Transport committee  I'd love to just quickly say that from a food and beverage manufacturing standpoint, by far the number one issue is labour. At the end of the day, if you don't have the workers, you can't manufacture the products. If our suppliers don't have the workers, it makes it difficult to

Transport committee  One of the challenges we have as an industry, and I suspect a lot of manufacturing sectors are the same, is that we have 8,000 facilities across the country, and the vast majority of them are small and mid-size. Most companies really struggle to even keep up with what the evoluti

Transport committee  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 f

Transport committee  Thank you very much, and good afternoon. My name is Kathleen Sullivan and I am CEO of Food and Beverage Canada, representing Canada's domestic food and beverage manufacturing sector. I thank you for the invitation to speak today. Food and beverage is one of Canada's largest m

Human Resources committee  No, we've received no specific response to the question of why we didn't receive a response, or our proposal wasn't implemented by the end of January. I suspect it comes down to the wheels of government departments sometimes moving much more slowly than any of us would like. We

Human Resources committee  I can maybe step in and answer for food and beverage manufacturing. On the retirement question, you're correct. We always anticipated a retirement cliff. Even before COVID started, we were starting to look at these issues to try to understand how we make sure we have the workfor

Human Resources committee  I will point out that CTAQ and Dimitri are here, as a member of my organization and part of our 11-organization coalition. We came and worked together because this is the single most debilitating issue that's impacting food and beverage manufacturing today. We didn't have a choi

Human Resources committee  Public Safety Canada did a survey in January that found that, because of labour shortages, companies reported their food production had gone down by 20%. We're in a situation where it's hard to believe a country like Canada can't keep up with its own food production. It's dazzlin

Human Resources committee  I should say that it's expected to go up again this year.

Human Resources committee  Good afternoon. My name is Kathleen Sullivan and I am CEO of Food and Beverage Canada, the national association representing Canada's domestic food and beverage manufacturing sector. I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you to discuss labour shortages in our industry. Cana

Human Resources committee  Of course. I would be happy to forward that to you. I will just identify that the proposal really builds on the existing temporary foreign worker program. It has three main elements. The first is to increase the cap or the limit on the number of foreign workers that Canadian

Agriculture committee  We haven't received a response on our proposal. Until we actually have some sort of announcement from the federal government that they are prepared to put a program in place to allow us to bring in temporary foreign workers to assist with the labour crisis, then we don't have an

Agriculture committee  When the B.C. crisis hit, Food and Beverage Canada did a lot of work with a round table to bring stakeholders together. I had a bird's-eye view into some of the challenges. What I found really interesting about that exchange was that we also have that issue domestically. One of t

Agriculture committee  Yes, absolutely, there are some things that our members have done, and I'm sure there are more things as well. First of all, as I said, the companies themselves are actually purchasing the housing units. They're purchasing entire apartment buildings or purchasing homes, multi-u

Agriculture committee  You know, they're difficult conversations, but I am an optimist. I'm an optimist because we have gotten to a place, after many years of discussion and debate within industry, where all segments of the supply chain—producers, processors, independent grocers and, really importantly