Northern producer wants slaughter rules changed

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

by SUSAN MANN

Ron Rhyner wants to raise a small number of chickens for his local market in northwestern Ontario but inter-provincial slaughter rules and lack of facilities make his dream impossible to realize.

Rhyner, who has a mixed farm in Vermillion Bay, west of Dryden and east of Kenora, says he wants to get a special permit to bring poultry custom slaughtered in a provincially-inspected plant in Manitoba back to Ontario to sell. He doesn’t hold chicken quota but wants to raise 50 to 100 birds, or whatever number is allowed without quota. Legally he can’t sell chickens here that were killed in a provincially inspected plant in another province.

There isn’t anywhere for Rhyner to have poultry custom slaughtered locally. Once, four years ago, he took chickens to a provincially inspected plant in Manitoba and brought them back and sold them, mostly to friends and family. He later found out that was illegal.

Agriculture ministry spokesman Brent Ross says chickens would have to be slaughtered in a federally licensed plant if they were to enter Ontario from Manitoba or any other Canadian province or territory. There are no exemptions.

There is a federally-inspected plant in Manitoba but it’s a commercial plant that doesn’t do custom work. “They only take (chickens) from certain farmers who grow chickens for them,” Rhyner says. The small beef abattoir in his area isn’t interested because it would have to shut the beef slaughter down and disinfect the plant to kill chickens. After the chickens are done it would have to disinfect the plant again to resume the beef slaughter. 

Rhyner has been talking to government officials for three to four years about either amending the rules or implementing some type of special permit. “That’s too small a thing for them to look at,” he says.

He’s also talked to the Ontario Federation of Agriculture but “they flat-out ignored it and said that’s not in their interest,” he says.

Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Bette Jean Crews says they’ve had a long-standing policy “that we need to be able to move animals between provincial borders without needing federally inspected slaughter.”

The policy has been around for so long because “we’re fighting an uphill battle,” she says.  Convincing government to change the rules is very difficult.

Trade within Canada has been a problem for all provinces in all commodities. The Agreement on Internal Trade addresses some concerns but “we haven’t changed the regulations around slaughter facilities,” she says. “But we’re working on it.”

Crews, who is at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture annual meeting in Ottawa, says delegates discussed a resolution Tuesday to establish a process to allow livestock products from provincially-licensed plants to cross provincial borders.

Rhyner says farmers in his pocket of Ontario do all of their business in Manitoba. They buy their fertilizers, feed, machinery parts and other inputs in Winnipeg.
 
“We don’t deal with Ontario,” he says, noting southern Ontario is 1,200 miles away. The closest urban centre to him is Thunder Bay, a four-hour drive one way. It’s not an agricultural centre so he can’t get farming supplies there.

Rhyner says he’d like to sell chickens and add that to his mixed farm business but there is no way to do it now. There are also other farmers in his area who would love to raise poultry and sell their products locally because “there is a market here,” he says. BF