The Chicken Farmers of Ontario marketing board has no compassion or policy to allow a chicken industry to develop on Manitoulin Island or anywhere else across Northern Ontario.
This is an issue that is likely to end up before the Ontario Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Appeals Tribunal.
Max Burt, the son of a proven chicken farmer on Manitoulin Island, has been struggling to achieve legitimacy for his fully-integrated chicken business - raising, slaughtering and selling them fresh to local customers.
The chicken board refuses to accept the family claims about how many chickens it was producing when the marketing board gained power to control chicken production for the entire province and refuses to believe that the family did not know it needed to apply for quota.
Yet this same chicken board seemed to be ignorant of ongoing chicken production on Manitoulin Island. My guess is the board learned because processors in Southern Ontario, eager to retain their monopoly on sales to stores in Northern Ontario, drew the board's attention to Burt Farms.
In any case, the chicken board did learn about chicken production and processing at Burt Farm and moved to squelch the business.
Max Burt has invested an enormous amount of time and effort in developing a meat-processing plant that is government-approved and inspected to slaughter a variety of species, ranging from cattle to chickens. He has developed a loyal clientele eager to buy locally-produced products, including chicken, some of them raised to niche-market standards such as free range.
Burt has no intention of ever producing and processing enough chicken to begin marketing in Southern Ontario, but he would like to serve the local markets which he is convinced would expand if the people could buy locally-produced and fresh chicken instead of what's trucked hundreds of kilometres from the Toronto area.
But the chicken board stands in the way. It won't allow him to produce chicken unless and until he buys quota from one of its millionaire members in Southern Ontario. And if he does grow chicken without quota, the marketing board will throw him under the bus.
Burt has stated his case in hearings before the directors and staff of the chicken board. They refuse to bend. He has appealed their decisions. They refuse to bend. So now Burt is pondering an appeal to the tribunal.
It ought not to take Max Burt of Burt Farms that much time and effort. The McGuinty government, which bestowed one of its Premier's Agri-Food Innovation Awards on Burt Farms in 2008, ought to intervene to set things right by ordering the chicken board to issue special quota for Northern Ontario.
It could, while it's at it, make this free quota and ban its sale out of Northern Ontario.
This is far from the first time this issue of chicken board injustice against Northern Ontario has been raised. In 1984, Elie Martel, NDP member for part of Northern Ontario, raised the issue in the Ontario legislature, noting that there is no chicken quota in all of Northern Ontario.
At that time, he said a young farmer who wanted to grow chicken would have to buy quota in Southern Ontario, produce at the same farm where that chicken quota was located for two years and only then would he qualify to apply to the marketing board for permission to move the quota to his farm in Northern Ontario. For obvious reasons, nobody did that.
And so, Martel complained, "he cannot even produce legally for local consumers."
Yet between then and now, the chicken board "discovered" large-scale chicken-producing farms in Eastern Ontario, all of them without quota, merrily producing thousands of kilograms of chicken for processors in Quebec.
After much controversy, those farmers were granted special "interprovincial" quota, and later that was converted into regular Ontario chicken quota. Those farmers, who had no track record of chicken production before the marketing board gained supply management powers, have joined the millionaires' club. Meanwhile, the Burt family, which has a track record of chicken production, is frozen out.
The chicken board could create special quota for Northern Ontario and issue enough to Burt Farm to cover production for local customers. And if it won't, the McGuinty government could and should intervene to make it happen.
