Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be back with you again this week.
In the food and beverage manufacturing sector, which I represent, we have been significantly impacted by the range of issues that you just listed.
Labour alone, which is a topic that we've been seized of for the past six months, has had, I would say, a devastating impact on the food and beverage manufacturing sector. A survey in January showed that food and beverage manufacturers were running at a structural deficit of about 20% of their workforce and that, in turn, had reduced food production by about 20%. Normally we're trying to increase production, increase export and increase our productivity. What we've seen throughout the pandemic is a reduction in our output.
Equally I would say that infrastructure issues have hit us particularly hard over the last number of months. I include in the infrastructure issues the border closures that took place with the various blockades.
Certainly the B.C. flooding situation was a little bit of a microcosm, if you will, that demonstrated for all of us how dependent we are. We often talk about foreign markets closing and challenges there, but I think we are also seeing that we are very much at risk within Canadian borders when we have infrastructure disruptions, and we were quite challenged.
We saw in some cases freight costs for food products increase by sixfold for trucking coming out of B.C. during the B.C. flood situation, and we even had at least one case of a food company that had to decline to ship food into central Canada from B.C. because the food costs were so high. Imagine being a country like Canada where transportation costs have reached a point—in this case due to natural disaster—where we can't afford to ship food. I think that is a really stunning situation that we really need to reflect on as an example of how extreme some of these situations can become.