It will be a year or more before the full extent of the damage from January’s ice storm in Quebec and eastern Ontario can be assessed, a senior Agriculture Canada official told members of Parliament last week.
Between then and now, governments face a thicket of complications as they try to decide fair compensation rules and eligibility.
“It will take us at least a year to assess the damage,” Doug Hedley, a director general in the department’s policy branch, told the House of Commons agriculture committee Feb. 3 during a special meeting on the aftermath of the ice storm that left large areas of both provinces without power for days and sometimes weeks.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
“We should not rush on this, so we can deal with it consistently.”
Questions not answered
As MPs from all parties put questions to Agriculture Canada and Emergency Preparedness Canada, the complications became clear.
Ottawa and the two affected provinces already have announced that farmers will be compensated for extraordinary costs and inventory or asset losses related to the storm. The bill will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
However, lost potential income is not eligible for compensation, and losses that were eligible for private insurance coverage, but were not insured, are not eligible for federal compensation.
Officials readily admitted once the dust has settled, they will discover holes in the net of compensation they are trying to construct.
In some cases, insurance companies are insisting that coverage does not extend as far as other companies are willing to extend it.
In other cases, the true damage to maple sugar bushes and wood lots may not be known for years.
Reform MP Jay Hill raised the issue of whether farmers who did not take pre-storm precautions by buying generators or preparing for disaster should be compensated for losses while a next door neighbor who spent money to prepare and saved his animals would receive less help.
“Should we be penalizing people who spent money to prepare themselves?” he asked.
Ontario Liberal Paul Bonwick suggested that it would be a slippery slope to begin to assess individual blame.
What about the farmer who did not build his barn as well as a neighbor and lost the barn to the ice? “I think our focus should be on helping people who need help.”
Andrew Graham, assistant dep-uty agriculture minister, conceded the issue of personal responsibility is a tough one when trying to determine levels of compensation. “We’re caught in a dilemma here.”
The officials told the committee that as late as last week, some farms in the townships south of Montreal still were without power for the fourth week.
Millions without power
At the height of the storm in early January, 10,500 farms in Ontario and 25,800 farms in Quebec were without power, scores of food processing plants and more than 1.2 million rural residents in the two provinces were living without electricity.
While several million litres of milk were shipped to Maritime provinces and Michigan for processing, 13.5 million litres had to be dumped for lack of processing plants.
In the barns, 8,000 hogs and an estimated 140,000 chickens died from asphyxiation or cold. There are reports of millions of dead bees and severe damage to greenhouses and orchards.
But the most immediate and perhaps most devastating impact will be in the maple sugar industry, where sap collection should begin within a month.
Hedley said as many of 70 percent of the trees in the $120 million industry have been significantly damaged or destroyed.
“Some areas will return fairly quickly,” he said. “Others may never return.”
