Jeff Traeger, President and Chief Executive Officer with UFCW Local 832, said the strike vote was a first for the plant and was taken in response to Maple Leaf’s refusal to take the bargaining process seriously so far.

Maple Leaf has been pushing major concessions at the table, and the union members have shown they are united and want a fair deal, he said.

The union and Maple Leaf were back at the bargaining table Monday, Nov. 17. Negotiations are expected to continue right up to the current contract’s expiry on Dec. 31.

UFCW 832’s bargaining committee is made up of seven members from various departments at the plant, and three staff members from the union. The committee first started to collect proposals from the membership in February and brought these proposals to the bargaining table in May.

The Lagomidiere plant in Winnipeg produces and packages pork products, including bacon.

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In a note pinned to the top of the program’s official website, the CGC noted that the strike was causing mail delays with the program.

Farmers were urged to, if possible, deliver their samples directly to the CGC, either at their head office in downtown Winnipeg, another CGC office or service centre, or another approved drop off site.

Service centres are located in British Columbia (Prince Rupert), Alberta (Calgary); Saskatchewan (Saskatoon and Weyburn), Manitoba (Churchill), Ontario (Thunder Bay and Hamilton) and Québec (Baie-Comeau and Québec City). Western and eastern regional offices can be found in Vancouver and Montréal, respectively. A full list, phone numbers and addresses can be found on the CGC’s webpage through the Government of Canada website.

“Please contact the office or service centre you’re visiting to confirm they have a sample drop off box available,” the website advises.

Besides CGC offices, drop off sites have been arranged at the following locations:

• BroadGrain Commodities Inc. – Dafoe, Sask.
• Bunge – Lethbridge County, Alta.
• All Paterson Grain elevators in Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba
• Sakai Spice – Lethbridge, Alta.

Farmers may also choose to keep their sample until the strike ends, the CGC said.

On Oct. 10, Canada Post said that mail service would resume after the Thanksgiving long weekend, as they moved to rotating, rather than nationwide, strikes.

The last day to mail samples is Nov. 30, 2025. Dec. 31, 2025 is the last day for any samples to be included in this year’s Harvest Sample Program.

Testing for quality

The cross-country Harvest Sample Program is a voluntary initiative for testing a host of quality factors across a range of crops.

For each sample, inspectors provide unofficial grade and quality results at no charge, including:

• Falling number for wheat and rye,
• Vomitoxin (deoxynivalenol or DON) levels for wheat, corn, barley and oats,
• Dockage assessment on canola and mustard seed,
• Protein content on barley, beans, chickpeas, lentils, oats, peas and wheat,
• Oil, protein and chlorophyll content for canola,
• Oil and protein content and iodine value for flaxseed, and
• Oil and protein for mustard seed and soybeans.

A CGC inspection supervisor said producer participants appear to be taking the inconvenience in stride.

“There hasn’t been a lot of complaints or anything. I haven’t heard one complaint,” said Judy Elias with the Weyburn, Sask., service centre.

“We’re all used to strikes, so there’s just new ways to do old business.”

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From April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025, Employment and Social Development Canada inspected 1,435 employers for compliance, the agency said in an Oct. 6 news release. Ten per cent were found to be non-compliant.

In the same period, nearly $4.9 million in penalties were levied, up from about $2.1 million the previous year.

Agriculture, construction employers among those punished

Examples of non-compliance included an agricultural employer who was fined $212,000 and was banned from the TFW program for two years for “failing to provide proper working conditions” and not providing required documents to inspectors.

A construction employer was banned from the program for five years and fined $161,000 for failing to provide proper wages and working conditions, and for lack of compliance with federal and provincial labour laws.

A fish and seafood employer received a penalty of $1 million and a 10-year ban for failing to provide proper wages and working conditions, and for non-compliance with labour laws.

“To date, this is the biggest penalty ever issued by the Department,” the news release said.

“It is clear that improvements to the TFW Program are needed. This starts with a focused approach that targets specific strategic sectors and needs in specific regions,” it added.

TFW program to be trimmed

This echoed comments Prime Minister Mark Carney made to Liberal caucus members in September.

At the Sept. 10 event, Carney said his government aims to reduce the total number of temporary foreign workers and international students to less than five per cent of Canada’s population by the end of 2027, CBC reported.

In early September, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said the TFW program should be scrapped and a standalone agriculture program should be created. Poilievre cited Canadian unemployment as the main reason for the plan.

