Manitoba hog producers worry about how a new law will affect their industry following this fall’s provincial election.
Farmers fear a re-elected NDP government will continue to blame the hog industry for Lake Winnipeg’s water quality woes, and there have been no signs yet that a Progressive Conservative government would repair the situation.
“Until after the election, it’s kind of hard to tell where it will go,” Manitoba Pork Council chair Karl Kynoch said about the implications of Bill 46, which was recently passed into law and is now the Save Lake Winnipeg Act.
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The legislation contains vague language about all new or expanded hog barns requiring state-of-the-art manure handling facilities that most farm groups see as an effective province-wide moratorium.
The industry fears that the government has been targeting the hog industry to play to its political base because the new act’s as-yet-unwritten regulations don’t appear to be based on pragmatic water quality science.
“We feel it was only done for the election, to get votes,” said Kynoch about the new legislation.
“The government’s been beating up the hog industry for the past number of years.”
PC MLAs also voted for the bill, which Kynoch thinks they might have done out of fear of being seen supporting the often-attacked hog industry.
“It doesn’t matter what the Conservatives did, the government would have used it against them in an election,” said Kynoch.
Kynoch and Keystone Agricultural Producers president Doug Chorney urged politicians not to pass the law when a legislative committee held hearings on the law.
Chorney said he used a pragmatic approach, noting that the legislation would reduce regulation of hog manure treatment in the Lake Winnipeg watershed rather than increasing it.
“They’ve basically said you’re not going to build barns, so all the finishing and growing capacity for the pigs to feed the Brandon plant will come from North Dakota and Saskatchewan, and we can’t regulate them,” said Chorney.
“That will give us no control over nutrient management. We will have no control over the water quality of Lake Winnipeg by pushing the industry out of Manitoba.”
The industry hopes that either a reelected NDP government or a newly elected PC government will be able to back away from too-restrictive regulations once the election is over and focus more on helping farmers adapt their farming methods.
Right now, the law on the books looks scary to many farmers.
“Bill 46 could be the beginning of a lot of devastation,” said Kynoch.
