“Jobbank.gc.ca is the best way to find foreign workers,” said Dean Jorgenson, employer liaison officer with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.

“You’re given an opportunity to essentially fish from the Express Entry pool, as well as other job seekers who are already here in Canada.”

Launched in January 2015, the Express Entry program contains profiles for more than 60,000 foreign job seekers, Jorgenson said at the Agriculture Labour Summit last month.

“It’s the first point of contact for people who are interested in immigrating to Canada as an economic migrant,” said Jorgenson. “It’s an application management system that we use to manage intake for a number of different economic immigration streams.”

The program manages application intake for the Federal Skilled Worker Program, the Federal Skilled Trades Program, Canadian Experience Class, and certain provincial nomination programs (excluding Alberta). It is a step up from the old paper-based system that worked on a first-in, first-out basis, said Jorgenson.

“With Express Entry, we’ve moved to an entirely online electronic processing system, which means we can really take advantage of our global network and use resources that we might have in one part of the world to process applications that are submitted in another,” he said.

“We’re no longer obligated to process applications in chronological order. It’s given us the ability to prioritize candidates who are more likely to succeed economically once they arrive in Canada.”

As a result, applications are processed “much more quickly now,” he added. “The processing commitment for Express Entry applications is six months or less.”

Farmers who hope to use the Express Entry program still need to complete a labour market impact assessment (LMIA), which is now free for employers who are going down the permanent residency path.

“If you’re interested in providing someone in the Express Entry pool with a job offer and are interested in pursuing the LMIA route, there is no processing fee,” said Jorgenson.

“If, however, you want to bring in the person to work temporarily while their permanent residency application is ongoing, you can apply for a dual-intent LMIA, and there’s a $1,000 fee.”

How it works

So how exactly does this job matchmaking system work?

As it goes with online daters, the first step for foreign job seekers is creating a free profile on the Express Entry site.

“Candidates go online and create a free profile, and in order to create a profile, you have to make sure you meet the minimum entry criteria for one of those programs,” said Jorgenson. “You tell us a bit about who you are, how old you are, where you’ve gone to school, what sort of work you’re currently doing and have done, and then we give you points for that.”

Candidates can earn up to 1,200 points based on their education, proficiency in English or French, and Canadian work experience — including 600 points if they have a valid job offer from a Canadian company. Once they create a profile, they then register for the Canada Job Bank.

“This is a way for applicants to sell themselves to Canadian employers, and also for Canadian employers to get a sense of who’s interested in immigrating to Canada to see if there’s someone in the pool who might meet your labour needs,” said Jorgenson.

“People in the pool are pre-approved for meeting the minimum requirements for one of these programs. These are people who would already potentially qualify for immigration.”

After that, the highest-ranking candidates in the pool will receive an invitation to apply for permanent residency.

“Every couple of weeks, the department will determine that we have capacity in our system to process X number of applications — say 1,000. We would look at the top 1,000 candidates in the pool and invite them to apply,” he said, adding that since the program launched, more than 54,000 invitations to apply have been issued.

Farmers urged to use Job Bank

Express Entry is only for permanent residency applications for jobs that are permanent, non-seasonal, and “skilled” — including management jobs, professional jobs, technical jobs, and skilled trades. The federal government is reviewing the program to allow for semi-skilled workers in the future.

“Some of you may have employed temporary foreign workers in the past, and some of them might be interested in transitioning from temporary residency to permanent residency,” said Jorgenson. “In many cases, this would be the most appropriate pathway for them.”

Jorgenson “strongly encourages” farmers who are unable to find “suitable talent here in Canada” to look into the Canada Job Bank.

“Pretty much everybody who is in the pool has a Canada Job Bank profile, so it’s a good way for you to start connecting with overseas pools of talent,” said Jorgenson. “From what I gather, people aren’t having problems finding workers right now. But keep this in mind for when it might be time to look outside of Canada for someone who meets your needs.”

The post Looking for foreign workers? Express Entry program has 60,000 of them appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“There are lots of things in the report that are very positive for ag and agri-food,” said Mark Chambers, senior production manager with Sunterra Farms and co-chair of the Agriculture and Agri-Food Labour Task Force.

