OTTAWA — An agricultural labour task force is recommending a workforce plan outside the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to help the sector deal with a lack of employees.
It presented its plan to federal officials in late February and is now fine-tuning it, said Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst, executive director of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council.
The task force is a committee of the council’s board.
She said the supply chain from producers to processors has struggled to find workers just to maintain production. Expanding production to meet trade deals is even more difficult, and changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program last June added to the problem.
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“Only up to 30 percent of your workforce can include temporary foreign workers, and in some workplaces in agriculture and agri-food businesses, that cap isn’t high enough,” she said.
As well, the cap drops to 20 percent and then 10 percent over the next couple of years.
Government must recognize that agriculture differs from other industries, and the solutions to labour shortages aren’t the same as, for example, the hotel industry, she said.
“It’s seasonal. It’s physically demanding. It’s in rural locations.”
Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz saw the plan just before the Canadian Federation of Agriculture annual meeting. He said he understands the situation.
“We’re with you,” he told delegates.
“We need people to make sure that when we have a trade agreement … we can actually send them the product in a timely way.”
Ritz agreed that temporary foreign workers don’t necessarily fill the skill set that agriculture needs.
“Guys were using as much of the (TFW) programming as they could, customizing it to their operation and doing OK with it, but it still was not targeted like it should be,” he said.
MacDonald-Dewhirst said the workforce action plan contains two broad recommendations: fix access to foreign and domestic labour and improve workers’ training and knowledge.
Beneath those are more specific short, medium and long-term recommendations.
In the short term, the existing Temporary Foreign Worker Program must be tweaked to address critical concerns identified by the stakeholders.
“The medium-term solution is build this agriculture and agri-food workforce program, and then the longer-term solutions are to work with (Employment and Social Development Canada) and (Citizenship and Immigration Canada) and really in a whole-scale way address the broader labour issues and access to labour,” she said.
MacDonald-Dewhirst said former citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney had said the Temporary Foreign Worker Program was a limited and last resort that appeared to be disappearing.
“Yet, agriculture and agri-food depend on this aspect of foreign labour to support the production of food in Canada and because of that, we need a program that’s going to be here for a long time,” she said.
A new program would include the existing Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program and ways to deal with the critical needs of primary agriculture and processing.
Labour shortages are acute throughout the system. Processors are having trouble running plants at full capacity, which makes them inefficient and has a trickle-down effect on producers.
MacDonald-Dewhirst said processors must eventually make tough choices.
“There’s a decision for processing plants as to whether they will continue operation, given that they’re being inefficient in Canada, and how they will continue, whether they will need to source less animals and what not,” she said.
All supply chain partners prefer to hire Canadian workers if they can, she added.
Response to the plan has been positive, she said. The government wants evidence-based policy, so the committee is working to make sure it has that data.
Meetings continue this March.
“The farmers in the room want this done yesterday of course, and the government is a little slower to move,” she said.
