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Struggling to find workers, agricultural operators are sounding the alarm over problems with Canada’s immigration bureaucracy.
This week, the Canadian Mushroom Growers’ Association echoed concerns expressed last week by KT Ranches in the National Post, claiming chronic and often inexplicable rejections of temporary foreign worker applications by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) are creating grief for farmers.
“We’re starting to see these mass refusals,” said Mushrooms Canada’s Janet Krayden in an interview with National Post. She said their members started getting hit with a flurry of unexplained rejections late last fall.
“This is not just cattle — this is all of ag right now.”
Last week, KT Ranches co-owner Tracey Carson spoke of their battles with IRCC’s seemingly arbitrary and often confusing rationale in approving workers.
In one case, the IRCC rejected a work permit for a Kenyan-trained veterinarian hired as a herdsman at the Okanagan-based cattle ranch. He was rejected both because IRCC officers were concerned he didn’t have the ability to perform the job, and they weren’t convinced he’d leave the country after his permit expired because of “family ties” within Canada—even though he does not have any family in the country.
Krayden said Canada’s mushroom farmers are experiencing the same thing, specifically concerning Vietnamese applicants inexplicably rejected for family ties within Canada, despite none of them actually having relatives in this country.
“I have two farms that are struggling right now with those kind of mass refusals from Vietnam,” she said.
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