On the morning of April 22, Toronto-area MP Julian Reed met with an uneasy rural constituent, the owner of Oseco Inc. of Brampton, a forage seed company.He had a serious gripe about the government.
"The discussion centred around what is described as the piling on of fees that has taken place since 1985," Reed recounts. "Fear was expressed that there is a limit after which the company may lose its competitiveness because it depends a great deal on export sales."
The Liberal MP from Halton-Peel raised the issue with bureaucrats from both the Treasury Board and Agriculture Canada.
He heard what he figures was good news - negotiations are underway to turn much of the regulation and policing of the seed business over to the business itself, sharply reducing costs of licensing, monitoring and inspecting in the pedigreed seed industry.
"I'm very enthusiastic about the responses I've heard," said the rookie MP.
But satisfaction for one constituent does not address the overall issue of the federal government's aggressive cost-recovery campaign and the danger it poses the farm sector.
It is not in the concept of farmers or food industry companies paying more for the services they receive from government that is the problem. Most understand that, in these days of shrinking government budgets, subsidized services are being cut.
But in the cutting, the question is when do higher costs begin to threaten the ability of the operator to survive?
Senior agriculture bureaucrats, like their political masters, insist that they are careful not to hit an industry harder than it can stand. "We strive to minimize the impact on the competitiveness of the agri-food sector," assistant agriculture deputy minister Art Olson recently told a Parliament Hill committee hearing.
But how do they know?
Evidence during the hearing indicated that in government, at all levels, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing when it comes to government charges.
At the federal level, for example, the Treasury Board says sectors receiving services from government must ante up hundreds of millions of dollars more. It then is up to individual departments to negotiate a fee schedule with its 'clients'.
The trouble is, however, that other departments also may be charging for services they deliver to the same 'clients', creating the "piling on" effect that Reed mentions.
Right now, Agriculture Canada is in intense negotiations with a variety of sectors to arrange new fee schedules. By next year, bureaucrats have been told to raise user-fee revenues to $58.6 million from $56 million this year.
Are those fees, in combination with charges from other departments, reaching problem proportions?
Who knows? It turns out that no one is keeping track of the overall impact.
"We, at the Treasury Board, do not have any oversight function that allows us to assess the impact of a whole series of decisions from individual departments on a particular industry," says senior Treasury Board official David Miller. Because of complaints, there will be consultations this summer on the cost-recovery program, but the Treasury Board remains reluctant to take on the 'overseer' role, he says.
It is up to industry to raise the issue with the individual departments if it feels the cumulative burden is becoming too great.
That sounds like a formula for some hefty lobbying bill, but to what end? Industry groups complaining to cash-hungry governments that they are being asked to pay too much do not get much sympathy these days.
Farmers are always complaining, right?
Which takes us back to MP Julian Reed and his constituent who suffers from "cost recovery burnout".
As government cost recovery momentum picks up speed in years ahead, industry groups and producers are going to have to become more adept at dodging bullets and bills from different directions.
In its review of the cost recovery program this summer, the government really should listen to industry spokesmen when they plead that someone be given 'overseer' responsibility to make sure cost recovery overall does not inflict exactly the kind of competitive damage on industry that individual departments claim they are trying to avoid.
Barry Wilson is an Ottawa-based farm columnist.
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Right to farm rules under review
By BERNARD TOBIN
The provincial Tories continue to squeeze dollars out of the farm budget, but appear willing to give farmers more rights in a growing number of farm practice related disputes with neighbours.Farmers say tougher right to farm legislation could ease the headaches many face when dealing with complaints leveled at legitimate farm practices.
Agriculture Minister Noble Villeneuve has promised to toughen the province's right to farm rules, and farm groups have been asked to take part in consultations that could produce revamped legislation this fall. The current Farm Practices Protection Act (FPPA) has jurisdiction over nuisance noise, dust and odour complaints, but has done little to protect farmers such as Embrun's Jean Guy Lapointe, who last year spent $10,000 on lawyers and experts to defend charges brought by neighbour Françoise Bazinet.
