The federal government will use a $50 million slaughterplant fund announced in last week’s federal budget to help build new capacity in regions that do not have a plant, says agriculture minister Gerry Ritz.
He said one candidate for help could be efforts over the past few years by Rancher’s Choice Beef Co-op to build a federally inspected plant in Manitoba.
“Manitoba has no federally inspected (slaughter plant),” he said Jan. 28. “There’s one up there trying to get going. I think there is a role for us to play in that.”
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Two years ago, the Rancher’s Choice co-op dissolved because it could not get enough farmer financial support. There are fresh efforts to find financing to build a plant in the Dauphin area.
Provincial agriculture minister Rosann Wowchuk said recently the provincial government supports the goal.
Ottawa’s three-year, $50 million budget commitment to “strengthen slaughterhouse capacity in various regions of the country” was the fulfilment of a Conservative election promise.
But the details of what the money will be used for have been vague and at times confusing.
The budget documents presented to Parliament Jan. 27 said federal money would be available only to match private investment and it implied that the fund would be available only to help existing plants improve.
“The program will make federal contributions available to match private sector investments in sound business plans aimed at reducing costs, increasing revenues and improving operations of meat slaughter and processing operations in Canada,” said the finance department document.
A finance official at an off-the-record budget briefing said Agriculture Canada will write the rules “but the intent is primarily to modernize and improve the competitiveness of existing plants.”
It led the National Farmers Union to complain that there was no guarantee the bulk of the money would not go to Cargill, Tyson and XL, companies that control more than 80 percent of the Canadian packing industry.
That is not how Ritz sees it. He said the money should also be available to help finance new slaughter plants in areas without access to an existing plant.
“I have no intention of dumping this with the big three,” he said. “There’s an absence of slaughter capacity in parts of the country that needs to be (addressed).”
He said implementation of country-of-origin labelling rules in the United States underlines the need to increase slaughter capacity in Canada.
“We have to build our capacity,” he said. “We can’t rely on dumping across that American line any more so I’m quite excited about what we can do over the next three years with that $50 million.”
Ritz said he will fight any finance department attempt to limit the funds to improvements at existing plants rather than helping to build new plants.
“I’ll make that argument at whatever level we have to make it,” he said. “I want to see the holes (in slaughter plant capacity) that we have analyzed and assessed across the country addressed.”
