The farm lobby scored a major victory Monday in its year-long battle against what it considers excessive cost recovery plans and bureaucratic inflexibility by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency.
Treasury board president Marcel MassŽ indicated in a letter April 14 to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture that the agency is being put on a short leash by the government.
Instead of a five-year budget with $12.3 million in annual cost recovery fees, the PMRA will be given a one-year budget.
And it will have to justify its performance to cabinet ministers.
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“The agency will be required to report back to Treasury Board with an assessment of the impact of the fees, agency performance, service levels, efficiency measures and re-engineering before this authority is extended,” the minister said in the letter to the farm lobby group which led the fight against PMRA plans.
MassŽ’s decision to collar the PMRA came just two days before he was scheduled to appear before the Commons agriculture committee April 16, where MPs from all parties are expected to lambaste him over cost recovery.
Liberal MPs have increasingly been using weekly caucus meetings to warn that in rural areas, their party would pay a price in the pending election for cost recovery unrest among farm voters.
The PMRA, created to monitor and register farm chemicals for sale in Canada, has become the lightning rod for the complaints.
MassŽ said when Treasury Board was reviewing budget plans, the agency’s officials were ordered to pay more heed to complaints of their customers. They were expected to have “made changes as a result (of complaints) or provided meaningful justification on why it would not be appropriate to do so.”
At CFA offices, the mood was jubilant.
The national farm lobby, which complains that PMRA officials have been unbending in plans for a large bureaucracy and high cost recovery, issued a statement praising the MassŽ decision.
“The Canadian political process is alive and well,” it said.
The decision to make the agency justify its budget and performance a year from now “has given the CFA and other stakeholders the opening needed to insist on an efficient and effective PMRA in return for these fees,” said federation vice-president Bob Friesen.
He said continuing pressure will have to be applied to make sure the government keeps listening after the expected June election.
Controversy won’t end
While the decision may take some heat off MassŽ during the committee hearing, it will not end the controversy over the hundreds of millions of dollars in user fees the government has applied to the food industry during the past three years.
The farm lobby has been arguing that beyond the pesticide issue, the government must create an overseer body to assess the cumulative impact of user fees applied by various departments and agencies on the same sector.
MassŽ likely will be pressed at committee to announce that Treasury Board or some other body will be assigned the task of assessing the overall impact and referee if there are complaints in the future.
The farm lobby also has demanded that users have a say in program design and bureaucratic costs if they are expected to pay some of the costs.
