N.B.’s Farmers Call For Reversal Of Foreign Worker Ban As Efforts To Hire Local Failed
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick’s farmers are once again asking for a reversal of the temporary foreign worker ban imposed by the provincial government in late April, as efforts to replace them with local employees have not been successful.
Leaders of the National Farmers Union in New Brunswick (NFU-NB), Agricultural Alliance in New Brunswick (AANB) and Really Local Harvest, representing at least 800 agricultural producers in the province, held a press conference Thursday to speak about making temporary foreign workers part of the province’s recovery plan.
“The agricultural organizations here believe that the measures set up to replace temporary foreign workers with local labour have proved unsuccessful,” said NFU-NB executive director Suzanne Fournier.
Usually, the province needs between 165 and 175 temporary foreign workers in primary agricultural production. Some of them have arrived before the ban, but a majority were expected to arrive in May and early June.
On Wednesday, Premier Blaine Higgs indicated in a press conference that he could re-think his decision to restrict temporary foreign workers from entering the province.
“I said from the very beginning the decision was made at the height of the Covid crisis, where that was going and minimizing the risk to our province. That has subsided somewhat,” he said.
“I said I won’t let them go without employees and I meant that, I won’t. And if we don’t fill the roster in the next few days of what’s needed right now, then there will be decisions made to ensure that we can meet the needs.”
The government had launched a job-matching platform earlier in May to help fill jobs left vacant by foreign workers, but despite about 70,000 New Brunswickers currently being unemployed, only about 250 people have signed up on the platform. Meanwhile, industries like agriculture and aquaculture needs to fill approximately 600 jobs that are normally done by foreign workers.
Higgs said he “certainly” expected more people to step up.
Kent Coates, the president of Really Local Harvest and owner of Nature’s Route Farm in Pointe de Bute, said a reversal of the ban as soon as possible would help mitigate some of its negative impact.
Coates’ three workers from Mexico was supposed to arrive Monday and begin work in early to mid-June after their 14-day quarantine. June through October are critical times for his farm.
The ban has already lost him one of his workers, who is in Canada now but working at a different farm in another province. It’s also too late to get his two other workers.
He can still apply for the “unnamed” labour stream, for which the federal government draws from a pool of workers in Mexico who want to come to Canada. However, those won’t be the same workers that have built a relationship with him and his family, nor will they know his farm.
He said the seasonal worker program not only gives him access to reliable skilled labour, but also provides opportunities for the workers, for whom Canadian wages would enable them to build homes for their family, and send their children to university.
“Antonio, Jesus and Leopoldo changed my life and my business,” he said. “These workers are professional labourers, they’re reliable, they’re hardworking, they’re respectful and they’re proud…Despite language and cultural differences, we’ve developed a strong and close relationship.”
Coates said three weeks of his planting season this year have been consumed with trying to strategize his crops and staffing. Nature’s Route is already operating on very thin margins – 4 percent last year. The 96 percent of revenue going to staff payroll, operational expenses, infrastructure and others. Four percent of gross sales goes to Coates as his salary.
The ban has put his farm “way behind” because it’s an added challenge on top of the other Covid-19-related changes he’s had to make. This is something many other farms in the province is facing, he said.
“I was really blown away from having a professional labourer work on my farm as opposed to people that I always had to train myself. I find that at this point, in my production, it’s almost impossible to replace those trained positions with an untrained labour,” he said. “We’d get through the season but we’d certainly take a financial loss to do that, which perhaps is necessary for 2020 but is definitely not sustainable in the longer term.”
For this season, Coates has taken out the low-margin, high-labour crops like green and yellow beans. He’ll still grow a lot of staples food like tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, lettuce and spinach.
“I don’t feel there’s going to be a shortage of food. The national grocers will bring food in from somewhere. But I do feel we are in jeopardy of losing components of growing our own food in New Brunswick,” he said.
Labour Shortage Is Long-Running Issue
Before the pandemic hit, the agricultural sector’s ongoing labour shortages led the AANB to commission a workforce development strategy in the fall of 2019. The strategy was released earlier this month.
AANB president Lisa Ashworth said the strategy proposes medium-to-long-term solutions to help more New Brunswickers enter the sector. That includes providing stable funding for agricultural education from kindergarten through post-secondary levels to help young people understand how food is grown and what career paths they can take in the industry.
