The federal Liberal party gains a candidate in the Saskatchewan riding of Yorkton-Melville.
Chicken Farmers of Canada lose a national leader.
Lloyd Sandercock, of Fort Qu’Appelle, Sask., has decided to try his luck at federal politics in the expected spring federal election. He will retire March 25 after three years as chair of the national chicken supply management agency and lobby group.
“Our annual meeting will be the 25th and I’ll be stepping down then,” he said in a March 6 interview.
He may also resign as a director of the Saskatchewan Chicken Producers’ Marketing Board at the end of March, although he said that decision has not been made.
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Sandercock has served as national chair of the chicken marketing group since 1994, overseeing its evolution from a traditional supply management group to an agency in which production quotas are driven by processor and market demand and exports markets are pursued.
“I’ve seen the agency through a lot of changes, through the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) panel and the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) deal, which happened just months before I started,” he said.
“We have changed the agency totally. We are now more market responsive and I think we are the most aggressive, or progressive, supply-managed agency in the country.”
In the spotlight
Chicken Farmers of Canada (formerly the Canadian Chicken Marketing Agency) certainly has become the most high profile of the supply management agencies.
Representatives often appear on Parliament Hill when a Commons committee is holding hearings on rural issues. Within recent months, it was the only agency to appear before both finance and natural resources committees to extol the virtues of the chicken industry as a growth sector.
Federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale has rewarded them for their changes and salesmanship by highlighting the accomplishments of the chicken sector often as he talks about growth potential in agriculture.
Cynthia Currie, general manager of Chicken Farmers of Canada, was named recently to the federal Agri-Food Marketing Council. She is a member of the federal international trade advisory committee.
Last June, Agriculture Canada selected her to be keynote speaker at the department’s excellence conference in Winnipeg.
This week, she is part of the trade mission that Goodale is leading to Japan and Indonesia. Sandercock was also supposed to go but he dropped out because of the political nomination.
As a lobby group, Chicken Farmers of Canada has made efforts to keep a high profile to the government.
Last autumn during the Liberal Party of Canada biennial convention in Ottawa, Chicken Farmers of Canada was the only agricultural group to host a hospitality suite reception for Liberal delegates.
Sandercock said he leaves a leadership role in a sector that has become a major Canadian food industry player.
“Chicken is the most dynamic and growth-oriented industry in the protein sector,” he said. “We changed the way we were doing business from the old structured system that always seemed to short the market. We don’t do that anymore. We give the industry and processors the ability to react and provide the product.”