The Farm Practices Protection Board, which administers the act, ruled last December that Lapointe had to build a $1,000 wall to reduce the red-dog grain dust that traveled from his elevator to Bazinet's home about 60 feet away.
"Maybe they (the government) can accomplish something here for farmers where they have been cutting elsewhere," says Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) executive committee member Alvin Runnalls.
A brief prepared by OFA says the protection board would have more clout if it had the power to review municipal bylaws that place tough restrictions on farmers.
Runnalls says the case of Ottawa-area farmer Douglas O'Neil is just one example. O'Neil had always stored hay in a field along a concession in Clarence township, but two years ago, the round bales caught fire and firefighters had to extinguish the flames. That prompted the township to pass a bylaw ruling that hay had to be stored 50 metres from the road, making it impossible for O'Neil to retrieve bales after heavy snowfall or during spring thaw.
"In essence, all complaints about farm practices that don't contravene a federal or provincial statute or municipal bylaw" should be heard by the board, the brief says.
If municipal or provincial initiatives restrict use of farmland farmers deserve compensation, says the OFA. Runnalls says if groundwater or wetland preservation has an impact on viable farmland, the board should be allowed to set compensation levels. Because of growing concern for groundwater quality, restrictions on manure spreading and pesticide and fertilizer application levels are being promoted as a public benefit, Runnalls says. He says if the public wants to restrict the legitimate use of productive private farmland, farmers deserve compensation.
The OFA also wants the term "normal farm practice" better defined. Russell county farmer Rejean Pommainville, who sits on an OFA committee studying changes to right to farm rules, says many complaints against farmers come from rural newcomers who lack knowledge of farming.
Pommainville says a warning statement on land titles for agricultural areas would inform land buyers that life is not always peaceful and tranquil in farming areas. "In rural areas, there is quality of life," but there are noisy combines, and dust, he says.
Between August 1994 and August 1995 the board heard 389 complaints against farmers. About 50 per cent came from other farmers, the rest from non-farm residents. The board had 20 requests for hearings, but only two cases reached the hearing stage. The majority of complaints are resolved by agriculture ministry staff or other experts. Since the inception of the board in 1989, odour complaints have accounted for 50 per cent of the hearings, dust 30 per cent and noise 20 per cent.
The OFA says mediation is the key to resolving many disputes between neighbours and points out that the Ontario Municipal Board has recently set up such a system. Runnalls says a similar system, set up under the FPPA, could settle disputes, making board hearings unnecessary.
Pommainville says board decisions must have a high profile in the legal system, and courts should not circumvent the board's role in determining legitimate farm practices. He says "it's rare that the board has to go to a full hearing, and it could resolve problems far cheaper than the courts."
The OFA criticizes Ministry of Environment and Energy (MOEE) staff for, in some cases, not being familiar with the FPPA, or not willing to apply it. Runnalls points out that in the Lapointe case, Franoise Bazinet was represented by MOEE officials free of charge, while Lapointe had to hire his own defense. Runnalls says the agriculture ministry must be involved when MOEE or other ministries are involved in an investigation.
The OFA is also opposed to the use of soil classifications by government to determine types of farmland needing protection from development. "We believe all farm operations are deserving of the protection of the Farm Practices Protection Act, regardless of the soil class on that farm," the brief says.
Pommainville says "strengthening farmers' right to farm doesn't mean it gives us the right to pollute, just the right to make a living." He says farmers are environmentally aware and the number of farmers filling out environmental farm plans continues to grow.
"We want people to know they have to play by the rules. If they're polluting, they deserve to be punished," Runnalls says.
Labour union takes farmers to court
By TOM BUTTON
Labour activists are heading to court looking for a judge to give them the power to organize Ontario's 35,000 farm workers. Farm workers may even get the right to strike, says Walter Lumsden, organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW): "We're looking for equality with employees in other sectors."UFCW international vice president Tom Kukovica says the union's legal strategy is simple. It aims to prove that farm workers get lower pay and work in worse conditions than workers in industries that have the right to unionize.
