Canada’s major beef packing plants have made peace with the House of Commons agriculture committee, at least for now, by sending detailed financial records for a confidential audit of their profits during the BSE crisis.
It means for the moment, the committee is setting aside its threat of holding the companies in contempt of Parliament, subject to fines or executive jailing, for refusing to meet a request for information.
Holdout packers Cargill and Lakeside sent packages of financial information to Ottawa to meet a committee-imposed deadline of Oct. 29.
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During an earlier standoff in June on the same issue, the foreign-owned companies had refused to comply, citing fears that their private information would be leaked.
Canadian packers subject to the request, XL Foods, Better Beef of Guelph, Ont., and Levinoff Meats of Montreal, sent in packages before the last deadline in May, before an election call interrupted the standoff.
Cargill and Lakeside complied this time after assurances that the information will be examined only by an auditor appointed by Parliament. MPs on the agriculture committee will receive only a report on aggregate results, not company-specific financial performance.
“We are pleased that we are able to work with the committee and we are now in compliance with the order,” Cargill Canada communications official Rob Meijer said in a Nov. 1 interview from Ottawa. “Now hopefully the industry and the committee can turn their attention to something they agree upon, getting the border open and finding ways to get the industry back on its feet.”
Politicians on the Commons committee said they were glad the conflict had been resolved, but warned that what happens next depends on the quality of the information the companies submitted.
“This doesn’t really put the issue behind the committee,” Greg McClinchey, legislative assistant to committee chair Paul Steckle, said Nov. 1. “It is ahead of the committee. It’s a guessing game. It really depends on what the auditor finds and reports back to the committee.”
If the report to committee does not answer MP questions about whether the packers made “undue” profits while cattle producers lost heavily, the issue of contempt could be raised again in Parliament.
“We know that envelopes have been delivered but we don’t know the quality of information in those envelopes,” McClinchey said. “We never will because only the auditors will examine them. But if the auditor comes back with concerns that the questions we specifically asked have not been answered, then we’ll have to consider options.”
Meijer said it helped that meetings between Cargill officials and MPs last week provided assurances that MPs would not see the raw data.
He said he expects the auditor’s report to the committee will reflect conclusions drawn by an Alberta investigation that there was nothing untoward.
Instead, market circumstances of strong consumer demand and surplus cattle after the border closed “created circumstances that provided short-term benefits to the packers. It was the market reacting to market forces.”
