Ron Davidson-Canadian Meat Council:
Everybody is doing everything they can to find any Canadian that's willing to work in the industry.
There are probably 600 empty positions on the production line in the meat industry today.
We could be hiring that number of people tomorrow if the Canadians were willing to take these jobs on.
We're doing everything we can to find them.
Across the industry companies are now today doing less value added because they don't have the workers to do it.
They are taking specialty meats such as offals that we used to export and they are being put into rendering as waste because we don't have enough workers to harvest them.
As a result, in a very low margin industry, the areas where the companies should be making a positive margin are gone so we are actually going to be going forward producing less meat, buying less cattle and having less competitiveness.
We already pay more than the U.S. does for our labor.
These are mostly union jobs, we pay relocation allowances.
At the present time we do not have and we do not have prospects of finding a labor force that would let us take advantage of these new trade agreements.
Davidson says processors should be able to acquire foreign specialists when they've proved they can't find enough Canadian to do the work and suggests, under proper constraints, the express entry program is the best option to do that.
Source: Farmscape