George Morris Centre folds

by SUSAN MANN

The George Morris Centre’s announcement that it’s dissolving the organization later this year was greeted by a mixed reaction from Ontario’s farming community.

“They will be missed,” says Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Mark Wales. “They were an economic think-tank looking at agricultural issues in Ontario and that’s needed.”

But Barry Senft, Grain Farmers of Ontario CEO, has a different view than Wales about the centre’s relevance. The closure announcement “is not surprising. I predicted this a while back, especially when they started to peel out the educational component.”

In 2013, the centre completed the divesture of its farm management programs and spun off its Value Chain Management centre as an independent entity under the guidance of Martin Gooch.

Senft says the centre’s closure won’t leave a void in the agricultural industry. It was set up originally to be a think-tank and look at policy matters. But he says he believes a think tank must look at all sides of an issue. “In the last number of years, the centre clearly in my mind took more of a consultant type of approach to its existence and moved away from that think tank basis.”

The centre has moved away from the “think tank that raises issues on both sides of the equation,” he says, noting for example the centre took a single position on ethanol to outline the negative aspects instead of raising some of the benefits of an ethanol policy.

Funding difficulties led the centre in the direction of taking narrow views on issues, he says. “I think they just started to have to chase the dollar. There was some money set aside by George Morris but with returns on money not being as plentiful as it used to be, I think they needed then to start acting as purely a consultant.”

Wales says some of the issues the centre raised along with studies it released “were certainly controversial. But the only way that you look at issues and examine them and get to a better place is by actually doing that.” Wales says “hopefully there’s some continuation of that examination and that process of looking at issues in the future.”

In a June 19 press release, the centre says it will transfer its net assets as a gift to the University of Guelph’s Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) “in accordance with the wishes of the late George Morris.”

Ontario Agricultural College dean Rob Gordon says the gift will help support programs in the food, agriculture research economics department. “The plan is there is going to be a transition team established” made up of people from the centre’s board and the university. “Our role is going to be to identify what are the opportunities for the university to assume some of the activities that have been previously delivered by the George Morris Centre.”

The team will also be looking at “what we will do with those remaining assets as well. That will clearly be focused on making sure that we’re highlighting the legacy of George Morris,” he says.

It still has to be decided if the university will be hiring any of the centre’s staff, he notes.

Centre managing director John Scott says currently it’s business as usual. “It’s going to be a migration more than really a dissolving.” From now until the end of the year “we’ll kind of migrate over to OAC and that’s in accordance with the wishes of George Morris. It’s just a sensible direction to take.”

Asked why the centre is taking this step, Scott says there are a lot of organizations now that are doing the kind of work the centre was set up to do, such as the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute in Ottawa, Ivey School of Business at Western University in London, the Canada West Foundation and other organizations, whereas when centre was first set up almost 25 years ago it was the only one looking at agri-food policy. “It’s a much more crowded field.”

It’s difficult to keep a small centre going in that field without access “to a lot of resources,” he notes. The board looked at it and decided “this is the best way to go to preserve what George (Morris) wanted.”

Scott says they don’t know yet how much funding will be transferred to the university’s agricultural college. The transition team “will work through all of the details over the next several months.”

Al Mussell, centre senior research associate, says he found out about the centre’s upcoming closure Thursday at noon and doesn’t know yet what he will do. “My concern and hope is that we can retain some of the capacity of the centre in some form because it’s a loss of research capacity if the centre just dissolves and everybody goes their separate ways.”

Mussell, who has been with the centre for about 15 years, says “I think everybody here is still a little bit stunned. This is still very new to us. It’s disruptive, disturbing and distressing.”

For the past five to six years, the centre has had a tough go financially, he says. “It’s been a difficult situation. The research institute business is not an easy business.”

The centre’s 2013 annual report says that for the 2013 fiscal year the centre finished the year with $475,837 in expenses over revenues and for the 2012 fiscal year the expenses over revenues was $516,877.

The centre has been an integral part of the agri-food landscape and has made a significant contribution to the farming industry’s research and policy discussion over the past 15 years, the centre’s release says. “In returning to University of Guelph, the vision of the centre is going home, as it was domiciled with OAC for its first 10 years.” It became a separate organization 15 years ago.

The centre’s significance is it is independent, Mussell says, adding he intends to continue to get a lot of good work out during the next six months.

Morris, an Ontario beef farmer, cattle buyer and Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame member who died in 1999, founded the centre in 1990. It offers research, consulting and custom education to the private sector, government, producer groups and organizations that have a commercial interest in agriculture, food and related policies.

Bob Funk, chair of the centre’s board, says Morris bequeathed about $2 million to establish the centre. The money “was to sponsor research that was not funded by someone,” he notes. “It was intended to develop agricultural policy for the future.”

Wales says there are other think tanks in Canada but they don’t necessarily focus on Ontario issues and they don’t focus on agriculture. “There are plenty of economic think tanks out there that barely know that agriculture exists. The George Morris Centre was focused around Ontario agriculture and they sometimes took some contrary viewpoints on subjects, supply management being one of them.”

Former centre executive director Bob Seguin, who is now the director of Niagara Region’s economic development department, says the centre, which is a national group even though it did a lot of Ontario work, had “a number of financial and marketing challenges over the last several years and have been trying to address it.”

Seguin says the new management team and board have tried to find solutions “and have come to what they believe is the most appropriate solution given the financial outlook and the market outlook.”

The marketplace has changed, particularly there has been a decrease in the demand from both levels of government for outside economic analysis and research in agriculture, he explains. Also, there is more competition from other groups offering some of the same products as the centre does. “There is a different demand structure out there.”

The 2008/09 recession and the years after the recession “highlighted the amount of change and what that has meant to the financials for the centre,” he says.

Funk says since that time it has been more difficult “to get sponsorship for activities that were funded. It made it a little more difficult to keep a critical mass of business in the centre. It’s got to the point where we said this is better positioned with the university.”

Seguin says it wasn’t the centre’s financial difficulties that caused him to leave his executive director’s job there. “I had promised that three or four years would be my tenure.”

As for whether the centre’s closure will leave a hole in the agricultural industry across Canada and in Ontario, Seguin says other groups will try to “fulfill some of that (research work),” such as the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute and Western’s Ivey
School of Business. In addition, there are other, broader think tanks, such as the C.D. Howe Institute, Conference Board of Canada and the Fraser Institute that look at broader economic policy matters.

The centre’s lasting legacy is it raised “some different ideas” and provided educational products for the farm and food community along with different analysis and thinking on matters, he says. BF