The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council has launched a two-year process to update its labour market forecast.
This new work will adjust CARHC's last Labour Market Information released in 2014 and provide updated national, provincial and commodity-specific labour market information through 2029.
Four years ago, the LMI indicated there was a shortage of about fifty-nine thousand Canadians to work in production-agriculture, equalling annual farm cash receipt losses due to job vacancies at $1.5 billion.
Project Manager, Debra Hauer, explained that the agency wants to know what has changed since then.
"At that time we indicated that there would be a number of retirements and we're just wondering what things are looking like now; if people are having increasing labour shortages, if they're making changes to their operation where they're changing out of production that requires lots of labour and into types of production that don't, and if they're increasing the use of technology."
We asked Hauer if she had any inkling as to what the new numbers could look like.
"When we came out with our information a couple of years ago...we found that the labour shortages had doubled in ten years and were forecast to double yet again," she said. "At that time we were forecasting a labour shortage of Canadians of a hundred and fourteen thousand people by 2025 (and) I expect that will have increased since (then) but by how much, we're not sure."
Source : Steinbachonline