Stung by widespread criticism that the federal and provincial governments have not done enough to help agriculture, federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau issued a defence highlighting temporary foreign workers.
“When COVID struck, we immediately got to work, with the top three countries of origin for foreign primary agricultural and food production workers: Mexico, Jamaica and Guatemala.
We announced $50 million to help farmers and agri-food businesses to cover the costs of safely welcoming temporary foreign workers in compliance with the Quarantine Act.
“Working in close collaboration with industry we welcomed about 11,000 workers to Canada in April this year, compared to about 13,000, in April last year.
“To get here, all the federal departments involved in the Temporary Foreign Worker program worked together to simplify processes and facilitate as much as possible the safe entry of these workers, including priority processing of applications, highlighting that work permit applicants can continue working with the same employer while they have an extension application being processed, and the measures announced today to fast-track approval for workers in non-SAWP streams to change jobs or employers.
‘We also increased the maximum duration of employment under LMIAs from one to two years for employers of workers in the low-wage stream and removed the minimum recruitment requirements for the next six months, for workers in agriculture and food processing.
“Further to these changes, we are working hard to bolster our domestic labour force to address potential areas of shortages.
“On May 7, the prime minister announced that the federal Government was putting in place $3 billion to support wage top-ups for essential services. This is another important step to support many of our agricultural producers. We recognize that workers in the food supply chain, from the farm to the food store, are absolutely essential – and we look forward to seeing the provincial plans on these top-ups soon.
“We also launched our "Step up to the Plate – Help Feed Canadians" job portal, which is helping to match Canadians with jobs in the agri-food sector and we made temporary changes to the Canada Summer Jobs Program to offer more help to essential services including the agri-food supply chain,” her statement said.
But she said nothing about the subsidies amounting to only 10 per cent of what the Canadian Federation of Agriculture requested.
