Approval to hire a worker can take up to three months
Federal regulations aimed at ensuring that Canadian employers don’t exploit temporary foreign workers are a cost and bureaucratic burden for farmers, says an agricultural labour specialist.
Mark Chambers of Sunterra Farms in Acme, Alta., represented the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council on a labour task force that examined industry worker issues, including a chronic worker shortage.
He said the biggest problem for primary producers is a rule implemented last year that requires farmers to pay temporary foreign workers a “medium wage” based on a government survey of industry wages.
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“In order to get a temporary farm worker, you have to hire them at the medium wage and that often is higher than we would start Canadians at, so it becomes a problem,” he said.
“You hire a Canadian to work for $14 an hour and then you are forced to hire a temporary foreign worker at $16 or $17 or $18 an hour and it discriminates against Canadians.”
The result is that the already difficult job of finding workers for a farm operation becomes more difficult, and wage offers must be raised.
“All of a sudden, the cost of production goes up and you become un-competitive for international markets.”
He said the pressure for higher foreign worker wages comes from labour groups that argue there is no need to bring in temporary foreign workers when unemployment levels are high.
“But we advertise, and the reality is that it is tough to get people to work in agriculture, to work in rural Alberta,” said Chambers.
“So this adds costs to hiring temporary foreign workers and that raises the cost of production and makes it more difficult to hire Canadians, which seems to go against the point of the program.”
Employers applying to hire temporary foreign workers must submit a labour market opinion form that indicates they have tried and failed to find local workers to fill vacant spots. It can take up to three months to get the application approved.
“In this industry, that can be a long time, and while we see new rules put in place, nothing gets improved for us,” said Chambers. “It just gets more and more onerous. There’s a need for temporary foreign workers be-cause Canadians often don’t want the jobs, but if costs get raised, it hurts the business. We need to be competitive and if we aren’t, we’ll be in a shrinking industry.”
The new rules that Ottawa implemented at the beginning of the year include more surveillance and auditing of employers who use the temporary foreign worker program.
“I welcome that, and I will speak and advocate for producers who do things to the best of their ability and best of their knowledge to follow the rules,” Chambers said.
“But there are some bad apples out there and the problem is that if bad apples are found, they change the rules for everyone. Overwhelmingly, farmers play by the rules.”
