Officials from the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency have started the process of putting a long-festering dispute behind them.
The agency has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Northwest Territories, beginning a process that will bring its two large egg producers into the national system.
“We have finished the negotiations, the documents have been drawn up and I fully expect this to happen,” said CEMA director Gordon Hunter from Florenceville, New Brunswick.
“It has been quite an issue for quite a few years. It will be good to get it behind us.”
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A deal to bring the N.W.T. into CEMA means two large territorial producers will have to shelve plans for major expansion.
But they will be able to keep producing eggs far in excess of their domestic demand. Most of the production from the 115,000-bird quota they will bring into the system will flow south from the NWT and into surplus removal.
For most of the past decade, those producers have been outside the system and the eggs have been flowing south, mainly into the Edmonton market, where Alberta producers living under production controls have complained about unwelcome competition.
The Northern Poultry and Pineview Poultry Products Ltd. operations at Hay River had hoped to expand to 200,000 birds.
The deal between CEMA and the N.W.T. heads off a potentially greater problem for western producers, and the national system.
“This will be good for the agency,” said Cynthia Currie, chair of the National Farm Products Council who helped get talks started again after she was appointed to the supervisory council a year ago.
Ironically, the issue of CEMA authority over the N.W.T. producers was back in the Supreme Court two weeks ago.
For the second time, Supreme Court judges listened to arguments about whether the national agency has the right to impose its will on the northern farms, since the N.W.T. did not sign the CEMA national agreement in the 1970s.
It is a constitutional issue about the scope of national marketing monopoly legislation which some opponents of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly are watching closely.
If the court rules against the CEMA, some wheat board critics have said it could be a precedent to use against the wheat board.
CEMA lost at both lower and N.W.T. Supreme Court levels and appealed it to the Supreme Court.
The court first heard arguments last summer and then in December ordered a rehearing. It was held March 19 and a judgment is unlikely for several months.
The judgment will have no impact on the political deal made to bring the Territories into the CEMA.