Kukovica says Ontario is rife with examples of exploited farm workers, including cases where as many as 40 workers are forced to live in bunkhouses built for six.
On other farms, workers are sprayed with pesticides, and threatened with guns, Kukovica says. Farmers, he adds, are skilled at exploiting offshore workers and new immigrants who can't speak English.
"We think these things only happen in places like South America, but they are happening right here," Kukovica says. When judges hear what's happening on the farm, he says, they'll grant union rights to farm workers. UFCW has hired Toronto law firm Gowling, Strathy and Henderson to launch the challenge under the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If necessary, the UFCW, which is North America's largest private sector union with 1.4 million members, including 185,000 in Canada, will fight all the way to the Supreme Court, Kukovica says.
"What's the difference between a mushroom plant that employs 200 people and a shoe factory?" Kukovica asks.
Farm leaders say the union charges are fantasy. But they don't like putting their fate into the hands of the law system.
"That's the frightening part," says Mark Whales, vegetable and tobacco grower at Aylmer, and member of a farm committee that had been negotiating with UFCW.
"The union is going to be challenging the agricultural exemption through a system that doesn't know anything at all about agriculture," Whales says.
The UFCW found a staunch ally in the NDP Rae government, elected in 1990. Until then, the Ontario Labour Relations Act specifically said farm workers couldn't unionize. It was called the "farm exemption".
The Rae government overturned the exemption, and after three years of talks between farmers and the UFCW, the government killed the exemption and in July 1994, passed the Agricultural Labour Relations Act (ALRA).
It said farm workers could unionize, but they couldn't strike. Instead, disputes would be solved by binding arbitration. Mike Harris' Conservative government, however, has undone the NDP legacy. As part of this winter's omnibus bill, it killed the ALRA, and restored the old farm exemption.
Kukovica says the Harris move amounts to unconstitutional discrimination against farm workers. And Lumsden says the courts will be so aghast, they'll give farm workers even more power than they had under the ALRA, including the right to strike.
When the omnibus bill passed, the UFCW had already organized workers at a Highliner mushroom plant in Leamington, and was negotiating a first contract. It has also scheduled a vote at Kingsville Mushroom, and was organizing workers at Fleming Chicks.
Hamilton region fruit grower Ken Forth says the court challenge should fall flat. "A few farmers are bad employers," he says. "The vast majority know that it's in their own best interest to treat their employees well."
Forth says the union can't back up its exploitation claims with specific examples.
In the 18 months that the ALRA was alive, Forth says, the union didn't come up with a single complaint.
Whales points out the UFCW originally wanted the right to strike, as well as sectoral bargaining, so it could negotiate with a group of farm employers a set of wages, benefits and working conditions that would be imposed on all farmers. Blenheim fruit and vegetable grower Hector Delanghe, also on the committee that led to the ALRA, says the union wanted job classification. "It's completely unrealistic," Delanghe says. Delanghe says ALRA was a workable compromise, "the best deal we could get in a situation where we knew there had to be a deal."
Whales says a union victory in the courts could spill over to other legislation. Farmers could be forced to meet industrial health and safety standards, and also have to pay time and a half to workers putting in more than 40 hours a week.
Forth is nervous about the courts. "Lots of luck finding somebody there who knows about agriculture...maybe their great granddad farmed in 1860, but that's about the best you can expect," he says. "Somehow, I hope common sense prevails."
Farmers blow a fuse
By BERNARD TOBIN
After criticizing Ontario Hydro for poor service and rate gouging, farmers got to hear the utility's side of the story at a highly-charged Ontario Federation of Agriculture meeting last month.The OFA's board of directors passed a resolution in March calling for the utility to re-evaluate changes in how prices and small-use services are structured.
