Photo: New York Times
JULY 30th 2019
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily
Canada’s Growing Cannabis Industry Spells Disaster For Greenhouse Labour Shortages
According to many farm groups, the consistently labour-strapped greenhouse vegetable and flower growers of Canada are upping their intensive efforts in attempting to keep, as well as recruit as many more workers having been directly faced with deep pressure from the country’s growing cannabis industry as possible.
Andrew Morse, head of the Flowers Canada industry group, had said that “Many of the cannabis producers are very cash rich. They’ve got the resources to pay a very good wage.”
16% of all people working in the Canadian field of agriculture are employed under Canada’s greenhouse, nursery and floriculture sectors. For a number of years now, the entire industry has had troubles in dealing with a tight labour supply. The issue may have been considered somewhat manageable if not for the current record low national unemployment rate in the country, which only seems to be worsening the problem overall.
Cannabis had been recently legalised by the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, during the October of 2018, leading to a rapid rising and expansion of the industry as a whole. For traditional greenhouse growers, the new and expanding sector of business is posing challenges and issues, according to farm groups.
As it turns out, there are great similarities between the necessary and required skills for working in greenhouses - whether that be growing cannabis, or flowers and vegetables.
According to the Canadian Agriculture Human Resource Council (CAHRC), even before the legalisation of cannabis, after 2800 jobs went unfilled back in the year of 2014 the cultivation industry had resultingly lost C$100 million, this having been cited as the latest data available. By the year 2025, it is expected that this gap will only grow to 7500 workers, CAHRC said.
Two-thirds of the entire country’s greenhouse, nursery and floriculture industry is housed and located in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario. In all of North America, the province’s flower sector is the third-largest, coming in right behind California and Florida, and according to Morse, growing by about C$800 million in flowers each year.
“It’s an exciting new field, it’s very attractive to young people, especially, (those) trying to get into the sector,” said Justine Taylor, the head of the Ontario association that represents tomato, cucumber and pepper growers. The lure of cannabis is not only a higher wage, but also the fact that it is a rapidly growing new industry, he added.
Last year, Statistics Canada had spoken, and described the cannabis sector as something of a “budding source of employment,” given that somewhere around 10,400 workers had been calculated in the workforce in November 2018. This had occurred very shortly after cannabis legalization, at least a 266% increase from the previous year. However, there is not yet any 2019 data for cannabis labour.
Middle management is where the most acute labour gaps can be found, according to Taylor, so in order to compensate, greenhouse operators are “putting a lot more resources into recruiting,” which is including overseas.
There is also the possibility that Greenhouses may have to “lean more heavily on foreign worker programs or they might have to look for ways to incentivize the local population to take on more of those jobs,” according to Morse. . Many farms are presently relying on a federal program that brings in seasonal, low-skilled labour. Foreign workers account for at least 28% of the entire sector’s work force.
Linda Delli Santi, head of the Greenhouse Growers Association in British Columbia said that “We’re all kind of fighting for the same trades people, the same repair people,” and added that “Even if you’re building a new greenhouse, getting all the trades on site are often difficult because those people are busy with cannabis operations, too.”
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily
