A national business survey consistently names Farm Credit Canada one of Canada’s 50 best employers.
Last week, critics began to understand why employees love their company so much.
Sun Media newspapers, citing more than 3,500 pages of internal FCC documents obtained under access-to-information legislation, reported that the crown corporation has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars flying employees to holidays in the United States, accompanied by senior management, when they are selected for two employee recognition programs.
There are accounts of hundreds of thousands of dollars more in executive-class flying, expensive hotels and meals when senior FCC employees travel. There were receipts of $12,542 for Saskatchewan Roughrider tickets for employee use and other club memberships.
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The revelations led to opposition outrage, a demand from agriculture minister Gerry Ritz that the corporation justify itself and end the “excess” and a quick reversal by FCC.
The corporation cancelled a planned trip to Disney World in Florida that was supposed to start March 8 for employees recognized in the Bravo Club, which was set up to recognize the work of up to 12 nonloans program employees annually.
The program has also been cancelled.
At a meeting last week, the board of directors also cancelled the President’s Club program that sent up to 14 lending division employees plus spouses and senior managers on trips to American cities.
Sun Media reported that in the past two years, FCC spent almost $600,000 on trips for the two programs.
“FCC understands that it has a responsibility to spend its money wisely and carefully,” corporate secretary Greg Willner said in a statement after the board decision.
“The full board of directors and FCC executive committee members would like to extend sincere apologies for any negative perceptions caused by recent media coverage.”
Critics countered that the “negative perceptions” were not caused by media coverage but by FCC behaviour.
The board also agreed to review FCC expense policies “to ensure that they are more closely aligned with those of the federal government,” Willner said.
“Over the past year, the FCC president and CEO (Greg Stewart) had already taken steps to exert more fiscal restraint. However, it is clear that the corporation did not move quickly enough.”
The Sun Media stories showed Stewart was a beneficiary of many of these perks. In one case a year ago, he and his wife accompanied Bravo Club winners for five days at Disney World in Florida and FCC picked up $300 in child care costs in Regina while they were away.
The board decision followed a stern lecture from Ritz, who noted that the documents became public only because the Conservatives made crown corporations subject to access-to-information requests under its Accountability Act.
“Farm Credit Canada is there to serve farmers and taxpayers and this obvious excess is completely unacceptable,” he said in a statement after the initial stories appeared.
“I have instructed the FCC board to immediately provide a comprehensive assessment to determine what went wrong and implement a plan to rectify the situation and to ensure this kind of excess does not happen again.”
Opposition MPs on the House of Commons agriculture committee last week said the committee likely will be summoning FCC executives to the committee this winter to explain themselves.
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter called the revelations disgusting and accused the 50-year-old crown corporation of losing touch with farmers.
Ironically, in recent months FCC has been winning farmer praise as one of the few lenders willing to take part in the federal government’s loan program to beleaguered hog producers.
