The Ontario Processing Vegetable Growers marketing board believes it has found a compromise to an imposed regulation that it fears would have gutted grower contract protection.
Farmers had previously had two years of contract security, but new regulations would have reduced it to none and processors could have dropped growers whenever they wished.
The matter was the biggest concern for farmers when Ontario Processing Vegetable Growers members recently met for their annual meeting in London, Ont.
Chair Suzanne Van Bommel said the board has heard the concerns of growers after Regulation 440 was released last fall. The board took the concern to the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission, which is imposing new bylaws on the organization.
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Commission chair Jim Clark said at the meeting that the commission, which regulates marketing boards in the province, agreed with the change.
“I know that changes to term contracts immediately caused some concern to the industry,” he said.
“I have made it clear we are open to alternative solutions.”
Van Bommel said the contract security changes in Regulation 440, which is the government regulation that sets out how the OPVG will be run, were a surprise.
Here’s how the regulations worked:
- In previous regulations, a processor could terminate a grower with cause for such things as a food safety or production issue. The grower could appeal to a local board, and the board would decide whether it was just cause to remove the grower.
- If the issue was because of a business relationship issue, the processor had to give the grower two crop years notice that it wouldn’t renew a contract.
The new regulation said a processor could terminate without cause immediately, starting next December.
“That’s when we started to hear a great deal from growers et cetera, and they said ‘whoa,’ ” said Van Bommel.
Van Bommel said processors told the commission that having a local grower group decide whether cause was just wasn’t fair. There were also concerns that it was difficult to establish cause based on the grower board guidelines and that two years was too long to try to terminate a grower.
The vegetable growers group offered a compromise that would see it adjust its own regulations to make cause for grower termination more exact and that the time before termination would be moved to one year.
Clark said the commission has accepted that compromise, but he couldn’t say when it would be in effect.
Van Bommel said she expects the revised contract security language will be through the government process before next December, which was the original timeline for the use of the clause by processors. As a result, growers shouldn’t be subject to the language that most concerned them.
