Would-be employers flocked to an agricultural labour summit in Red Deer last week seeking solutions for worker shortages that threaten to limit production and potential in Western Canada.
They found precious few of those solutions.
Labour shortages at farms, feedlots, packing plants and other agricultural businesses have been a problem for years, but they were exacerbated by recent, knee-jerk changes to the federal Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
The June changes made application more onerous and expensive and limited temporary foreign workers to one year in Canada before mandatory return to their home country.
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Recruitment and retention, the key components of any employment program, became much more difficult.
Now packing plants say they are unable to find enough workers to run at capacity. Feedlots are in the same predicament. Beekeepers and other businesses with shorter seasons find current TFWP rules unworkable.
Expansion for any of them is out of the question. Instead, they are looking at the real possibility of lower production amid troubling questions about the future.
Will they have to downsize? Reduce their reach? Sacrifice quality?
And in the case of larger businesses, what good are new international trade agreements, with their options for greater exports, if labour shortages limit Canada’s ability to fulfill that potential? The TFWP, in its former incarnation, was not the answer to labour shortages. It wasn’t meant to be.
However, it was a useful stopgap while the federal government was presumably devising more permanent solutions. And it did give temporary foreign workers time to apply for permanent residency and citizenship, thereby slowly increasing the labour pool.
Program changes now force temporary foreign workers to leave Canada before they can complete the required waiting period for the permanent resident nominee program.
Some say the solution is to offer higher wages, but that facile suggestion ignores the challenge of matching the wages offered by the oil and gas industry. It also fails to account for the naked truth that many people in westernized countries won’t do some of the jobs required, regardless of wage.
As a result, a one-size-fits-all program will not fix the problem, and it appears the federal government is aware of that.
A newly developed express entry program could improve labour availability in some sectors. A plan announced Oct. 31 to admit 260,000 to 285,000 immigrants this year, 65 percent of them to meet labour and skills shortages, is another positive development.
Even so, they won’t address labour shortages as expeditiously as would improvements to the TFWP. Many workers who were part of the program in the past have achieved residency and/or citizenship and have enriched the country and labour pool as a result. That could continue to occur if the TFWP was adjusted.
Other labour intensive industries in Canada and the United States have been known to export jobs by opening factories and manufacturing plants in other countries.
Agriculture doesn’t have that option. Jobs that entail on-farm activity or the primary processing of agricultural goods cannot be outsourced, transferred, externalized or otherwise moved, regardless of chosen euphemism.
The jobs are on the farm, in the feedlot, at the packing plant and among the foods and ingredients that Canada produces and exports.
It means workable programs and policies must be devised here at home, both temporary and permanent. Future expansion and productivity in the sector depend upon it.