Despite a huge — and increasing — shortage of workers on farms, ranches and in food-processing plants, the federal government has reduced the number of foreign workers companies can hire and upped the paperwork requirements. With numerous other sectors also complaining about the program, Parliament’s standing committee on human resources decided a thorough review was needed. Last year, it heard from dozens of groups, including the task force that Chambers co-chairs, as well as labour experts, unions, and foreign workers.

Many of the committee’s 21 recommendations echo what his group has been telling government for years, said Chambers.

“It’s very encouraging because they’ve obviously listened,” he said. “Now I guess the million-dollar question is: Will the government look at this report and say, ‘OK, these are good recommendations and we’ll implement some or all of them.’

“I’m hopeful that they will. We’ve been speaking to various departments but now you have a review panel saying they have to do something. So now it’s not just coming from the industry.”

The problems with the program in regard to agriculture are manyfold and that’s reflected in the makeup of the task force, which includes farmers from different commodity sectors, food processors, and industry associations. But the common problem they share is that most Canadians don’t want to move to a rural area for jobs that are often physically demanding and sometimes unpleasant, such as working in a meat-processing plant.

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council says there are 60,000 unfilled jobs in the farm and food-processing sector and the shortage will reach 114,000 by 2025.

Chambers knows that problem first hand as his company has tried for years to fully staff its hog-processing plant at Trochu. The operation employs 120 people, but needs 10 to 15 more.

“We’ve still got empty positions and we believe it’s costing us significant money,” he said. “If we had a fully staffed plant, we could probably capture another $5 million (a year) in sales revenue. A lot of the value added doesn’t get done anymore and so we’re basically throwing away food because we don’t have enough staff to add value.”

Sunterra Meats has been getting a few more applications since the downturn in the oilpatch, but only enough to keep its meat-processing lines going. What’s being thrown away is pig hearts, livers, and lungs.

“You and I may not want to eat those products but there’s a lot of overseas countries that see them as a delicacy,” said Chambers. “But you need a consistent supply — it’s not one of those things you can do one week but not the next. So you need a solid workforce before you can say, ‘OK, now we can develop this market.’”

But since the company has maxed out its foreign worker limit — 20 per cent for companies already in the program — it can’t recruit abroad to fill those jobs.

This was one of a multitude of issues that farm employers and processors raised with the parliamentary committee. Some are quirky — for example, grain farmers can’t use the seasonal farm worker program that’s available to vegetable and fruit growers.

“The caveat to that is you have to be on the national commodities list. And grain, for whatever reason, is not on the commodities list so grain farmers can’t use this program.”

But others are more complex. Chambers and other meat and seafood processors have spent years telling federal officials that the foreign workers they hire should have a “pathway” to citizenship. Highly skilled workers, such as physicians, can easily qualify for permanent residency but it’s much more difficult for those “at the bottom of the list” when it comes to job skills.

“We want a pathway for permanent residency even for those at the bottom of the list,” said Chambers. “People should be able to come in on a work permit and if they meet all the criteria, become permanent residents.”

But the biggest request has been for agriculture and agri-food processing to have its own foreign worker program. And that call, too, was heard by the parliamentary committee, he said.

“One of the things we’ve been continually pushing for is that ag and agri-food need to be taken out of the regular temporary foreign worker program and have their own robust, stand-alone program that works and would generate pathways to permanency,” he said. “And when we look at this report, we see a lot of that in there.”

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Despite “endless” domestic recruitment and a seven per cent unemployment rate in Canada, the country’s meat industry is still short about 1,000 workers.

And the situation “just gets worse and worse,” an official with the Canadian Meat Council told attendees at the recent Ag Labour Summit.

“We’re not going to be able to sustain long term a competitive meat industry if we can’t have workers to fill our plants or on our farms where livestock is being produced,” said Ron Davidson, the council’s director of international trade, government, and media relations.

“We’ve got two new trade deals out there, which hopefully will open substantial new markets. But we don’t have the workers to take advantage of that.”

Liberal Party of Canada president Anna Gainey sent a letter to the council prior to the election promising to “fix the program.”

“We need accurate labour market data, clear rules, strong enforcement, and a credible pathway to citizenship for foreign workers,” Gainey stated in the letter.

But it’s not just the program that’s an issue, but also the public’s perception of it, said Davidson.

