Layoffs at Agricorp
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
by SUSAN MANN
An Agricorp official says the completion of two major projects is the reason why the provincial Crown corporation laid off 30 staff members on Tuesday.
Randy Jackiw, Agricorp’s CEO, says one of the completed projects was the design work to get the Ontario business risk management program up and running. The other big project was the first phase of Agricorp’s information technology renewal strategy.
“There’s no impact to program funding for farmers in what we implemented today,” Jackiw says on Tuesday. Agricorp is “going to continue to meet those same levels of expectation” that farmers have in staff members answering their calls and for a timely turnaround of their applications.
The laid-off staff members are from all the various divisions, job grade levels and locations throughout the province, he says.
The employees, however, weren’t necessarily from the projects that have been completed.
“We made decisions based on where is our business today and what do we need for the future,” Jackiw says, adding the layoffs were effective immediately.
Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Mark Wales says they weren’t informed of the layoffs ahead of time but were notified about them once they happened on Tuesday. Wales adds he didn’t expect to be consulted in advance. “This is Agricorp managing its business properly. It’s not something we have any say in.”
Wales says the layoffs are just streamlining at Agricorp and “it’s not supposed to affect program delivery. That’s our big concern. We’ll obviously be making sure program delivery is not affected.”
Wales says Agricorp has assured the federation the layoffs won’t affect program delivery “so we’ll take them at their word and again we’ve been assured” the laid-off employees didn’t all come from one area but were spread out throughout the agency.
Agricorp had additional funding from the Ontario and federal governments along with resources for the two projects and had planned for a $3.4 million reduction in the 2014/15 budget “coinciding with the completion of that work,” Jackiw says.
The funding reduction has been in the Agricorp business plan “all along,” he says.
“We’ve been reducing costs throughout the year but we got to a point in time where we wanted to make sure that we were going into next year in the best condition possible,” he says, adding “this is also the least disruptive time of year for us to do this before we get into our next program cycles so that’s why we decided to do this now.”
The Ontario agriculture ministry declined to comment on the layoffs. Ministry spokesperson Mark Cripps says by email Tuesday that “as an agency of both the federal and provincial governments, Agricorp has jurisdiction over their operations and thus any comments regarding today’s decision will come from Agricorp.”
Established in 1997, Agricorp delivers both government and non-government programs to Ontario farmers. Agricorp has 350 to 450 full-time, seasonal and contract employees depending on the time of year.
Agricorp administers the Ontario farm business registration system and 46,000 farmers register through that program. Jackiw says 15,000 farmers buy production insurance, 16,000 participate in AgriStability and 12,000 in total enroll in Ontario business risk management programs.
This is the largest layoff at Agricorp since Jackiw was appointed CEO in 2002. “There are occasions when work is done that people are laid off. This is a larger scale because these were big projects,” he notes. BF