How Canada Cut Foreign Workers and Hobbled Its Meat Industry
- Plants dependent on immigrant labor can’t fill all their jobs
- A lesson for Trump on consequences of America-first measures?
How Canada Cut Foreign Workers and Hobbled Meat Industry
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For a glimpse at how Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to immigrants may affect the meat industry in the U.S. -- the world’s largest beef producer -- look no further than across the northern border to Canada.
Three years after former Prime Minister Stephen Harper tightened restrictions on foreign workers to force employers to hire more Canadians, processors from British Columbia to Nova Scotia say the move compounded a labor shortage from which they have not recovered. The Canadian Meat Council estimates the industry has 1,650 vacancies at 19 rural abattoirs, or 9 percent of total employment at those facilities.