CAMI fights for survival

WELLAND – Jimmie Lee, owner of CAMI International Poultry Inc., is fighting for business survival in a market where supply-management marketing boards have stacked the odds against him.

Not only are the marketing boards refusing to supply him with Canadian-grown chickens to fill orders from eager customers, including many Chinese and other immigrants in the Greater Toronto area who for religious and cultural reasons want his products, but they are now trying to block his access to imported chickens.

The Chicken Farmers of Ontario marketing board has refused to replace about 600,000 kilograms of live chicken he was buying from farmers in Quebec before the Ontario and Quebec marketing boards signed a deal to stop inter-provincial movement of live birds.

The Chicken Farmers of Canada, the national agency for provincial marketing boards, has blocked Lee’s application to buy birds from the United States because it says it can meet his needs.

However, the national agency is offering already-slaughtered birds which will not meet the specifications Lee’s customers demand. They want Hong Kong dressed birds which means they want the head and feet left on.

Nor do the already-slaughtered chickens meet a number of other customers’ specifications, such as roaster-weight birds that are air chilled, hand-slaughtered Halal-protocol slaughter for Muslims, etc.

Lee has filed a court challenge to gain the right to import chickens that the marketing boards are refusing to supply.

Because of the way the bureaucratic system works, his challenge is to a ruling by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, but DFAIT is acting on protocols outlined by an agreement with the supply-management system managers.

Lee has been successful with an application to DFAIT to participate in another program in which the national chicken agency has no right to interfere. That policy allows Canadians to import raw materials, do some processing in Canada, and then export the finished products.

That government policy is designed to exempt companies from import barriers, such as tariffs and quotas, so they can provide jobs and business for Canadians.

Lee has customers lined up in China, Hong Kong and Dubai.

As for his application for imports to make up for what the supply management system has taken away, "they are trying to make life difficult for us,” says a frustrated Lee.

In his quest for chickens, Lee has gone as far as Nova Scotia to buy a truckload of birds.

“How can marketing boards be so powerful that they can put people out of business?” Lee asks.

What’s more, Lee has broken no laws or marketing board regulations. He says he has no arguments with the concept of supply management to support farmers.

He “played by the rules,” says industry veteran John Slot who is a past chairman of Chicken Farmers of Ontario and director of Chicken Farmers of Canada. “He has done nothing wrong.”

But he knew long before Ontario and Quebec signed an agreement last year to stop inter-provincial trade that he was going to lose 70 per cent of his supply of chickens.

The Quebec and Ontario chicken boards and the two dominant associations representing chicken-processing plants indicated they would cut off out-of-province purchasing.

But their deal included provisions to replace the out-of-province birds they were buying with home-province birds. Except CAMI and one other Ontario processor.

That other processor threatened a lawsuit and the Ontario board and major processors, members of the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors (AOCP), settled out of court by supplying him with Ontario-grown chickens. 

That processor, I happen to have found out, is Cericola Farms. Cericola also became a member of the AOCP.

Lee neither sued nor joined the AOCP. He stuck with the Ontario Independent Chicken Processors association.

John Slot, who manages the OIPP, figures it’s his personal involvement that has engendered the determined opposition from the chicken marketing board and AOCP.

“They don’t like me,” says Slot. During public hearings before the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission, the AOCP spokesmen termed Slot "a disruptive force," but when challenged to provide backing for that claim, offered no evidence. Slot countered that he has a track record of working hard to co-operate with the marketing board to find policies and ways to ensure that Ontario processors and their clients can be fully supplied with Ontario-grown chickens.

Slot says personality clashes are no reason to persecute Lee and CAMI International Poultry Inc. “Jimmy is a really nice guy. He has done nothing wrong.”

Slot says it’s not only Lee who is being punished, but also his loyal customers.

He says it’s ludicrous that members of certain religious and ethnic communities in the Greater Toronto area, the largest multi-ethnic community in the world that is living in peace, are denied the right to buy the food they want.

He is issuing two challenges to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne who is also Ontario Agriculture Minister:

“First, I challenge her to explain how this has happened.

“Second, I challenge her to fix this problem. 
Do the right thing” by supplying CAMI with 600,000 kilograms of live chickens per six-week quota period “to replace the chickens that Chicken Farmers of Ontario and the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission (which supervises the chicken board) took away.”

And Slot is challenging Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Trade Minister Ed Fast to grant Lee’s request to import chickens to make up for what he has lost from his Quebec suppliers until Wynne resolves that situation. 

“I have always been in favour of supply management,” says Slot, “but supply management is not above the law. Lee legally bought chicken (from Quebec farmers) and paid his (marketing board) levies.

“This has gone far beyond a matter of supply management. What is being done here violates the Canadian constitution, it violates property rights, it’s not legal.”

And Slot is appealing over the head of marketing board leaders, asking chicken farmers to remember that David Fuller, the longest-serving chairman of the Chicken Farmers of Canada, often reminded chicken farmers that “supply management is a privilege, not a right.”