Hello. Thank you for your good wishes.
Hello to your brother as well. He's an outstanding service professional at our resort, to say the least. I know he's enjoying his time back in Quebec and on the farm.
I am proof of what a 10-year visa process can do for a family. I went over to Australia as an instructor on a working holiday visa, and I grew to like it so much that I increased my credentials, went back and forth for a number of years and became a permanent resident of Australia. I met my wife there and had two kids there. When the family that owned the Big White Ski Resort became Canadians, the father retired and the son took over, and he invited me to come back in 1995.
Since that time, visa workers and young people on working holidays only have two years with us. They used to have a longer period of time. With Canada being what it is, they worked in the mountains, they worked in Ontario and they worked in the sugar shacks of Quebec. They travelled around the country, because they had a visa that could take them back and forth. They fell in love and, whether they moved to their home country or stayed here, there are thousands of examples of this.
When you only have a two-year restriction, the visa holder still wants to travel. They're not going to stay in your sector or with your company—in our case—for more than one season. They're going to move on and go to our competitors and competitor companies, take that great training from Canada that the Canadian industry is known for and use it to benefit that other country.
I agree with your comment. I don't 100% agree with the people who you ran into. It was terrible to get a visa to come to work in Canada up until six weeks ago. It took anywhere between three and four months, and was sometimes as much as eight months. We simply missed the opportunity for the last two years; when people could travel, they couldn't get their visa in time to make their entry. Now it's getting better.
We understand what's going on in Afghanistan. We understand what's going on in Ukraine. We understand that the immigration department is overloaded and that it takes people to process these things. What we're saying is that you have a respected industry that is with you on this that knows the process. Give us a chance to help you process. We think, with the extension of the visas and the visa time allotments, we could help solve this crisis immediately.