THE DEAL is done and unlikely to be undone. The Alberta government has passed Bill 43, the marketing of agricultural products amendment act, scheduled to take effect in 2010. It will institute refundable checkoffs for cattle, pigs, sheep and potatoes in Alberta.
Without mandatory checkoffs, the groups receiving and managing check-off fees for those four commodities must change their regulations and find a way forward.
It won’t be easy.
Their budgets will be more difficult to manage when the amount of available funding is unknown from year to year. There will be additional administration costs to track and refund checkoffs to producers who request them.
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Services rendered by these groups – Alberta Beef Producers, Alberta Pork, Alberta Lamb and Potato Growers of Alberta – may have to be reduced or modified because of less stable funding.
And they will have to do this despite the many questions that remain about Bill 43 and why the Alberta government introduced and passed it, with little or no consultation, in the span of two months.
Among the four groups at issue, only ABP was consulted beforehand and its objections, though doubtless noted, had no effect. The other three groups were unpleasantly surprised by the introduction of legislation that they didn’t request and do not favour.
Given that, it’s logical to conclude that the bill is exactly what ABP thinks it is – an effort to silence ABP objections about various government policies and actions, among them the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency.
That’s how ABP president Rick Burton put it at the June 9 semi-annual meeting. Since then, the government has done nothing to refute his assertion about attempts to silence the ABP – an assertion made publicly and widely reported.
Its lack of response gives credence to the idea that those who criticize this government’s actions do so at their peril. Polite dissent is not welcome.
The lipstick the government initially put on Bill 43, in an April 28 news release, was that it would bring consistency to agricultural commodity regulations and ensure producers have a choice in how their check-off money is spent.
It’s hard to argue with those reasons – if they are the true reasons.
But the government didn’t explain why the legislation was expedited without consultation and without request from the affected groups. It didn’t explain why such a change was thought necessary during crises in the cattle and hog industries, when commodity group attentions would be best focused on survival.
It didn’t address the reasons for a one-size-fits-all strategy when the cattle checkoff, with its heavy reliance on participation from feedlots and influence across multiple sectors, is clearly a different size altogether.
So yes, the legislation has passed and yes, commodity groups must deal with it. But the government continues to owe producers in all four groups a better explanation and justification for its actions.
The government of Ed Stelmach was largely elected on the strength of rural votes. Those rural voters deserve more facts on the matter.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
