Agriculture committee  There are probably more things to do even in terms of digital, monitoring, and adjusting the process to the varying changes in the animals as they come into the process, but I guess the one comment I would make is how capital intensive this is. Part of what I was trying to argue

Agriculture committee  That's where we're falling short. The capital required to build a scale plant today in Canada in food is enormous, and it is absolutely 25% higher to do it in Canada versus in the U.S., and we have to do it in a completely free trade environment. That's the stress that's killing

Agriculture committee  There's a lot in that question.

Agriculture committee  I guess the first point I would make is that the critical ability to move to that factory of the future and apply the industry 4.0 technologies is to have competitive-scale plants. We do, in the case of our Brandon slaughter plant, as an example. Meat processors such as Cargill a

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the invitation to speak to you. Your topics of innovation, competitiveness, and trade are very important to Maple Leaf. In fact, the viability of our business really lives in that interconnectedness between those topics every day. I want to

Human Resources committee  Very definitely, as I think others have mentioned, agriculture is not an easy occupation. Meat cutting is certainly not easy, and retention is a major challenge in the industry; it always has been. What we've found in our successful use of the program and the transition to perma

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My thanks to the committee for inviting me to appear today. I've shared with you a presentation document that I hope you've had a chance to look at. I'm not going to go through it, but I want to start first with talking about two people. The first pers

Agriculture committee  Maple Leaf Foods is a completely federally inspected business. All of our plants in Canada are under federal regulation and licensing and, of course, we fully support that. I guess the issue we're speaking to is the problem of a small but still important piece of the business u

Agriculture committee  Yes. Thank you. Yes, I can respond briefly. Indeed it is. The labour availability issue is chronic across both agriculture and food in Canada. I think it's true in the seafood industry as well. The problem has been, as I said, compounded by the changes to the temporary foreign w

Agriculture committee  That's very good.

Agriculture committee  That's a very good point. In that case, when we get an approval for a foreign worker at a given—

Agriculture committee  When labour is approved under the program for a given plant at a given location, and then you're unable to do that, that labour cannot be moved to another location. That's very true.

Agriculture committee  I think you're hitting on the key point. The problem is that we always frame the issue in the context of trade barriers, as if there's some sort of tariff or real measure actually at an interprovincial border stopping the movement of goods or people or capital, whereas I think we

Agriculture committee  I will make a comment and then turn to Tyler. As I mentioned, in our perspective, it's not so much that there are actual barriers preventing the movement of goods or services or capital, but that regulatory fragmentation is definitely creating a burden of compliance costs and un

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Actually, the information is that it was 143 plants over the past eight years. That figure is coming from the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. I believe there are several factors, and there has been some recent good work to study the issues and the competitivenes