Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the invitation to appear before the committee today to discuss the Auditor General’s report on the health and safety of agricultural temporary foreign workers in Canada during the COVID‑19 pandemic.
As you all know, labour is a vital resource for Canadian farmers and food processors. Some 60% of all those in the temporary foreign worker program are employed in the agriculture and food sector.
In the early days of the pandemic, Agriculture and Agri‑Food Canada launched two programs to provide financial support to employers to comply with the new federal health and safety measures for temporary foreign workers.
The mandatory isolation support for temporary foreign workers program provided over $130 million to help farm employers, food processors and fish harvesters across Canada to cover costs of compliance with the isolation protocols under the Quarantine Act.
Employers faced a number of increased costs related to entry requirements of temporary foreign workers, and the program helped them offset some of those costs, including wages and benefits, accommodations, and transportation.
Due to high demand and ongoing border measures, we increased funding to the program twice, and we added provisions for employers to cover hotel stays for workers who were unable to travel directly to their place of employment due to quarantine requirements. The program successfully assisted employers, as they brought foreign workers to Canada to enable agriculture and food production to continue at a time when that was a great worry to all of us.
The second program, the emergency on-farm support fund, provided federal-provincial support of over $40 million to help more than 1,700 farm employers prevent and respond to the spread of COVID-19 within their workforce, including temporary foreign workers. This investment helped fund improvements to living quarters and workstations, PPE, sanitary stations, and other key measures. These upgrades helped to ensure that farm employers were better prepared to protect workers and reduce the risk of transmission. Last year, these programs helped to facilitate the arrival of a record number of temporary foreign workers to farms across Canada.
Looking ahead, we continue to work with ESDC and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on a number of improvements to the temporary foreign worker program. The goal is to improve worker health and safety, and ease the administrative burden for employers.
As the report reminds us, temporary foreign workers are essential to Canada's agriculture sector, to our supply chain, and to our food security. Their skills and labour were key to the Canadian agriculture sector's resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will certainly work together with our partners to strengthen our programs, protect the health and safety of those workers, and keep our food supply chain strong.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.