“After three decades in Ottawa — mostly inside government — I know that taking something like that and turning it into a program that they can sell is a challenge,” said the former senior civil servant with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and other federal departments.

“We have to tell them what we want and we have to give them the information to justify it.”

There’s “a solid 80 per cent public animosity” towards the temporary foreign worker program, and Canadians are skeptical about whether it’s really needed, he said.

“We continue to be told, ‘If you recruit harder and pay more, you’re going to get all the workers you want,’” said Davidson. “People have a hard time understanding how you can have a worker shortage if there’s all these unemployed Canadians out there.

“We know there are many unemployed Canadians. The problem is trying to recruit them.”

• More on the Alberta Farmer: Foreign worker program a paperwork jungle

And recent changes to the program — including hiring caps of 20 per cent of a company’s workforce (which will drop to 10 per cent next year), increased fees, and decreased work terms — have made it harder to hire temporary foreign workers.

“We still do not have a pathway that’s working as well as we need it to, to get workers into the industry,” said Davidson. “We took a program that wasn’t designed for full-time openings and started using it. We’re caught in this program, and we’re certainly feeling the impact.”

And while meat packers and processors are on the front line of this battle, livestock producers are paying a price, too, he said.

“I don’t care if you’re a producer, a processor, a worker, or a consumer — everyone loses under the current program when you have empty workstations in the plants,” said Davidson. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the value chain. If you’ve got a link in that chain that’s not functioning properly, we’re all hurting.”

One example is offal. There are strong markets, particularly in Asia, for liver, tongue, tripe and other organ meats but the worker shortage means plants aren’t able to collect offal.

“Instead of going into South Korea or China as exports with value in them, they were going into rendering. That is not a winning formula for a sustainable industry,” he said. “We’re supposed to be doing value added and product innovation, and this reduces those. We want investment in Canada, and this reduces investment in Canada and quite frankly transfers it overseas.”

That makes it critical for the meat industry to convince both the new government and the Canadian public that it is “hiring everybody we can domestically.”

“We just have to work with them to make it palatable and explain it to the media and the public.”

The post A Liberal ‘fix’ for temporary foreign worker program may be elusive appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“For us in Western Canada, it really comes down to availability of labour,” said Darcy Fitzgerald, executive director at Alberta Pork.

“We need to have workers available for us, and often, they’re not Canadian, only because we don’t have enough workers to come work on farms with us or to work in processing. It’s right through the value chain.”

There are currently 800 to 1,000 job vacancies at meat-packing plants across Canada — about 10 per cent of the workforce.

That won’t be remedied by massive layoffs in the oil and gas sector, said Fitzgerald.

“If you don’t know the industry or have a history with it — as most Canadians don’t — it doesn’t pay those big six figures like the oil and gas industry does,” said Fitzgerald.

“Those people don’t come to work at the farm. They don’t come to work in food processing. That’s the reality of it. We need to be real about our situation. Just because one industry lays off workers doesn’t mean those workers will come work in another one.”

And the industry isn’t a fit for a lot of people, he added.

“Just because you’re a body and don’t have a job, it doesn’t mean you’re the right body to work in an industry that has to have a lot of compassion for animals. We need people who know how to work with animals and have an innate ability to do that.”

That’s why the industry is reliant on the federal temporary foreign worker program. And while it helps, said Fitzgerald, it’s also “cumbersome to get through.”

“It’s a long process. It’s an arduous process. And we’re moving down the road of making it harder than better.”

Seasonal workers aren’t an issue for the industry, but finding long-term employees is.

“We’re looking for the types of workers that can come year round and the types of programs that can work long term for our livestock industry.”

Ideally, temporary foreign workers would be nominated to become Canadian citizens, but again, red tape gets in the way.

“Often, we have too many people lined up to become Canadians, and suddenly these individuals — who are very good people and who want to become citizens — are turned away and have to go back home,” he said.

“Then they’re out of the system for four years, and we can’t wait four years for them to come back to Canada.”

Fitzgerald wants the next federal government to fix the program so it “serves both the worker and the employer, while being good for Canada.”

“This really comes down to industry and government working together on programs that are good for everyone and good for the country.”

The post Meat packers desperate for workers despite jump in jobless rate appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.