“It’s not realistic to expect people to look for work in an industry they do not understand,” Ashworth said.
Immigration is also a key pillar for the succession planning of New Brunswick’s farms, and automation can help with some jobs, but that needs time and investment. Besides, even though farmers are already implementing some automation, not every job can be done by a machine, AANB VP Marc Ouellet told Huddle in an earlier interview.
“It’s not like you can start automation tomorrow morning,” he said.
Ashworth noted that both Nova Scotia and P.E.I. have brought in their seasonal agricultural workers from abroad, isolated them for 14 days, and have not seen an increase in related Covid-19 cases. That indicates the federal health protocols farmers in New Brunswick were already following would have worked to keep public health risks low.
Food Insecurity
Covid-19 has exposed New Brunswick’s vulnerabilities when it comes to food security. The province relies heavily on sources from outside the province – this is something Higgs wants to change.
On Wednesday, he said food security will be a major priority in the coming years. The goals are self-sufficiency, as well as sustainability of farmers, and an ability to feed the general public at home, and possibly abroad.
“We look forward to working closely with government to establish meaningful and lasting policies and infrastructure to help New Brunswick achieve Premier Higgs’ stated goal of becoming more self-sufficient in the future. But these ambitious long term plans do not resolve the current situation that we’re all attempting to deal with,” said Ashworth.
The workforce development strategy identified temporary foreign workers as “foundational” to farms in the province, she said.
Farmers rely on temporary foreign workers because they’re skilled, committed and know the farm that they return to each year. The average temporary foreign worker in the province has about 7.5 years of experience in farming, Ashworth said.
With the ban, New Brunswick’s producers are expecting a loss of approximately $7 million due to lower productivity. And it will lead to higher prices of local food.
Challenges Hiring Local
In the early years, Coates’ farm relied on “local grassroots workers who are highly motivated to impact our food system.” But as the business grows, it became more difficult to find local staff.
By 2017, his farm was growing hundreds of thousands of pounds of vegetables a year, selling to farmers markets in Moncton, Dieppe and Sackville, as well as wholesale to P.E.I. and Nova Scotia.
“I was at my wits end trying to find sustainable labour solutions,” he said.
He says he offers between $15 and $17 an hour for local workers, but not many people took the offer. Although he said he’s had great local staff over the years, he’s had consistent issues with reliability.
“By the time August comes, even at a seven-hour workday, five days a week, I’m finding most of my local staff is feeling pretty tired and by the time September and October come, I’m finding my reliability has traditionally declined significantly,” he said. That’s a problem given 70 percent of his annual income comes from the harvest period in those two months.
Once, he said he expected seven people to show up to harvest and only three were present. On the other hand, temporary foreign workers are able to sustain their high productivity pace throughout the whole season, he said.
He signed up on the temporary foreign worker program in 2018 to fill labour needs. Coates said his foreign workers make minimum wage but are provided free housing and internet. He also covers their travel cost.
It’s not that many local workers aren’t committed, but they usually also have other career aspirations outside of farming.
“[As a society], we’re not expected to do a job that’s physically tiring. And I think that’s a huge component of the problem,” he said. “Expectations are definitely an element that would have to be incorporated in the long term strategy for us to find local help.”
Rébeka Frazer-Chiasson, NFU-NB president, said one of the biggest issue is the misunderstanding about the value of agriculture work.
“We just see it as labour,” she said. “Of course some of the value is represented in the pay but not all of it. If you really felt like you were working on a farm to build a New Brunswick food system that we were proud of and that was important and essential work, I think that would be different.”
Premier Higgs suggested on Wednesday that the agricultural sector needs to be supported by the government, industry and the general public. He said workers’ wages need to be a factor that’s discussed, and buying local should happen at the food chain level as well as farmers’ market level.
Coates said he feels he pays fair wages. If he has to train additional local workers, that would cost more, but he’s not looking for a government bailout.
“I base my business on production and paying fair wages by the work we do…What I’m looking for is, I have to have the labour work done to a standard that’s acceptable otherwise my business is not profitable,” he said.
Ashworth noted that while the provincial government has decided to get federal help to top up the wages of essential service workers making up to $18 an hour, agriculture work wasn’t a sector covered by that.
“So that was a choice that our province has made recently,” she said.
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