Five provinces, one milk board?

Thursday, January 13, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario dairy farmers are hailing the new year with a quota increase and the question of whether it’s time to merge Ontario’s board with those in other Eastern Canadian provinces.

Dairy Farmers of Ontario’s board approved a one per cent quota increase, effective Feb. 1, at its meeting Thursday.

General manager Peter Gould says the board decided to increase quotas because fluid sales during the past three to four months were stronger than anticipated. “That necessitates a quota increase.”

Another reason for the increase is more milk is being used in the domestic dairy product innovation program than was anticipated. The program provides successful applicants with a specific quantity of milk for five years to be used for new initiatives. Program users pay the prevailing provincial price for milk or milk components.

“Those two things added up to a one per cent increase at this time,” Gould says.

Farmers in the other P5 provinces - Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island - will also be getting a one per cent quota increase effective Feb. 1.

Earlier this week, at the organization’s annual meeting in Toronto, board chair Bill Emmott told delegates the P5 boards, at their meeting in November in Quebec City, endorsed further action to bring the five eastern provinces closer together. The provinces already have joint quota policies and share markets and revenues as part of the Agreement on Eastern Canadian Milk Pooling, formerly called the P5 All-Milk Pooling Agreement.

Emmott asked delegates if it was time to move toward sharing one board with affiliated committees for allocation, transportation, raw milk quality, finance and administration. The intent would be to have P5 committees with representatives from the five eastern Canadian provinces that are part of the agreement.

Gould says it’s just a concept now and there isn’t a deadline to have the one board in place. “Rather than trying to make decisions with five boards, ideally we’d like to see if it’s possible to achieve a single decision-making body within the P5.”

Currently all the authority enabling each board to exist and operate comes from their provincial governments. If a decision to merge the boards is made, “it would take the cooperation of the provinces to put in place a P5 decision-making body,” Gould says.

Also at Thursday’s board meeting, which took place after the annual meeting, Emmott was re-elected as chair, while David Murray was re-elected as vice-chair and Ian Harrop was re-elected as second vice-chair. BF