By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
The hospitality industry in Osoyoos is deeply worried about how they will staff hotels and restaurants going forward as political winds have torn the foreign worker sector asunder.
Hospitality industry personnel gathered at The Sage Pub recently to discuss the situation after the federal government jammed the brakes on the low-skill segment of foreign worker permits amid political rhetoric and concerns of abuse in some sectors.
The story was virtually the same from restaurants to resorts who stand to lose up to 50 per cent of kitchen and housekeeping staff in Osoyoos after a virtual freeze on work permit renewals based on the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) program.
Allan Redekopp, owner of The Sage Pub notes that while there is support from Destination Osoyoos there are limits to what anyone can do.
The situation has been exacerbated by political pressure, misguided notions amongst some Canadians that foreign temporary workers are in some way partly responsible for the housing crisis, an effectively leaderless government and a prorogued parliament waiting on a coming election.
Christine Martins, Administrative Bookkeeper for the Sage Pub & Liquor Store said they have contacted Richard Cannings, MP for this riding and his office is “working on it”. Martins says Cannings advice after talking to the IRCC is to convert the permits (within 90 days of expiration) to tourist visas. The problem with that is they are no longer able to work until the situation changes, she says.
The situation has dire personal consequences for some of the workers, including one kitchen staff at the Sage who has a wife and two children here, one of which was born in Canada. While they can remain in Canada, he will have to leave the country.
“He’s in a real pickle now because his wife and mother have been extended so that his family could stay, but he has to leave,” Martin adds.
David McBean, General Manager of the Watermark Beach Resort noted that out of all the foreign labour programs the government only targeted the low skill foreign worker program.
He noted there are still a handful of programs by which employers can bring in foreign workers including the Francophone Mobility Program (workers from French-speaking countries), a high skill LMIA program, seasonal, refugee, free trade and Ukraine programs.
“All these programs are still there, they’ve only touched one program,” and this just happens to be the program that many use. “So it’s like you had all your eggs in one basket and they put a hole in your basket but you’ve got all these other baskets,” he said.
“I think it’s more of an awareness thing, to know that these other baskets exist.” He gave the example of the Francophone Program which gives a two-year closed work permit (meaning role-specific and employer-specific) only costs $200 and doesn’t even require the employer to purchase an air ticket.
Well-versed on the ins and outs of bringing in foreign workers, McBean was at the forefront of bringing in workers through the Ukraine program in 2023 when he was General Manager at Spirit Ridge Resort.
For his staffing needs, he operates with a combination of the francophone closed permit workers supplemented with seasonal LMIA workers and also workers through the refugee program. “They haven’t touched that program,” he adds.
Tandy Kustiak Director of Human Resources at Spirit Ridge said the resort has had success bringing in workers through Canada’s free trade agreements (FTAs) of which Canada is currently signatory to 15 covering 51 countries.
Generally, foreign workers eligible under a FTA require a work permit to work in Canada, but are exempt from obtaining a Labor Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). This typically speeds up the process and makes them cheaper as well.
But while these alternatives offer hope down the road it is the immediate time frame that concerns the industry executives.
Martins continues: “Our concern is we have four foreign workers where three so far, their work permits have expired.” She says the LMIA and work permit applications have been submitted but the work permits have been denied because there is no LMIA approval.
“So three out of the four have been told they need to leave the country or restore it as a tourist,” she said.
And so too at Walnut Beach Resort where they are looking at losing half of their housekeeping staff.
At Spirit Ridge Kustiak said that originally they were told they could extend the permit until April and then the next thing they were told was that the permit would not be extended and the worker had 24 hours to leave the country.
She says four workers have been rejected in their LMIAs and had to return back to their country of residence.
“There’s two more at the end of the month, and two more in March,” she said, shaking her head. “And you know what, they’re the best workers, it’s gut wrenching to me, because they were so invested, their heart was in it.”
Redekopp says that out of the eight kitchen staff, two are Canadian-born, one Filipino who was formerly on the foreign worker program just received his citizenship and of the other five one just arrived and is good for two years but the other four will all be gone and this “decimates half our kitchen staff right there.”
This has knock-on effects for the pub, he said, noting that 70 per cent of their sales are supported by those eight kitchen workers and losing half of them will likely force “severely reduced hours” which will impact other employees.
“So it’s certainly a hammer on the head for this particular business, but I know we’re not alone in where it’s at,” he said.
He noted that in a letter to Cannings, it was a situation of “biting off our nose to spite our face,” “because losing these people who actually want to be here is going to cost actual Canadian jobs.”
One problem is the difficulty in finding Canadians willing to work in the kitchen. “This is the frustrating part,” he says. “You can’t get people to work, and now you’re going to deny us access to the people who actually want to work.”
For Redekopp this is a major bone of contention, particularly when he gets flack for hiring foreign workers from uninformed people. “If I offered you $25 an hour to wash dishes, you would tell me to go fly a kite, and now you’re telling me that I’m an a**hole because we’ve hired somebody who actually wants to do the job.”
McBean points to some of the flaws in the LMIA structure. With the demographics of Osoyoos with a population of just over 5,000 and a retired population at around 43 per cent, according to government statistics, another 10 to 15 per cent of the population is aged 55 to 65.
Another chunk of the population is under the age of 18, leaving roughly around 1,000 people to run every business in town – restaurants, hotels, agriculture outside of town, and so on.
He says that the LMIA for Osoyoos and Oliver is calculated by considering the unemployment rate across a wide swath of the southern portion of the province from around Princeton across to the Kootenay region.
This situation skews the numbers for local employment where in fact there is a desperate need for workers “but because there’s a bunch of people, hours away by car who are unemployed, they feel that that, therefore, we should not be able to hire people here,” he says.
Redekopp adds that it’s unlikely that someone is going to move from Cranbrook to Osoyoos to work as a room attendant, even if they could find a place to live.
“We face a very real problem with being a very big hub for tourism business, and that’s our main economic driving force, yet we’re running out of gas, so to speak,” Redekopp said.
And now at the slowest period of the year they’re looking at losing half their kitchen staff. He ruefully laughs as he says he’ll put his kitchen uniform on and back to the kitchen.
“We’ll get through it for the short term,” he says, noting the irony around the fact that the tourists are returning to normal numbers after the pandemic and wildfires chased them away. “We’re finally maybe making some numbers back, and now we’re getting kicked in the face on something else.”
“All of a sudden our major resorts don’t have staff, and the ancillary players don’t have staff. We’re now this resort municipality that we’re building up but everybody who comes here . . . will be getting a two out of 10 service-wise and experience-wise, and they’re not coming back [after that].
“It’s a frustrating situation to be in,” Redekopp says. “Even the fact that we’re having this meeting and jumping through hoops trying to figure out a solution and a way to move forward in business is tough.
“If it was simple enough to hire Canadians, every single one of us, we would all do it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
