Air Canada: labour issues.
Railroads: labour issues.
Canada’s economy: labour issues.
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Canada’s oat crop looks promising
The oat crop looks promising and that’s a good thing because demand is strong.
How about farmers?
Yup, labour issues are the number one problem for many farmers and certainly the overwhelming issue for the agriculture industries built upon the crops and livestock that farmers produce.
Labour issues are a not-so-subtle subtext lying beneath the troubles of our times. If farmers and agriculture industries don’t figure out how to deal with the increasingly serious problems we are having in finding people who want to work on farms, in processing plants and in small towns, their future will be far dimmer than it should be.
I’ve been exploring this issue in recent weeks, looking at how Canadian farmers and agriculture can take advantage of the young, dynamic, ambitious people this country has been absorbing from around the world in the form of immigrants. While most other western nations have turned away from being pro-immigration in recent years, Canada is still mostly pro-immigrant.
That, however, is under threat due to the chronic and extreme failure of multiple layers of government to provide a housing supply anywhere equal to the increase in population, especially in our big cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.
Immigrants aren’t usually presented in Canada in the bizarre caricature that appeared in the recent U.S. presidential debate. According to Donald Trump, in Springfield Ohio “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the pets.”
Canadians, to their great credit, haven’t fallen into that sort of nasty and apparently untrue rhetoric.
However, the high rate of immigration embraced in Canada has provoked a recognition that if a country is going to take in a bunch of immigrants every year, it had better make sure it can provide a bunch of housing so that the new immigrants and existing Canadian citizens aren’t fighting over an inadequate and too-expensive housing stock and blaming each other for how hard life has become.
This country has failed to do that, and that’s a national disgrace.
Rural Canada and farm country has an answer for that. Rural Canada isn’t overpopulated, other than in the booming places that have thrived from immigrant inflow, which powers their industries and manufacturing and keeps schools and churches open. Places like Steinbach, Winkler and Neepawa in Manitoba are scrambling to keep up with the population growth that is making their communities more and more important in this far-too-urban provincial economy in which I live.
Most small cities, towns and villages have housing, space and schools for dynamic immigrants and their families looking to build themselves a life in Canada.
However, few know about it. They generally don’t look outside the cities in which they arrive, and where large diaspora communities exist. They don’t think of looking to grain farms and hog barns, rural veterinary practices or machinery dealerships for a future.
Not only do they often not hear about or understand the opportunities in rural areas, but they are also often subject to the flip side of the dog-eating-immigrant caricatures peddled south of the 49th parallel. In Canada, media portrayals too often make rural people appear reactionary, racist, backward and hostile to non-White people. It’s not hard to find anti-rural and anti-farmer stereotypes on social media and in our movies and television.
Imagine what it’s like being a new immigrant, perhaps not speaking much English, having a colour of skin other than pink, possibly practising a non-Christian religion and thinking about living in a rural area in which almost everybody else seems nothing like you?
It would be intimidating.
Farmers and agricultural people need to fight those images of rural Canada. That’s not what it’s really like out there, but how can a machinist from Bangladesh who arrives in Winnipeg know that?
It’s up to aggies to fix that image problem. Some companies already do a great job with that.
Maple Leaf Foods has worked hard to entice immigrants to its vast empire of farms and mills, slaughter plants and food processing plants. As a friend of mine at Maple Leaf has said to me: “Our second best product is new Canadians. We have produced thousands.” After a few years of working for the company, most become Canadian citizens, creating a bridge to their home countries.
Maple Leaf has figured it out. It probably has lots to teach the rest of the industry about how to seem welcoming to non-Canadian-born workers.
On the day I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the interview I just did with a Manitoba NDP MLA, Diljeet Brar, who represents an urban Winnipeg constituency with a big Sikh population. Brar spent 10 years at Manitoba Agriculture as an extension specialist, following an early career at an agricultural university in India.
He would dearly like to see more Indians working in agriculture, but he says it’s hard finding a way to bridge the gap between capital-poor immigrants trying to work their way through the arduous immigration process in the city, and the world of agriculture.
However, behind most immigrants — especially Sikh immigrants — is an upbringing on a farm and a desire to get their hands dirty with the soil, as their families have done for centuries. Most don’t want to be the first generation of their family that doesn’t work the land. Sikh kids in the Punjab often prefer playing with toy tractors to playing with toy race cars. That’s what they dream about when they grow up.
This could be a key population of potential workers that could fill ag jobs with dynamic and driven people — not just to fill jobs but also to propel farms and small towns to the next level.
The same applies to the Filipino population, which already plays a crucial role in communities such as Neepawa, where many of the jobs in the slaughter plant are filled by Filipino workers. The homebuilding industry is booming and some of the churches are full and offering multiple services. As CBC TV reported in March, “if you’re planning to attend St. Dominic’s Roman Catholic Church … plan to arrive early or you might have to stand.”
Imagine that.
Young African immigrants often come from farming backgrounds, something that calls to the soul of many. They almost never get to respond to that call.
Imagine if an effort was made to open the window to that call so they could hear it in Canada.
They might end up getting a degree in computer engineering at the University of Alberta, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t feel great peace working for an agricultural enterprise in Pincher Creek. Those opportunities are out there, but do they know about them?
As well, a major pool of potential workers exists in Indigenous nations in the middle of farm country, but it is generally overlooked by both sides. Young Indigenous people seldom think of agriculture as their path to a good future, and few farmers look to the reserve as a place to find the right employee.
Labour issues are bedevilling and threaten to cripple Canada. We’ve done a bad job in matching opportunities with liveable lives.
Farm country could help fix that, relieving the cities of their overpopulation while providing the rural economy with the fuel it needs so it can keep running.
It won’t happen without farmers and rural people reaching out. Nobody’s stepping up to help.
However, if rural Canada steps in and says, “we have a home and future for you, and it’s good,” more people might respond than you might expect. It’s what so many want but are scared to even dream of in this forbidding northern land. It’s home to us. We need to make it home for them, too.
