By Oli Herrera

BUTCHER SHORTAGE

More needed to address meat worker shortage than just changing TFWP

Mar 16, 2022 | 5:42 PM

PRINCE GEORGE—During a conference on Tuesday, the Small Scale Meat Producers Association found that slaughter access was a key issue for producers. But on the other side, slaughterhouse operators say that the problem is a lack of staff. The SSMPA says modifying changes to bring in more workers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), but there’s more needed to fix the problem.

Day in and day out at Kawano Farms, workers prepare dozens of animals to be processed and served at the dinner table. Some beef are taken to the abattoir and held for days before wrapped for consumption.

Kawano is just one of the few abattoirs in B.C., serving hundreds of clients and various types of meat. Yet, there’s only beef being processed at the moment. The owner says it because he doesn’t have enough workers to take on the extra payload.

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“It doesn’t seem to matter what you offer as far as wages. We provide lunches. We provide medical and dental, and bonuses, and all kinds of things and we just cannot attract people to come and work in this industry.” said Michael Noulette, Owner and Operator at Kawano Farms.

The facility handles various types of meat including beef and pork. They also handle specialized meat like bison, llama, sheep and more. However, lack of workers has changed the way the facility does its processing. Instead of multiple animals in the facility at once, each species is handled at different times of the month.

“When we’re on the slaughter floor, we have to pull all of our employees into there. So the cutting room doesn’t work that day. Ideally what we’ve like to have is enough employees where we could run the slaughter floor at least two to three days a week and the cut room, I’d like to run it at least 6 days a week.” said Noulette.

“We just don’t have enough skilled butchers. We don’t have enough people interested in the trade.” said Julia Smith, Vice President of the Small Scale Meat Producers Association.

Lack of labour is one of the top findings that the SSMPA found in their recent survey. Which is why one of their recommendations is to include provincially regulated abattoirs to within the Temporary Foreign Worker program. Operators like Noulette have had first hand experience.with the program with no success.

“It was just a never-ending battle with the foreign worker’s program to get something approved for that.” said Noulette.

He says the problem goes beyond the program. He’s tried to collaborate with schools in B.C. and Alberta to get more students interested and trained to join the industry, but nothing came about. He then tried to create his own program but failed due to a lack of funding.

Changes with the TFWP is only a temporary solution according to the SSMPA. They hope down the line it would attract more canadian workers to the industry.