Alberta’s unusually high unemployment rate is bringing a few new staff out to the farms and processors, but a long-term fix still swings on improving the federal government’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP).

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals announced in February that a committee will be struck to review the program in light of ongoing labour shortages on farms and in processing plants.

While there have been various submissions from provincial representatives and commodity groups, this is the first time the government has committed to a full review of how the program is working and where it needs to be changed, says Janet Krayden, stakeholder specialist for the Canadian Agriculture Human Resource Council.

Her agency is part of a task force representing 67 agencies and commodity groups working together under the Canadian Agriculture & Agri-Food Action Plan.

Rather than each group battling it out on its own, the task force unifies producers and processors with a single voice in lobbying the federal government for help resolving labour issues.

Alberta has the potential to become a “super powerhouse” in agriculture, with labour shortages being one of the biggest obstacles to reaching that goal, says Casey Vander Ploeg, policy research manager for the National Cattle Feeders Association.

“The announcement that the Liberal government made in Ottawa, in my opinion, that is a very positive development,” said Vander Ploeg. “The potential is there, and I don’t think anybody denies that. But if you don’t have the boots on the ground to do the work, it ain’t gonna happen,” he says.

Canadian farmers and producers generally prefer to hire Canadians to work for them, in part because hiring foreign workers is complex and expensive, says Vander Ploeg. However, with so few Canadians willing or able to do the work, access to foreign workers is absolutely vital, he added.

Historically, Western Canada was built by immigrants, mainly foreign workers who came here in search of opportunities, he says.

It appears that some time will pass before the farm labour review committee is struck and gets to work, says Alan Dooley, agriculture labour recruiting specialist for Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.

In a conversation with Krayden, Dooley was advised that the committee could be struck as early as late spring or as late as this fall.

While the committee is not yet up and running, the federal government has offered a glimmer of hope in allowing some fish processors on the East Coast some leniency in the TFWP, says Dooley.

“Maybe that says something about where they’re going,” said Dooley. However, it’s “really hard to say” if that leniency could expand to other areas, he says.

Alberta farmers and processors have seen only limited and likely temporary benefit from the large number of workers who have been laid off in the oilfield sector, he says.

“We’ve got an unemployment rate of almost eight per cent for the province, which is up substantially from even a year ago, so I think we can say it’s better, generally, for producers and processors, in terms of getting labour. We do know that it isn’t perfect by any stretch,” said Dooley.

However, the people who have found themselves out of work and looking for new jobs are not necessarily in a good position to come and work on a farm or in a processing plant.

Most of the people who lost their jobs are urban based and are neither willing nor able to move into a rural environment, says Vander Ploeg.

Secondly, their skill sets don’t match the requirements, he says. For example, there is no job in the oilfield that can physically or mentally prepare someone to spend eight hours a day on horseback, riding in the feedlot to check for sick or injured animals, he says.

That difference in skill sets also increases the potential for serious or fatal injuries, says John Lawton, who operates cattle feedlots in the Niton Junction area as well as in Southern Alberta.

Lawton sees a lack of access to workers as a major obstacle throughout the value chain. Alberta’s two major beef plants, in High River and Brooks, are unable to run at full capacity because of the lack of people to work the lines.

That means only basic cutting is done at the plants while too many live animals are being shipped to the United States and coming back across the border as processed beef, says Lawton.

The situation on the farms and in the plants has improved in recent months with the high number of people out of work in the province, says Dooley. However, that relief is only temporary and is likely to disappear as oil prices rise, he says.

Labour shortages at Alberta processing plants are likely to become more of a problem on July 1, the deadline at which plants must reduce the composition of their workforce to include no more than 10 per cent foreign workers, says Dooley.

As stated by Mark Chambers of Sunterra Foods, he says, agriculture is a value chain, so anything that has an impact on processors is also going to affect producers. “Our concern is that, when oil prices recover, there will be challenges again,” he says. “This could be fairly short lived. The price of oil dropped fairly quickly – this all happened in a year and a bit. When oil prices recover, where are those people going to be? We don’t think they’ll be in agriculture. They’ll be back in construction or the oil patch.”

Agriculture and food processing make up just over six per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product, at a value of $108 billion per year and employing 2.3 million people. Since 2014, Canada has seen a net loss in the processing industry, with 143 plants shut down and 63 new plants opened. •

— By Brenda Kossowan