At the April board meeting, Hydro retail general manager Larry Doran said he was "shocked" and "literally blown away by a resolution from such a key group." Doran said November, 1995, Hydro customer research showed customers thought Hydro had improved service. But considering the backlash from the OFA, it "appears agriculture has gone the other way."
Farmers had complained that recent changes to hydro billing practices allow farmers to apply rural rate assistance to meters that serve residence only. Farmers needing separate services for irrigation, water pumps and other operations had to pay higher rates. The OFA also charged that service charges for small users had increased dramatically.
Doran didn't have all the answers, but acknowledged new rate structures had taken a significant bite out of some farm customers who need multiple services or seasonal use services. "We admit we underestimated the number of special farm situations. We had felt it would be in the order of one to two per cent....We see it's larger than that."
Doran announced details of new service options for farmers that the utility hopes will soften the protest, but farmers remained critical when Doran took questions from the meeting floor.
Both a secondary account and a service suspension option will be retroactive to Jan. 1 of this year. For farmers who require more than one service, additional accounts with a minimum usage of 2,500 kilowatt hours per year will be available at a reduced rate. Doran said annual savings per year for farm accounts will be $450. Extra services must be connected to the same transformer as the primary account "because we can't rationalize connecting farmers with accounts half a mile away using different equipment," Doran said.
Rates for secondary services will be higher than primary services receiving rural rate assistance, but there will be no monthly service charge, which will produce savings, Doran said.
Under the second option, service suspension, farmers can get service for six months of the year with an annual minimal use greater than 2,500 kwh per year.
There will be no service charges for the six months the service is inactive, but farmers will have to pay a $50 charge twice a year to suspend and reactivate the service. Savings will average $135 for single-phase farm accounts and $140 for three-phase accounts.
Doran told farmers that new Hydro rate changes for 1996 will mean savings for 90 per cent of the utility's customers. Farm customers will see Rural Rate Assistance increase from $18 million to $27 million, and net revenue collected from farmers will decrease by $3 million.
Doran said 3,000 to 4,000 farm accounts will benefit from the minimum use and secondary account options. But that wasn't good enough to satisfy OFA directors. Simcoe director Ed Pridham criticized Doran, saying "we've been sold a bill of goods again this morning."
He said he was pleased with the frequency and the quality of Hydro service, "but the story that we're holding the line on dollars coming out of my pocket is a crock.
"Only a few years ago, we were paying a minimal quarterly bill of $25 a quarter and now we're being asked for $189 a quarter. Tell me that's not an increase."
Oxford county's Margaret Vilez said the suspension option would not solve tobacco farmers' Hydro problems. Tobacco farmers have high-use requirements two to three months a year, but need minimal service year-round to maintain water and security. "The six-month service is not an option," she said. Kent county's Lyn Girty told Doran that Hydro's rate reduction is negated by the utility's move to monthly billing from quarterly billing.
"I would suggest that this rate reduction that you are talking about is being chewed up dramatically by the services that you are rendering, and the fact that you didn't let us know that in the first place."
Niagara's David Wiley, holding a farmer's utility bill in his hand, wanted to know why a Niagara farmer has to pay a $31.50 Hydro service charge, when half a mile away the Lincoln Hydro Commission charges only $7.85 per month.
In Hydro's defence, Doran said Lincoln Hydro has higher service densities, and can offer lower rates.
"Right now [Ontario Hydro] has average density of 12 customers per kilometre for one million customers versus 75 for local municipalities," Doran said.
Lambton's Dona Stewardson said she has farmed in Lambton county for many years and could always rely on Hydro, but complained that service had declined in the past five years. She wanted to know "why every time it looks like a storm, we're left sitting in the dark?"
Doran said Hydro tries to keep the lights on throughout the province, but the utility "cannot guarantee that there is any way you could provide the type of service to a farm community. Immediate response and lack of exposure to lightning cannot rival an urban setting where it's all underground. It's just not feasible."