A bit more than 78,000 temporary foreign workers were employed in Canadian agricultural industries in 2024, Statistics Canada data shows.

The current Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) allows primary agriculture employers to bring in seasonal workers from Mexico and the Caribbean. However, farmers and food producers may also hire workers through the TFW Program.

Program under scrutiny

The program has also faced a barrage of scrutiny in recent years. A February report from Amnesty International called the system “inherently exploitative and discriminatory.” It called for measures like greater flexibility of work permits, removal of permanent residency criteria that it said discriminates against low-skill workers, and for improved worker access to healthcare and adequate housing.

The Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association pointed to “decades of continuous improvements” that allowed for more mobility options within SAWP. It said that program sets the gold standard for TFW programs.

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The Free Trade and Labour Mobility Act is part of the One Canadian Economy legislation that received Parliamentary Royal Assent on June 26. The act looks to ensure that:

• Goods and services produced, provided or distributed under provincial or territorial requirements are recognized as meeting comparable federal requirements related to interprovincial trade.
• Workers licensed or certified by a province or territory can work in comparable occupations in federal jurisdictions without additional requirements.

Regulations under the act are under development to specify requirements including what makes federal rules comparable to provincial ones, the federal government said in a news release on Thursday.

The federal government will hold national and regional consultations with industry, business and labour representatives, including agriculture and agri-food groups, in the coming month. It is also calling for written submissions.

Interprovincial trade, labour mobility could benefit farmers

Interprovincial trade — a longtime matter of debate — has been a hot topic with federal and provincial governments this year as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs have threatened national exports.

In February, the Trudeau government said it would remove 20 out of 39 exeptions to the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA). These mainly related to government procurement.

A March meeting saw Canada’s premiers agree to reduce barriers, including those around direct-to-consumer alcohol sales. Recently, Manitoba signed economic co-operation agreements with New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island.

Manitoba producer groups have cheered moves toward greater interprovincial trade.

“Having uniformity and consistency in standards is key, and it is also important that these standards meet the standards our customers require as part of international trade agreements,” Manitoba Beef Producers general manager Carson Callum said in May after Manitoba tabled the Fair Trade in Canada Act.

The act passed in early June.

“Removing regulatory barriers across provinces that impact efficiencies — such as transport regulations — are areas our sector feels are key areas of focus to improve interprovincial trade,” Callum added.

Cam Dahl, general manager of the Manitoba Pork Council, said the Manitoba bill was a step toward greater labour mobility. For example, he suggested, a veterinarian certified in Ontario would be able work in Manitoba. He also flagged difficulties in transport regulations.

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Getting an education while growing up on the farm was just part of the package. I only realized it had happened later on in life during my first off-farm job as a carpenter. My boss had rented a telehandler loader for a job and announced I’d be driving it because “You’re a farm kid, you can figure it out.” I didn’t think twice, hopped in and sure enough I had it figured in less than a minute. After that I began to pay attention to the wide array of skills I’d acquired outside of the public school system. Even now, as I’m about to turn 40 years old later this year, I’m noticing abilities I have that I learned on the farm.

The learning environment on our family’s farm was learn-by-observation, followed quickly with learn-by-doing. I’m pretty sure it’s the same on most other farms. The many hours riding buddy with my dad or opa in a tractor was the observing part. I was mesmerized by the spinning augers of the pickup header or the way the soil would be thrown by a cultivator shovel. I connected the dots from a lever pull in the cab to the shifting equipment outside the cab or how subtle changes in crop density would be reflected by engine noise, indicating the driver should make an adjustment. Furthermore, I was learning the spatial awareness required to maneuver a sometimes 120-foot-wide implement through a field. I was soaking it all in, learning everything I could through observation.

I was also receiving instruction while I rode along. My dad would tell me specific things to watch out for and show me specific subtleties of each piece of equipment. There were certain ways he preferred to drive and he expected me to operate similarly when I would eventually take over. In other words, there were preferred ways and less-preferred ways to operate the equipment.

Stage two, learn-by-doing, came quickly for some jobs and only later on for the more high-stakes tasks. I can’t remember how old I was when I began cutting grass but, the stakes were relatively low, so perhaps around 10-years-old. With my observational knowledge and a few instructions, I jumped on the lawn tractor and started mowing — slowly at first, and as I gained confidence, the speed increased. Dad would give feedback, then when it was time to mow again, I would make those adjustments. I made mistakes but the grass always grew back so it was never a big deal. One time I did drive over a water spigot and that was a bigger deal!

