The Canadian Meat Council warns without the ability to hire sufficient numbers of workers the opportunity Canada’s meat processing plants to capitalize on new trade agreements will be lost.
The federal government has cancelled a scheduled July 1 reduction in the number of temporary foreign workers a company has on staff as it reviews the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Ron Davidson, the Director of International Trade, Government and Media Relations with the Canadian Meat Council, says the implications of the inability of Canada’s meat processors to recruit sufficient numbers of workers are broad.
We can draw a pretty direct line between not having enough workers in the plants and decreased value added production, decreased innovation, decreased investment, decreased exports, reduced competitiveness, reduced employment, reduced sustainability, reduced livestock prices and a hollowing out of rural Canada so the implications are very broad.
If we’re going to take advantage of new trade opportunities, we need to have the people in the industry to prepare the product for export. If you don’t have the people, the trade agreements are of no use. In fact the trade agreements can work against Canada.
When we have a trade agreement we open up to Canadians going abroad and we open up to foreign products coming to Canada. If we can’t get enough people to take advantage of the opportunities that are being created abroad, what we end up with is not increasing our sales to the foreign countries and opening our market to all kinds of new product coming in from those foreign countries. ~ Ron Davidson, Canadian Meat Council
Davidson says the meat industry agrees that every effort should be made to recruit Canadians and has, for years, looked across the country for unemployed, new immigrants, refugees, indigenous and youth.
He says once a chronic shortage of workers in Canada has been clearly demonstrated the industry is asking to be able to use foreign workers to fill the jobs that remain empty.
