Agriculture committee  I don't have stats. I will say that what we are seeing, though, as you all know because you're talking to your constituents, is that supply chain costs are going up, whether fuel costs or just the costs of getting replacement goods and labour costs. At the same time, we have a ve

Agriculture committee  I haven't had a lot of direct conversations with the unions recently. I will say, first of all, that we are a fairly highly unionized industry, as you pointed out. Those are relationships that are managed between the unions and the companies, and for all intents and purposes see

Agriculture committee  There's a long list, but number one, I think we have to focus on labour. In that respect, I think in the short term, again, where we should be focusing our time is on foreign workers, making sure that we can bring those foreign workers in, that those foreign worker are.... You

Agriculture committee  I don't have stats, but I can report anecdotally to you that I think there is a real recognition that, given the labour situation and also an overall desire to increase productivity, there needs to be a move to more automation, digitization and robotics. This is an industry, thou

Agriculture committee  There are two main things I would point to. One is labour. Our infrastructure and transportation systems are facing the same labour problems we are, particularly on the trucking side. Another is capacity. We don't have the excess capacity we need to be able to deal with surge per

Agriculture committee  I think, if it's properly constructed and mandatory, a code of conduct could help. The challenge we have is a grocery retail market in which five banners control over 80% of the sales, and 8,000 Canadian companies are trying to sell into it. There's clearly an imbalance of power

Agriculture committee  We see so many reports written, and nothing happens with them. We have this gem of a supply chain task force report. In large measure, it repeats recommendations made by the agri-food economic strategy table back in 2018. Let's get moving on it. This only works if we all work tog

Agriculture committee  On the plan that we're looking at, labour is a complex, multi-faceted problem, and any solution is going to have to be multi-faceted as well. Some of the things we're looking at that I would suggest are priorities are, first of all, really simplifying, as much as we can, the te

Agriculture committee  Yes, that would have a very positive impact. It would certainly reduce the cost and administration that companies are going through to, in effect, bring back the same workers year after year. I think that would go a very long way toward allowing companies to focus on what they sh

Agriculture committee  The supply chain task force recommended the establishment of a supply chain office, and I think we have to look at something analogous to that for the food system. You literally have hundreds of thousands of farms, tens of thousands of retail outlets and food processors. The syst

Agriculture committee  On infrastructure, I would just like to add—and the national supply chain task force report comments on this—that we also encourage the government to recognize that a lot of the infrastructure needed to get people to work is actually local infrastructure—whether there's affordabl

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon. I am Kathleen Sullivan, CEO of Food and Beverage Canada. We are a national trade association that represents Canadian food and beverage manufacturers. Across Canada there are almost 8,000 food and beverage manufacturing establi

Transport committee  I think from my perspective, I'll echo what Dennis said. We have a very strong relationship with the U.S. in terms of trade, both ways. It takes a lot to break that relationship. Having said that, I think we have all seen a signal ourselves that we need to really start focusing

Transport committee  I would just say two things from a food and beverage manufacturing perspective. The first is around labour. A game-changer would be investing the resources necessary to overhaul our immigration system to make sure we have the people and the systems we need to process immigration

Transport committee  I'll take the opportunity, if I may. From a manufacturing perspective—food and beverage in this case—I think we do need to take a look at, first of all, the need for an industrial strategy or industrial policy for Canada. I think that would be multi-faceted. It would include thi