As I grew in age and experience, higher-stakes jobs became available. That meant mistakes could lead to costly repairs or delays. I would take what I’d already learned and apply that to the next responsibility, compounding my skill set. It wasn’t long before I was able to operate all the equipment, in some cases before it was legal to do so (driving a tractor-trailer unit to and from the field on dirt roads when I was underage, for example). As my experience continued, learning to do new tasks or drive new equipment required fewer hours of training. By the time I went to work off-farm, jumping in a completely new-to-me tractor on a job site and figuring it out was easy because of my farm education.

The focus throughout all of my learning on the farm was on specific tasks or jobs that needed to be done. Not much attention was given to other skills required for employment such as communication or conflict resolution. We just interacted with each other the way we knew best. I observed how my parents interacted with me, my siblings, their friends, each other and their parents. From birth I developed patterns and habits of communicating. The learn-by-observing and learn-by-doing stages were combined; they are for everyone.

Shifting stakes

In any business, communicating can be complex. In a family business, it is always complex. Most of our attention was given to the operational side of the farm business. In the summer months there wasn’t enough daylight to get everything done. In the winter months our time was filled with all the work we didn’t get to in the summer. We didn’t take the time to consider the relational side of the farm. It didn’t occur to us that communicating had high stakes — that errors in family relations could be just as costly as running a sprayer boom into a power pole.

I’m not casting blame on anyone; learning relational skills like healthy communication is difficult and awkward. They are also easy to overlook when so much of farming requires timely, high-priority operational tasks. Farmers can “get by” for a long time without having to think about relationships. I only came to realize much later in life that each of my family members and I had a preferred way we liked to be communicated with. I learned that when I read a book about personality styles.

Learning how to become a healthy communicator or how to resolve conflict may be difficult, but it isn’t impossible. The environment I grew up in and described to you was rich with skill development. We were all learning, day in, day out — using our mistakes as opportunities to further develop our abilities, evaluating our processes to become more efficient. I’m sure your farm isn’t any different. We can all learn to do just about anything. Start small and make little improvements. Compound your skills and apply them to higher-stakes conversations and make even more improvements. Don’t worry, you will fail, but everybody does; it’s the best way to learn.

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Rollins said the administration wants a 100 per cent American workforce and suggested some people receiving government aid could replace immigrant workers.

“Ultimately, the answer on this is automation, also some reform within the current governing structure. And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America,” she said at a press conference outside the Department of Agriculture headquarters.

Most adults on Medicaid work full- or part-time or are not working due to illness or disability, caregiving, or school attendance, according to a May brief by the health policy organization KFF.

The farm sector has warned that mass deportation of farm workers would disrupt the U.S. food supply. In June, the Trump administration signaled it might pause raids on some farm worksites. It has since reversed course.

Trump’s tax-cut and spending bill, passed on July 3, introduces work requirements for Medicaid, which the Congressional Budget Office has said is expected to leave nearly 12 million people uninsured.

Later on Tuesday, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer said at a cabinet meeting at the White House that the Department of Labor had developed a new office to work with farmers and ranchers, but did not provide more details.

The Labor Department oversees the H-2A program, which provides seasonal visas for agricultural workers.

Farmland owned by ‘adversaries’

Rollins also said at the press conference that the USDA will curb farmland purchases by “foreign adversaries,” including China, and terminate agreements and contracts with people and entities from those countries.

Asked about land already owned by Chinese-owned companies Syngenta and Smithfield Foods, Rollins said the administration is still considering its options.

“You’ll likely see an executive order on this very soon from the White House and we’ll be looking at multiple different authorities within the federal government to begin to claw that back,” Rollins said.

In 2023, Arkansas ordered Syngenta to sell 160 acres (65 hectares) of farmland under a state law barring some foreign entities from acquiring or holding land.

Twenty-six states limit or ban foreign businesses, governments or nationals from owning private farmland, according to the National Agricultural Law Center, and some of those laws have faced legal challenges.

Only about 3.4 per cent of U.S. farmland is owned by foreign entities, and Canada owns the largest share, about 30 per cent, according to the USDA.

Rollins said she will be a member of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, “as of this afternoon.” The interagency body reviews foreign investments in the U.S. for national security threats.

Bipartisan lawmakers have supported limits on ownership of farmland by foreign countries, citing national security concerns.

