Ontario has announced it will spend $30 million to help its 21,000 cattle producers benefit from the national cattle set-aside program aimed at trying to match cattle marketings with available slaughter capacity.
Ron Wooddisse, president of the Ontario Cattlemen’s Association, said Sept. 27 the announcement will keep Ontario on par with Alberta in provincial commitment to the industry.
“We’re glad that the Ontario government has agreed to join the federal government in providing their full 40 percent share of the funding to help our struggling industry,” he said.
After Ottawa’s Sept. 10 announcement of the set-aside programs and market development and slaughter capacity expansion that will cost the federal government $488 million, Alberta announced it will spend $230 million.
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The federal government said it would provide its 60 percent of the cost of the set-aside programs whether or not provinces were able to spend their 40 percent.
The OCA began to pressure the provincial government to come up with an equivalent contribution to Ontario’s industry, the second largest in the country.
Premier Dalton McGuinty announced the provincial commitment Sept. 27.
Meanwhile, the Maritime provinces have said no thanks to the federal set-aside program. After years of having no packing capacity and being forced to ship cattle to Ontario for slaughter, things are about to change.
In November, a new federally inspected farmer-owned packing plant is opening in Borden, P.E.I., to slaughter all the animals in Atlantic Canada.
“We don’t have an issue of set-aside,” P.E.I. agriculture minister Kevin MacAdam said last week. “We’re a net importer of beef in Atlantic Canada so we need every animal we can going through that plant when it opens.”
He said the Atlantic provinces hope to convince Ottawa that the portion of the set-aside money their region could get should be used for other projects to help the regional industry. Funding projects to improve traceability or marketing could be possibilities.
At the end of a federal-provincial agriculture ministers’ meeting in P.E.I. Sept. 22, federal minister Andy Mitchell said flexibility in the BSE program could allow the region to opt out of the set-aside program without losing the money.
“There are some specific ideas that the minister (MacAdam) has put forward on specific component parts and we are actively having discussions in that respect, and we’ll see how they unfold in the not-too-distant future.”
