Demand for foreign skilled workers in food industries of Canada.

Leaders of food industry in Ontario, Canada have been madly lobbying to the Canadian Immigration Service (CIS) in order to bring in more number of overseas workers on work permits.

Vice-President for labour and taxation at the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA), Justin Taylor, said that the efforts towards lobbying have had a positive effect, although there is much to be done to counteract the already massive shortage of workers in the industry.

According to the news source, the food industry would require a minimum of 181,000 workers by the end of 2005, and the Canadian work permit program is the best possible source of getting close to this number. This particular program has been highly successful in plugging many voids in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

Taylor said that the government needs to stop that all we need is engineers and doctors who are been brought in through the points system screening. He added that we don’t need doctors to work in quick-service restaurants; we want people having knowledge and experience in this sector.

He said that the base reality is that these are low-skilled jobs and employers are just looking for people to chop onions and take out the garbage.

The executive vice-president of CRFA, Joyce Reynolds, said that CRFA presented the issue to the Canadian government two years ago, with the advice of increasing the number of temporary workers in Canada, improving the method of training in order to retain trained temporary workers in Canada and developing an immigration policy that encourages Canadian Immigration.

Ms. Reynolds said that though this labour shortage will cause suffering to almost all industries, the outlook of food service industry is particularly grim. She said that more than 483,000 employees of the industry are aged between 15 to 24 years and projections show that by the year 2025, the population of this age group in Canada will decline by 345,000.