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“I think we need to find our hook in some of those core government priorities,” said Brodie Berigan, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture’s (CFA) senior director of government relations and farm policy.

Berigan spoke alongside Food and Beverage Canada CEO Kristina Farrell and Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council (CAHRC) executive director Jennifer Wright in a webinar on June 26.

Large financial commitments to things like defense and housing could draw away workers from an already strained agriculture and food labour force, Wright said.

The sector should look at how its priorities fit into the government’s mandate and use that as an entry point for advocacy, Berigan said.

Prime Minister Mark Carney set seven priorities in his mandate letter earlier this year, including building “one Canadian economy” by removing barriers to interprovincial trade, establishing a new economic and security relationship with the U.S., strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces, and making housing more affordable.

The mandate letter also mentioned “attracting the best talent in the world” while balancing immigration rates.

It’s hard to know what this means, Berigan said. He speculated this could be targeted at Americans who are feeling insecure in their job and who may be interested to move to Canada.

Need to build consensus

The Agri-food sector needs also needs to agree on what it needs so it can present a unified voice to the government.

“When you are the government, and you have a diverse set of stakeholders who are calling for different things, it’s very easy to do nothing,” Berigan said.

More than 100 members of the agriculture and food sector met for a summit on June 11 and 12 in Toronto. Berigan said the need to strengthen employers’ human resource capacity came up a lot—specifically, the need to support employers to build capacity around tech solutions and a labour pool that will increasingly rely on technology to drive productivity.

The sector also needs to identify its skills gaps, said Farrell. Berigan said the need for a “skills gap map” came up at the summit. The government already has some of this data, but needs to hear it from the industry.

Programs in flux

The federal government is at the beginning of a new mandate and structuring its priorities, Berigan said. A lot of programs are in flux, including the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

The sector needs to clearly articulate the advantage of pursuing a multi-pronged approach like the National Workforce Strategic Plan that the CFA, CAHRC and Food and Beverage Canada have developed, he added. It also needs some sense as to how it will implement it.

“I think the clock is definitely ticking,” Berigan said.

“Unless we’re in there, able to articulate the value and the role of these types of strategies and the importance of them, decisions are going to be made without us.”

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement leadership told field office heads during a call on Monday that it would roll back a directive issued last week that largely paused raids on the businesses, the former officials said, requesting anonymity to discuss the new guidance.

ICE officials were told a daily quota to make 3,000 arrests per day — 10 times the average last year during former President Joe Biden’s administration – would remain in effect, the former officials said. ICE field office heads had raised concerns they could not meet the quota without raids at the businesses that had been exempted, one of the sources said.

It was not clear why last week’s directive was reversed. Some ICE officials left the call confused, and it appeared they would still need to tread carefully with raids on the previously exempted businesses, the former officials said.

‘No safe spaces’

U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said ICE would continue to make arrests at worksites but did not respond to questions about the new guidance.

“There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Washington Post first reported the reversal.

Trump took office in January aiming to deport record numbers of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. ICE doubled the pace of arrests under Trump compared with last year but still remains far below what would be needed to deport millions of people.

Top White House aide Stephen Miller ordered ICE in late May to dramatically increase arrests to 3,000 per day, leading to intensified raids that prominently targeted some businesses.

‘Chaos and confusion since the beginning’

Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday that farms and hotel businesses had been suffering from the ramped up enforcement but also said, without evidence or explanation, that criminals were trying to fill those jobs.

ICE issued guidance that day pausing most immigration enforcement at agricultural, hospitality and food processing businesses. But in another Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump called on ICE to target the Democratic strongholds of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York and to use the full extent of their authority to increase deportations.

A White House official said Trump was keeping a promise to deliver the country’s single largest mass deportation program.

“Anyone present in the United States illegally is at risk of deportation,” the White House official said.

Deborah Fleischaker, who held senior roles at both DHS and ICE during Biden’s presidency, said the shifting ICE guidance reflects broader turmoil at the agency since Trump took office. The White House has ousted multiple ICE leaders as it pressed for more arrests.

“It has been chaos and confusion since the beginning,” she said.

Farmers push back

The intensified ICE enforcement after Miller’s late May order renewed long-running concerns among farmers about ICE operations targeting their workforce. Nearly half the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as do many dairy and meatpacking workers.

Farm industry fears escalated last week when ICE detentions and arrests of workers were reported at California farms, a Nebraska meatpacking plant and a New Mexico dairy.

