Thank you and good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thanks for the opportunity to appear before you today with my industry colleagues.
My name is Randy White and I'm the president of Sysco Canada. Sysco Canada is a national leader in selling, marketing and distributing food and non-food products to over 45,000 active clients in restaurants, health care, long-term care, retirement facilities, educational facilities, lodging establishments and other food-away-from-home businesses and customers. Our business model includes fresh, frozen, dry goods, produce, dairy, meat, seafood, as well as paper products, food service packaging and all other supplies in the industry.
We are a major economic driver from coast to coast and we employ over 5,000 Canadian associates operating out of 25 significant facilities, including our facility in Monsieur Barsalou-Duval’s riding. We deliver to every province and territory with a fleet of more than 600 trucks. In addition, we are proud participants in the Government of Canada’s nutrition north program, helping to deliver healthy quality food products to some of the most remote locations in Canada.
At Sysco, we are dedicated to delivering the highest standards of food safety, reliability and quality in the food supply network in Canada and around the world. Our expertise is robust and very consistent with food supply chain management and it is second to none. During the earliest days of the pandemic, as well as more recently with the challenges of the B.C. extreme flooding situation, Sysco was at the front of the line helping to solve supply chain problems and logistical issues to ensure people in the hardest-hit regions were able to receive food and other supplies. We have the right expertise, the right experience and the right resources to bring to the table to work with the Canadian government in helping look for solutions.
Mr. Chair, this committee is studying Canada’s supply chain management and it is very timely. I would like to raise three specific areas where companies like ours need the Canadian government to support and help, where possible.
First and foremost, supply chain success is really about people. Our people at Sysco, our drivers, our warehouse associates and our teams, are what allow us to get food from the farm to our customers across the country. I know that we are not alone, as we are hearing about this today in many ways, saying that the labour shortage is at all-time high. In fact, here is a statistic. The latest quarter at the end of the last calendar year showed that there were over 22,000 open truck driver positions across Canada. That number has continued to increase. It's an astronomical number. Across our network, we require more drivers, more warehouse associates, more employees in general to ensure we are able to continue servicing our clients, providing food in government settings as well as the private sector.
We note the recent federal government's changes to the temporary foreign worker system announced earlier this year. However, at the top of this, what we really need, and we need it now, is speedier approval of applications to get these people into the system and into the general workforce and into our workforce faster than the current pace.
The second item, which we saw during the pandemic and certainly during the B.C. flooding, was a patchwork of regulations that actually hampered our ability to get food and other essential supplies across the country. For example, for many of our drivers, the only way to get supplies into isolated parts of British Columbia was to go out of Canada, through the United States and back across the Canadian border. Unfortunately, in many cases they were stuck at border crossings with understandable COVID regulation issues that changed sometimes by the hour. They were applied unevenly. This led to unnecessary delays for food and supplies for Canadians who needed them desperately. With the minister responsible for emergency preparedness recently appointed, one of his priorities needs to be to work with the provinces to establish protocols to help cut unnecessary red tape and restrictions in these times of crisis. This is a very important point.
My third point is that in budget 2022 the government had noted the need for heavy-duty electric vehicles to be part of the solution in the fight against climate change and the battle to get to net zero. Sysco Canada wants to participate in this goal. It is very well known that electric vehicle tractor-trailers are extremely expensive. We want to work with the federal government and provincial governments to accelerate the adoption of EV transport equipment to help meet these targets.
Given our track record in other countries and elsewhere, we would be a natural partner for the federal government in this challenge. These are some of my thoughts to put on the table today with the other thoughts. I'm sure we can get to further discussion on this at some point in the future.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, committee. I look forward to engaging further on these ideas.