After the strike at Exceldor, another tile in one year has fallen on the poultry industry as a shortage of chicken catchers soon threatens to cause the euthanasia of 100,000 birds per day.
• Read also: Labor shortage: Exceldor urgently needs foreign workers
Most of the chicken catchers, whose job it is to capture the birds and put them on the trucks that will transport them to the slaughterhouse, are from Guatemala.
But the delays in processing the files of these foreign workers by Services Canada are delaying the arrival of these valuable employees.
“Usually, it takes around four months for us to process requests. Now, we have reached about 7-8 months to process the files, ”laments Michel Beaudin, vice-president of the chicken-catching company Équipe Sarrazin, in an interview on the show. To your business.
Mr. Beaudin usually has 15 teams of chicken catchers in his business, but currently he only has seven active.
“My employer Exceldor is having a hard time finding buyers for these birds. And there, we are close to the end where we are starting to talk about the need to euthanize birds, ”he warns.
“If ever the shortage of workers is not filled, it could go up to a hundred thousand birds a day which would have to be slaughtered, perhaps euthanized, because they grow too big, that they do not have more space in the building and that the building must be emptied, ”adds Mr. Beaudin.
Call to speed up the process
Poultry stakeholders urge Ottawa to prioritize chicken catchers’ cases and speed up the process to avoid the “catastrophic situation” that looms.
“It’s almost 30% of the workforce that is currently missing to catch chickens, so it’s major. We really need to process files quickly, as a priority, it’s really essential for us, ”claims Sylvie Richard of the Quebec Poultry Processing Council.
“The situation is still catastrophic. We can see the repercussions that we have had recently in the entire poultry sector and the shortage of manpower worries us, ”admits Pierre-Luc Leblanc of Éleveurs de poulaille du Québec.