Livestock and restaurant sector representatives said on a press call organized by the American Business Immigration Coalition on Tuesday that raids make operations more difficult in their heavily immigrant-dependent industries.

“The people pushing for these raids that target farms and feedyards and dairies have no idea how farms operate,” said Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association.

Michael Marsh, CEO of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, said farm groups had not had enough input into the administration’s decision-making so far on immigration enforcement in agriculture.

Marsh said he had not received responses from Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials to a letter sent last week requesting a meeting.

“We’ve got a serious issue if we have almost a million of our workers that are going to be subject to deportation,” he said. “Because if that’s the case, and they are picked up and they are gone, we can’t fill those positions.”

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The order to scale back U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids came from Trump himself, the person familiar with the matter said, and appears to rein in a late-May demand by top White House aide Stephen Miller for more aggressive sweeps.

Trump was not aware of the extent of the enforcement push and “once it hit him, he pulled it back,” the person said.

New orders to come

The new directive, issued on Thursday, still allows for investigations into serious crimes such as human trafficking. The New York Times first reported the guidance.

Trump took office in January pledging to deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. While Trump framed the effort around removing serious criminals, thousands of suspected immigration offenders with no criminal records have been swept up in recent months.

ICE’s more aggressive tactics – including raids in Los Angeles – have sparked protests and pushback from Democrats. Some Republican lawmakers have called on the administration to focus on criminal offenders.

Trump said on Thursday that he would issue an order soon to address the effects of his immigration crackdown on the country’s farm and hotel industries, which rely heavily on immigrant labor.

“We will follow the president’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement when asked about the new ICE guidance.

Farm groups skeptical of promised changes

The White House pointed to a Trump social media post on Thursday where he said farms and hospitality businesses were concerned the administration’s far-reaching immigration enforcement was taking away “very good, long time workers” and promising changes.

U.S. farm industry groups have long wanted Trump to spare their sector from mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain dependent on immigrants.

The United Farm Workers union said on Friday that it was skeptical the new directive would help workers without legal status. The group said it had calls from members about immigration arrests even after the new directive was issued.

“As long as Border Patrol and ICE are allowed to sweep through farm worker communities making chaotic arrests…they are still hunting down farm workers,” the union said in a statement.

— Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco, Ismail Shakil in Ottawa, Anusha Shah in Bengaluru.

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“Our farmers are being hurt badly and we’re going to have to do something about that… We’re going to have an order on that pretty soon, I think,” Trump said at a White House event, adding that the order would address the hotels sector, too.

He did not say what changes the order would implement or when it would take effect. Representatives for the White House and Department of Homeland Security had no specific comment about the order, while representatives at the Department of Agriculture could not be immediately reached.

“We will follow the president’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.

Reliance on immigration

U.S. farm industry groups have long wanted Trump to spare their sector from mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain dependent on immigrants.

Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers and many dairy and meatpacking workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told CNBC that Trump was reviewing all possible steps but that Congress would have to act.

Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, a leading farm lobby, said on Thursday that farm workers were key to the nation’s food supply.

“If these workers are not present in fields and barns, there is a risk of supply-chain disruptions similar to those experienced during the pandemic,” Duvall said in a statement.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in labor shortages and supply-chain snarls, with meat plants forced to idle and dairy farms to dump milk, and consumers encountering emptier shelves at grocery stores.

Trump acknowledges impacts

In recent days, demonstrations have been taking place in major U.S. cities to protest immigration raids.

Trump is carrying out his campaign promise to deport immigrants in the country illegally. But protesters and some Trump supporters have questioned the targeting of those who are not convicted criminals, including in places of employment such as those that sparked last week’s protests in Los Angeles.

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged the impact of the crackdown on sectors such as the hotel industry, which includes his company. The Trump Organization has said Trump’s adult sons are running his business.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote on his social media platform. “Changes are coming!”

Farmers have a legal option for hiring temporary or seasonal labor with the H-2A visa program, which allows employers to bring in seasonal workers if they can show there are not enough U.S. workers willing, qualified and available to do the job.

Rollins said Trump was “looking at every potential tool in the toolkit” and pointed to the length of the temporary H-2A visas.

The president understands that we can’t feed our nation or the world without that labor force, and he’s listening to the farmers on that,” she told CNBC.

—Reporting by Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey and P.J. Huffstutter; additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya, Aatreyee Dasgupta, Leah Douglas and Ted Hesson.

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