless seated, and preferably wear a mask at all times, including when seated. Maintain proper hand hygiene by using the hand sanitizer provided in the committee room, and regularly wash your hands well with soap. As the chair, I will enforce these measures, and I thank you all for your co-operation.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of January 25, 2021. I would like to outline a few rules to follow.

Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You may speak in the official language of your choice. At the bottom of your screen, you may choose to hear floor audio, English or French. With the latest Zoom version, you do not need to select a corresponding language channel before speaking. The “raise hand” feature is on the main toolbar, should you wish to speak.

This is a reminder that all comments should be addressed through the chair. When you are not speaking, please keep your microphone muted. The committee clerk and I will maintain a speaking list for all members.

With this, the committee is resuming the study of the labour market impact assessment under the temporary foreign workers program.

I would like to welcome our witnesses who are appearing before the committee today. Thanks to all the witnesses who have joined in today.

Today, in our first panel, we will be hearing from the Canadian Meat Council, represented by Marie-France MacKinnon, vice-president, public affairs and communications. We will also be hearing from Aliments Asta Inc., represented by Stéphanie Poitras, executive director, and Édith Laplante, director, human resources. The last witnesses for this panel will be the Canadian Mushroom Growers' Association, represented by Ryan Koeslag, executive vice-president, and Janet Krayden, workforce expert.

The witnesses will have five minutes for their opening remarks. If there is more than one witness for any particular organization, members can share those five minutes with their colleagues.

We will start with the Canadian Meat Council, and we will hear from Marie-France MacKinnon, vice-president, public affairs and communications.

The floor is yours. Please begin. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Marie-France MacKinnon, Vice-President, Public Affairs and Communications, Canadian Meat Council]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Ms. MacKinnon. Could you please move the microphone a little up?

Thank you. Please resume.

[Marie-France MacKinnon]

The bottom line is the cap issue. At the four-month mark, we want our workers to be removed from the cap, so that we don't have to face LMIA renewals and work permit extensions. We hope this will be addressed, but the bottom line is that we've lost a year in a three-year pilot program.

We've had great support from all parties. This isn't a partisan issue. It's an economic issue for Canada. Allowing us more flexibility with this cap is just good public policy. Canada has set an ambitious target to grow its agri-food exports to $75 billion by 2025. Meat processors are well-poised to help reach that number, but the roadblock is our cap.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Ms. MacKinnon.

We'll now proceed to Aliments Asta, Inc. We'll ask Ms. Poitras, the executive director, to please begin.

You will have five minutes. You can share the time with your colleague.

[Stéphanie Poitras, Executive Director, Aliments Asta Inc.]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for inviting me here today.

I'm going to speak in French, because I'll be able to tell you more in less time. I speak some English, but not perfectly.

Asta Foods is a family business with 500 employees. We do slaughter and primary processing of pork. We do not do secondary processing. We sell our products to distributors, large grocery chains and further processors, but between 60% and 65% of our production is exported to 35 countries. So a lot of our production is sent to many countries around the world.

We have also invested in pork production. In fact, 50% of the pigs that come to Asta Foods come from farms that we are associated with. We have also invested in a feed mill, a refrigerated meat transport company and several maternity facilities. These investments have ensured the sustainability of Asta Foods.

As I said earlier, Asta Foods is a family business. My father built it after buying out the facilities of a company that went bankrupt in 1982. When we started, we were processing about 300 animals a day. Now we process 4,100 hogs a day. So it's really a nice business. My father is a visionary and he is passing the torch to us. My brother and I have taken over and the transfer is complete.

So it's a business that could really thrive, but unfortunately the lack of workers is very stressful for me. The future is very stressful to me. It's not because the business is not financially healthy or because it hasn't made good investments; it's because of the lack of workers. Right now, I have to throw meat in the garbage because I'm short of workers. I have to throw away a lot of offal and fat, and sometimes even heads, because I don't have enough workers. I'm losing about $3 million a month. That's not per year, that's per month: that's $3 million per month I'm throwing away. We are facing a challenge.

At Asta Foods, we take care of our employees. We are a family business. I know the names of all my employees, even though I have 500, because I've been working with them since I was a little girl. We have a lot of Canadian employees, and I want to continue to have them. As Ms. MacKinnon, whom I know well, said, it's very expensive to get immigrants to work here. So it's not the first option at Asta Foods, but they are the ones who have saved us so far.

I admit to being very stressed about what is in store for us in the next few years, and even this summer. It's so bad, I don't even know if I'll be able to maintain production every day this summer. I may have to slow down my production line. Meanwhile, there are pigs piling up in the barns. It's a very stressful situation for producers as well.

In the Lower St. Lawrence, there are several large companies in the same sector. We are far from the major centres, where most of the immigrants are. We can't bus people from Montreal or Quebec City to work here. It's not attractive for them to move away from their families and drive four and a half hours, or nine hours to get here and back.

[Édith Laplante, Director, Human Resources, Aliments Asta Inc.]

Excuse me.

Mr. Chair, we had five minutes for both, right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Yes. You have one minute and a few seconds left.

[Stéphanie Poitras]

I'm going to close on this. There are several large companies in several large sectors, so we need a lot of workers.

I'll yield the floor to Mrs. Laplante.

[Édith Laplante]

Thank you very much.

Forgive me for interrupting you, Mrs. Poitras.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'll try to be brief.

Despite all of our constant and innovative recruitment efforts, we have a shortage of workers. The temporary foreign worker program is our last resort, but it is not enough to solve our labour problems. It hinders our development and makes it difficult to turnover regular employees and manage retirements.

