Olymel and Westco have started $2.2 million worth of site preparation construction for their planned new Sunnymel chicken processing plant at Clair in the Madawaska region.
The plant is controversial because it’s large enough to service the entire Atlantic region with weekly processing capacity of 450,000 birds. That leaves Nadeau Poultry, owned by Maple Lodge Farms Ltd. of Norval, Ont., with no birds to process and therefore no markets. The partners estimate it will cost $40 million to build.
Nadeau does, however, have an agreement with a Nova Scotia co-operative to build a new plant there. It is currently processing Nova Scotia birds at its New Brunswick facility.
While construction is underway, New Brunswick’s chicken producers who support Westco and the Sunnymel proposal are shipping their birds to an Olymel plant in Quebec.
At one point, the Nova Scotia government intervened to order producers to ship their birds to Nadeau, but later changed that decision and now says this is essentially a competition between the two companies and it’s not going to intervene.
Nadeau was rebuffed by the province when it recently made another bid to gain assurance of chicken supplies to keep its plant running.
There is an implication for Ontario because one of the issues in the New Brunswick confrontation has been inter-provincial trade in live chicken. That’s a hot-button issue between Ontario and Quebec; marketing boards in both provinces have a tentative deal to effect a truce, but it has yet to be ratified and implemented.
The first step towards ratification will be a decision from the Quebec government’s body that supervises the marketing board. Then it will be up to Ontario’s marketing board and its supervisory body, the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission, to pass regulations to bring their part of the agreement into force.
There was a commission hearing in Guelph recently to deal with concerns that a number of small-scale chicken processors have with the process involved in negotiating the Quebec-Ontario agreement and their anticipation that it will have adverse effects on their operations.
