By Joel van der Veen
DAVIDSON — As he spoke last week, Gerrid Gust was behind the wheel of a four-wheel-drive tractor valued at upwards of half a million dollars.
With the stakes involved in modern farming, Gust and farmers like him depend on experienced workers from other countries to make it through the season.
But changes to Canada’s labour exchange programs have made those workers increasingly hard to come by, forcing some farmers to make do with a short staff.
“I don’t want to put just anybody up the street on it,” he said Wednesday. “They seem to want to force us to use unskilled workers that have never been on a farm before, never seen a tractor before.”
Gust, who farms east of Davidson with his family, said they’ve been bringing in summer workers from Australia for almost 20 years through International Experience Canada (IEC), under the “Working Holiday” category.
Due to the recent drama over Canada’s situation with temporary foreign workers (TFWs), some of the timelines for the IEC programs have changed, leaving the Gusts to cope with a reduced number of workers.
Ordinarily, the program would allow applications beginning Jan. 1, but this year that date was bumped to somewhere in mid-February.
In reality, Gust said, it was closer to March 10 before applications were accepted, and with a six-week processing time, the situation has made it difficult to get paperwork completed in a timely manner.
Gust said his family currently has five labourers here with their paperwork in order, while one additional labourer is in the country but still holidaying since his paperwork is incomplete.
“He can’t get the proper entry visa,” explained Gust. “He can travel around Canada but he can’t work.”
He also mentioned a friend in southern Saskatchewan who needed to bring in a worker for calving, but because of the altered timeline, “they just couldn’t do it.” Gust said the situation is similar for farmers across western Canada.
Gust said the family has contacted both the federal and provincial ministries of agriculture, as well as local MLAs, and while they were “sympathetic and helpful,” little has been accomplished.
He said the problem appears to lie with Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC); he hasn’t been able to reach them by phone, and emails have met with no reply.
Gust said he’s tried every organization he could think of, from the Grain Growers of Canada to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, but to no avail, leaving them to deal with the reality of a smaller crew.
“We’re just making do,” he said. “I wouldn’t say we’re working longer hours, we’re just getting less done than we’d optimally like to do.”
For now, Gust said he is continually trying to make his voice heard, to express the urgency of the situation for farmers and to reach out to groups like the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council.
Remi Lariviere, a media relations official for CIC, explained in an email to the Leader that the IEC is a bilateral exchange program, reciprocal in nature, that facilitates work experience opportunities for Canadians in 32 countries around the world.
“Putting more emphasis on jobs for Canadians first and addressing youth unemployment was the guiding principle for the creation of the International Mobility Program in the summer of 2014,” he wrote.
He also explained that the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) allows employers to hire TFWs when Canadian citizens or permanent residents are not available to fill jobs.
For the full story, please pick up a copy of The Davidson Leader’s May 18 edition.