A strike at Ontario’s second-largest hog packing plant is adding to the oversupply woes of the Canadian pig industry and raising tensions with Americans who complain that too many pigs are heading south for slaughter.
“It’s awful, just awful timing,” Canadian Pork Council executive director Martin Rice said last week.
In Washington, D.C., Steven Cohen of the National Pork Producers’ Council said the political pressure is growing to force curtailment of Canadian hogs being shipped to the United States for slaughter.
“A lot of our people are hurting and they see some of our capacity being taken up by Canadian animals and they want something done,” he said Dec. 17. “Right now, we are hoping for a voluntary solution. But there is pressure.”
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The strike at Quality Meats started in early December after workers rejected a company insistence that a new contract include significant wage cuts.
Quality Meats processes between 25,000 and 30,000 hogs per week.
Rice said the Ontario pork board is trying to deal with those hogs by sending them to plants as far away as New Brunswick and Red Deer, Alta.
But it is not an economic winner.
“When you are getting as little as hogs are worth now, those kind of transportation costs just eat up whatever is paid,” he said.
Yet for all the effort to find space in other Canadian plants to handle the hogs normally bound for Quality Meats, the strike has caught the attention of the American industry already chafing under the presumption that Canadian hogs heading south are a major part of their problem.
A lack of processor capacity is one of the major reasons American hog prices have fallen. There are too many pigs for the processing space available.
The NPPC recently wrote to Canadian Pork Council president Edouard Asnong complaining that as many as four million Canadian hogs will be sent to American plants for slaughter this year.
The Quality Meat strike will make it worse, said NPPC president Donna Reifschneider. She urged the Canadian government to intervene to end the strike.
The American embassy in Ottawa also has been lobbying the Canadian industry to increase packing plant production to keep more hogs at home.
“The Americans seem to think we have a lot of unused capacity in our plants,” said Rice. “We have not found it.”
But Reifschneider said in her letter that with American hog prices at 43-year lows, both countries have some responsibility to try to correct the problem of oversupply.
She said American plants are adding overtime, second shifts and weekends to try to process more hogs.
“We are doing our part and we expect the same of our Canadian counterparts,” she wrote. “We are under increasing pressure from our members to take extraordinary action. Thus, your prompt attention to this matter is extremely urgent.”