Our main recommendation is on the limit of temporary foreign workers we can hire. This is the root of the problem, as we indicated in the brief we provided you. We know that primary agriculture-related positions are exempt from the limit. However, we believe that slaughter activities are a logical continuation of primary agriculture. Without livestock, there is no slaughter, and without slaughter, there is no livestock. So we, too, would like to have this exemption from the limit.

If this is not possible, we would really like to see the current 10% limit increased to 20%, or even 30%. This would help us ensure not only the sustainability of the company and the continuity of its operations, but also its development.

On the other hand, the permanent selection of temporary foreign workers is a problem in Quebec, because the pilot program excludes temporary foreign workers from Quebec. I would point out that 80% of our employees who are temporary foreign workers would like to obtain permanent residency, but we would like to see...

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Ms. Laplante. Your time is up. You'll get another opportunity when we go into our round of questioning.

We will now hear from Canadian Mushroom Growers' Association. We will start with Mr. Koeslag, executive vice-president.

You have five minutes, and you can share your time with Ms. Krayden.

[Ryan Koeslag, Executive Vice-President, Canadian Mushroom Growers' Association]

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.

[Janet Krayden, Workforce Expert, Canadian Mushroom Growers' Association]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Ms. Krayden, but your time is up. You will get another opportunity when we go into a round of questioning.

[Janet Krayden]

I'm actually done. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

We will now go to our first round of questioning.

Mr. Allison, you will have six minutes.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I'll begin with Ms. MacKinnon.

We hear this time and time again. This is not the first time and you are not the first witness to say, “Listen. We could do so much better as an industry if we could just get labour.”

I'm always amazed. As a country that produces a lot of raw products, it seems like a travesty to me that we are not doing more value-added, in production, in slaughter capacity and all those things, as it relates to your industry. We're bringing in approximately 400,000 immigrants every year, first-time people working toward citizenship and permanent residents.

However, from every industry we talk to, time and time again, we constantly hear that the shortages are growing. In other words, they're getting bigger and bigger. This seems to be the never-ending issue. As a country we could do so much better if we could get these sector-by-sector plans in place to move forward.

You were talking about that, Ms. MacKinnon. We ship many products to the States that they finish. Do they have the same types of issues? Are they being more flexible? What are they doing with their immigration or their ability to get workers, or are they experiencing the same kinds of problems we're having?

[Marie-France MacKinnon]

To be frank, they're actually experiencing the same problems we have. Everybody has somewhat of a shortage. That's also our problem. If we don't attract those temporary foreign workers to come to Canada.... We have a great country to sell them, and for them to come to and help us grow rural Canada. These temporary foreign workers have other options as well. Our recruiting them and bringing them here, and their helping us by working in our meat plants and building rural Canada, is really what it's all about.

We have this huge opportunity, and Canadians don't want to move to the rural countryside. That's not for everybody. The shortage is there. People say all the time, “Well, you bring them in, they move to urban cities.” They don't.

Our research indicates most of them don't. Our research shows that, if you bring them in, and assuming they work out and everything is great and it works both ways—assuming there's a good fit there—those temporary foreign workers stay with our members for over 10 years in rural Canada. They're not moving at the first chance, getting a PR and moving to Toronto, which is what everybody talks about all the time. These employees actually stay with us.

Our situation is not unique, but we have big problem. It saddens me to think about shipping meat abroad when we have the capacity and the industry to process more and to increase our processing capacity, yet we're handcuffed by a labour shortage and by this cap I talked about earlier.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

I think I know the answer to the question, but I'm going to ask you. Should we not be, as a country, looking at sector by sector, talking to the different industries that are struggling and trying to come up with a plan to work with them?

It may be a pathway to permanent residency. It may be something temporary. It may be a combination of things as we move forward. It seems crazy to me that, in sector after sector, we have shortages, shortages and shortages, which means lost revenue, which means lost taxation, which means at the end of the day that we're not competing on the world stage the way we could be if we had a plan, sector by sector, to help out your specific industries with your specific needs.

[Marie-France MacKinnon]

I couldn't agree more. A sector plan is what makes sense. It's just good public policy. Actually, the dream would be to have a division within AAFC, Immigration Canada and ESDC that works together to fill that gap, so that when we're facing a labour shortage....

We're like what Édith and Stéphanie talked about. We're primary processing straight to.... We're all intertwined, from the producer to us. We work together. There can't be backlogs. That means we're losing. Look at how much product Aliments Asta is losing. That's crazy. That's because of a lack of labour.

We can have a labour strategy for our sector, for agri-food, for meat, for anything, but we have to have the three departments work together to come up with a good plan. We need more paths to PR. We need the labour cap removed—or not—or at least hiked a lot more. Let us fill these jobs.

Let us demonstrate to the government what we have to offer and how much we can grow our sector and our exports. It's all there. We just have to tap into it. It would be great for industry to have an opportunity to really deliver on that.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Thank you.

Janet, I see your hand's up. Do you want to add a comment here? I think I have a minute left, so why don't you finish that minute with what you have to say.

[Janet Krayden]

Thank you.

What you're saying, Mr. Allison, is exactly what the industry's been asking for from multiple governments for many years. They would like to see an agriculture and agri-food workforce program.

We're hoping this new immigration pilot could be a piece of that, but as you can see, we're struggling with the criteria of the program, because the majority of the immigration programs are set up more for urban centres. They call for higher education and degrees. That's what all the point systems....

We want our pilot to be different to allow maximum access, so that we could at least be allowed to fill our 2,750 spots. We're still struggling with the—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Ms. Krayden. Your time is up.

We will now proceed to Mr. Regan.

Mr. Regan, you will have six minutes for your round of questioning. You can please proceed.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Ms. MacKinnon, you mentioned the temporary resident to permanent resident program. That stream has no educational requirement. Are you saying you want to see more programs like that?

[Marie-France MacKinnon]

I'm sorry. I didn't understand the question. I cut out.