The shortage of kosher chicken made it into Maclean’s
Magazine’s April 14 issue where the writer highlights criticisms of supply
management.
Reporter Justin Ling tells how Chai Kosher Poultry sold its
plant supply quota (to Sargent Farms) and left the Ontario market in the lurch
with only one kosher chicken supplier for all of Canada – Marvid of Montreal.
The company could not meet demand, so hiked prices by about
50 per cent.
Ling quotes Richard Rabkin saying “the effect on the kosher community has been quite
drastic” and has hit the grocery budgets of the Orthodox Jewish community right
across Canada.
Ling also tells how Alan Burke of the East Beach Jewish
Community Association is leading an effort to re-open Chai Kosher Poultry, but
is running into trouble lining up supplies.
Buying plant-supply quota from other processors is too
expensive and so far the chicken board has not given the Jews chicken supply
through its new specialty markets policy.
Maclean’s says nothing about the lack of chicken for CAMI
International Poultry Inc. which had its Quebec supplies cut off when the
marketing boards and large-volume processors in Ontario and Quebec made a deal
to stop trade in live chicken.
That has left the Asian community in the Toronto area
without a supplier of Hong Kong dressed chicken which have heads and feet left
on.
CAMI is taking the chicken marketing boards and the federal
government to court in an effort to get chicken supplies to revive its business
and serve the Asian market.
Ling also tells how the kosher community was left without
cheese this winter when the federal trade department stopped issuing
supplementary import permits. There is no kosher cheese processor in Canada.
After the Jews protested, the federal government re-instated
permits to import kosher cheese.
It has not granted similar import permits to CAMI.
John Slot of the Ontario Independent Poultry Processors
Association has said privately that the situation simply shows that the Jewish
community has more political clout than the Asians.
And neither one, it seems, has as much clout at the Chicken
Farmers of Ontario marketing board.
