Conservatives call for another food terminal in Ontario

Thursday, March 7, 2013

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives want to see another food terminal established in the province to provide more local access for both farmers and buyers.

Tim Hudak, the provincial party’s leader, and Oxford MPP Ernie Hardeman, its agriculture critic, spoke of the idea today during a stop at the Western Fair Farm Show in London. The proposal is one of the points in the party’s agricultural platform due for release next week.

Hardeman notes a lot of southwestern Ontario produce is trucked to the Ontario Food Terminal in Toronto only to be shipped back to the area by its buyers or through it on the way to the United States. “We think that needs to change.”

Hudak, who toured the Ontario Food Terminal earlier in the morning, says there is clearly a need for another facility. The terminal hosts hundreds of vendors and thousands of daily buyers and is the third largest in North America. “You cannot get your way in there right now to get a stall because it is so popular,” he says. “So what do you do about that? Well, why don’t we look for a second terminal to increase access for our farmers directly to market.”

Hardeman envisions industry leading the terminal’s development with government encouraging the food sector “to move ahead and find a better, more cost effective way of delivering produce to their customers.”

The PCs plan to consult potential stakeholders to determine where to locate the terminal. “We need to do more review to decide whether it should be in London, in southwestern Ontario — somewhere in southwestern Ontario — or whether it should be in other places,” he says.  

Hardeman and Hudak say the terminal should be entirely self-financed. “We believe that the system presently would be able to deal with that,” Hardeman says.

He says he’s aware of an effort underway to study the feasibility of establishing a regional food hub in Simcoe County, as well as other initiatives across the province.

A regional terminal could be related to the existing terminal’s operations, he says. “It’s quite possible that they could be operated as a larger unit and put the value into the delivery of service rather than administration.”

However, he says his party wasn’t talking about specifics of how the terminal is implemented or administered. “What we’re looking at is to expand the present system that we have, to take it out of the (Ontario Food terminal’s) 1954 model and make it to provide the services that are needed in all of Ontario.”

John Hemsted, chair of the steering committee exploring the feasibility of a Simcoe County food hub, was unaware of the announcement and could not comment because he did not know the details.

Jamie Reaume, another member of the Simcoe committee and chair of the Ontario Food Terminal, could not be reached for comment. BF