The COVID-19 pandemic

[danbrotherston]

Seasonal farm work is a bit of a different animal than either McDonalds or software development, though. Hard, physical work, with no chance to check social media every few minutes. Needs significant skill to make a decent wage. Dorm housing at the work site. And the work lasts only weeks or few months at a time. Those attributes don't make it attractive to many people in today's society, even if the wages were higher.

Of course, if they were to start paying workers $25 or $30 per hour, you'd get more candidates. And maybe even some that can handle the work. But then we'd be looking at a big cost increase in Canadian-grown farm products, and people might choose the imported alternatives instead.

Not going to disagree. There are also efficiency to workers moving around, given that our growing seasons are short, basically you still get the efficiency gains from specialization of labor, even though the labor doesn't last all year.

I was making a more general statement about work visas/migrant worker policies. Not that I think we should limit workers, but the standard of "I can't hire anyone to do the job" means little when the "without raising wages" remains implicit.

That being said, I think service work *should* be treated as a higher skilled job. Frankly, the fact that it isn't doesn't do anyone any favours.  But that's an entirely different conversation.