Lawyer Herman Turkstra, speaking for the Association of
Ontario Chicken Processors, testified during a tribunal hearing in Guelph
Monday that “kosher has been looked after and is no longer an issue.”
He was referring to the demise of Ontario’s only
kosher-standard chicken processor when Chai Kosher Poultry of Toronto closed in
May, 2013, after selling its chicken-supply rights to Sargent Farms Ltd. which
is unable to meet the kosher standard.
After that happened, kosher customers had only one source –
Marvid Poultry of Montreal – and the price rose sharply.
The Chicken Farmers of Ontario marketing board and its
parent supply-management partner, the Chicken Farmers of Canada national
marketing agency, came under heavy political pressure from the influential Jewish community to meet the Ontario market demand from
Ontario production and processing.
Despite Turkstra’s assurances to the tribunal, which was
hearing an appeal over the chicken board’s failure to implement a
specialty-markets policy it adopted more than a year ago, there is still no
kosher-market production or processing in Ontario, and slim prospects there
ever will be.
The board received five applications when it put out a
request from proposals from processors, but the board has failed to answer
repeated media requests about what has happened to those applications.
During a break in the tribunal hearing, board vice-chairman
Murray Opstein said the board has yet to allocate any chicken supplies to a
processor approved to serve the kosher market.
Joe Abate of Arthur, one of those who filed an application,
said when he delved into the details of what would be required to achieve
kosher-standard approval, he found it far too expensive and bureaucratic and
he’s no longer interested.
Apparently nobody else is, either. The owners of Chai Poultry have sold their equipment.
When Turkstra was challenged to explain his comment to the
tribunal, he said in a private conversation that the Association of Ontario
Chicken Processors, whose members account for more than 95 per cent of chicken
processing in the province, have agreed to make chicken supplies available from
their market-share allotments to fill the demand for kosher-processed chicken.
When asked “at what price?” he said that’s something the
AOCP members have not discussed.
Processors sometimes trade chicken supplies among themselves
to meet their processing schedules and marketing situations, but the terms of
those trades are confidential.
Turkstra also said that processors on a national level have
written to the Farm Products Council of Canada, which supervises the national
chicken agency, to say they will not oppose a national increase in chicken
production allocations to provincial marketing boards to meet kosher-market demand.
The processors have apparently made that offer because they
fear that businessmen interested in serving the kosher market might file an
application with the federal government to gain the right to import
kosher-standard chicken from the United States.
Not only would there be eager suppliers, but also prices
would be substantially lower than kosher chicken from Marvid Poultry. It might also open the door to imports of other specialty-market poultry.
So far the federal trade officials, under lobbying pressure
from the chicken industry, have refused to grant supplementary import permits
for special-market chicken.
They have successfully argued that if there is any generic chicken available from Canadians, no supplementary import permits should be
granted.
CAMI International Poultry Inc. of Welland filed a court
challenge against that when it was seeking supplementary import permits for
live chickens so it could process them for the Hong Kong dressed market,
mainly people of Asian ethnicity in the metropolitan Toronto area who want heads and feet left on.
The AOCP members arranged to supply CAMI with enough
Ontario-grown chickens from their own market shares to persuade CAMI to drop
its court challenge.
