Industry maps out agriculture labour strategy

Glacier FarmMedia – An industry steering group has released an agricultural labour strategy it hopes will lead to a comprehensive plan for a stable workforce.

The critical shortage of workers in both primary agriculture and food and beverage manufacturing was well known before the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated over the last two years.

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC), Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) and Food and Beverage Canada (FBC) announced their national strategic plan last month, saying they hoped the five-pillar strategy would serve as a launch pad for a full plan.

Why it matters: A national strategy to tackle the labour shortage in agriculture could help the sector fill job vacancies and provide stability. 

Jennifer Wright, acting executive director at CAHRC, said industry associations and governments were involved in looking at issues, gaps and short-, medium- and long-term solutions.

“We know that it is a very complex issue and that there’s not one answer to this issue,” she said.

Wright said temporary foreign workers fill about 59,000 positions.

“It still leaves us with a gap of about 16,000 jobs,” she said.

Steering group co-chair Kathleen Sullivan from Food and Beverage Canada said vacancy rates in her sector are generally 20 to 25 per cent and in some cases higher.

“We are facing a chronic and structural labour challenge,” she said. “This has had a really detrimental impact on food production across the country, on animal welfare, and I think most importantly to me on the health and well-being of our current workforce.”

Scott Ross, assistant executive director at the CFA, is the other co-chair. He said primary agriculture has long been dealing with a labour shortage that consistently hovers at around nine per cent.

“We hear more than ever anxieties, concerns and challenges associated with labour-related disruptions and constraints up and down the supply chain,” he said.

The strategic plan identifies several foundational themes, or those that cut across all sectors: competitiveness and profitability; data; equity, diversity and inclusion; indigenous; and infrastructure.

These surround the five pillars the steering group identified in the strategic plan. Wright said the plan builds on the previous workforce action plan done by CAHRC and 11 agricultural roundtables.

Each of the five themes has an overall goal and key steps the committee thinks will help meet that goal.

“The idea here is if we get it right across all of those five themes…that ultimately you now have the best chance possible to be able to attract and retain the workers you need, with the right skills,” Sullivan said.

The first theme is perception and awareness. The goal is to increase the number of people entering the sector by enhancing the perception of the industry and variety of careers available. Sullivan said the industry hasn’t done enough to explain the opportunities to potential workers.

That fits with the second theme of people and workplace culture.

“Our goal here is that our sectors be viewed as a desired choice,” she said.

Steps to attain that include developing and promoting workplace culture models and offering tools for the many small businesses in the sector that don’t have human resources departments.

Ross said there has been a lot of attention on immigration and foreign workers, which comprise the third pillar, and that is a more complex issue than it sounds. There is a notion that many agricultural jobs are seasonal but he said there are a lot of year-round jobs that could be filled by new entrants to Canada, particularly those with agricultural backgrounds.

“We need to find ways to do a better job of bringing them to our industries, working with immigrant settlement agencies and other stakeholders in this space,” he said.

Skills development is the fourth theme, which calls for the development and implementation of a national skills strategy to ensure the sector’s workforce is appropriately trained.

The co-chairs said there is more research and information required in this space to understand how workers can fill current and future needs and how governments, post-secondary and private trainers can build and deliver programs.

Finally, automation and technology are seen as a way to lessen reliance on labour but also impact the skills workers need.

Sullivan said adopting more technology and automation means the workforce must be skilled and agile.

Francis Drouin, parliamentary secretary to federal agriculture minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, said the labour gap is felt at every point in the food chain, with tens of thousands of unfilled jobs.

“This will be a challenging mission, but as everyone here knows, the need to secure a high sustainable workforce for Canada’s agriculture and agri-food sector couldn’t be greater,” he said during the launch. “We need real and lasting change and we need it urgently.”

Bibeau is leading work with cabinet colleagues on an agricultural labour strategy.

Ross said that the steering committee is engaging with government to make sure work is not duplicated.

– This article was originally published at The Western Producer.