New foreign worker program targets high skilled workers for Canadian farmers

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

A national farmer business alliance has developed a foreign workers program to help farmers find high skilled, long-term employees.

“This program is targeted for more longer term, possibly permanent, and also higher skilled farm labour,” such as farm managers, compared to the labour Ontario farmers get through the federal government’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker program, says Bill Martin, vice president of Farmers of North America. The alliance is headquartered in Saskatchewan and has 10,000 members across Canada, about 600 to 700 of which are in Ontario.

Martin says in Ontario “we will be as active as farmers want us to be. This program applies to farmer members all across the country.”

The Seasonal Agricultural Worker program has farm workers come from Mexico and the Caribbean to work on Canadian farms whereas the Farmers of North America service will recruit farm workers mostly from Europe.

The alliance has formed a partnership with ILC Canada to provide its members with services to access foreign workers under federal programs, such as the Temporary Foreign Worker program, to fill gaps in the farm labour market. ILC Canada is a Ukrainian-based company that finds workers for people in other sectors in addition to farming, Martin says.

In an alliance survey, members said they needed a program to help them with regulatory and recruitment requirements.

Mark Wales, Ontario Federation of Agriculture president, says the need for this service in Ontario isn’t as great as in Western Canada. Most of the alliance’s members are in the prairies “so that’s where the demand (for the program) will be coming from. I don’t see that there’s a big demand for Ontario.”

“Ontario has a very high uptake of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program,” Wales notes. Those workers do a variety of jobs on provincial farms, including planting, spraying, harvesting, working on packing lines and making deliveries.

Under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program, workers can only be in Canada for a maximum of eight months, whereas under the Temporary Foreign Worker program workers can be here for a couple of years, he says.

The Seasonal Agricultural Worker program is very regimented, Wales says. Workers can only come from certain countries and farmers must pay the employees’ return airfare plus provide housing “and a whole list of things.” The worker can only work on the farm they are registered to work on.

Wales says in Ontario there might be a demand for the Farmers of North America labour program from greenhouse growers.

Martin says in an Oct. 21 press release getting workers through the Temporary Foreign Worker program is an expensive option for farmers as in addition to wages, they may have to pay other costs, such as airfare and accommodations. Anyone who claims farmers want to use this program to get cheap labour is “either misinformed or malicious,” he says. BF