The director of international trade, government and media relations with the Canadian Meat Council, says a lack of labour is the biggest challenge facing Canada’s meat processing plants as they strive to take advantage of new free trade agreements.
The Canadian government has been extremely active in securing new free trade agreements, including the recently completed deal with South Korea, pending agreements with the European Union and Ukraine, negotiations involving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and pending free trade discussions with the Philippines.
Ron Davidson, the director of international trade, government and media relations with the Canadian Meat Council, says to capitalize on these opportunities, staffing of the processing plants will be absolutely critical.
Unless we have people in the plants to process the animal, the plants can not be processing them and producers will be forced to rely on live animal exports to the U.S. which, as we know from experience exporting live animals, markets can be shut down very quickly. Every company is still challenged with finding enough workers. We still have hundreds of jobs available.
What happens when you don’t have enough people, we have to staff the slaughter end, we have to staff the primal cuts so, what happens is, we pull people away from doing the value added and collecting the specialty meats, we’re basically in a narrow margin industry it becomes very important to do those higher margin activities.
If we are going to have an industry in Canada in the long term, it’s very important that we have enough people to undertake those functions.
We are recruiting as actively as we can among all the Canadian groups including unemployed people, including new immigrants, including refugees and we continue to work with the government to try and gain access to foreign butchers and meat cutters when we have clearly demonstrated that there aren’t enough butchers and meat cutters available in Canada.
Davidson says the processors have jobs available, and they’re available today.
