Ontario's RMP cap put to the test

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

The $100 million cap on the Ontario business risk management program for agriculture could be put to the test this year as it takes effect for the first time.

Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Mark Wales says with the real drop in corn prices “everybody will be figuring out you won’t get what you were expecting based on the program design.”

The working groups for the participating commodities – grains and oilseeds, beef, pork, veal, sheep and horticulture – have to work out how payments to farmers will be pro-rated “if there’s not enough money, especially given there’s more than one pay-out period,” he says.

Wales says the challenge facing the working groups was likely the reason Oxford MPP Ernie Hardeman, the Progressive Conservative agriculture critic, asked at Queen’s Park earlier this week for the government to explain how it can tell farmers there’s no money for them yet increase agriculture and rural affairs ministries’ salaries and wages.

Hardeman says in a Nov. 4 press release that he was referring to a 2012 Liberal budget pledge to freeze public sector employee wages and salaries and to government figures that suggest the ministry will spend more on salaries and wages this year than it did last year.

Ontario agriculture ministry spokesman Mark Cripps says the cap was negotiated with the participating commodity groups. The agriculture ministry is very efficient and ensures “as much money as possible within our total budget allocation goes to the programs that support farmers.”

But he acknowledges that “maybe there’s some pressures with the cap this year.”

Cripps also says management salary ranges across the public sector have been frozen since 2009 and there has been no wage increase negotiated with other employees’ union representation. However, employees’ salaries can still move up through existing pay grids, “while staying within the overall compensation envelope,” he notes.

Hardeman based his assertion of an increase in wages and salaries on a comparison of the ministry’s actual 2012/13 expenditures of $86.2 million for salaries, wages and employee benefits to a 2013/14 estimate that the two ministries will spend nearly $92 million on the same categories, an increase of 6.7 per cent. (Agriculture, food and rural affairs became two ministries earlier this year but the ministries continue to share one administrative budget).

Cripps questions the fairness of comparing estimates to actual expenditures. He notes last year’s actual total expenditure for ministry salaries and benefits was $86.2 million – 6.2 per cent less than the fiscal year’s estimate.

“We fully expect that in 2013/14 we’ll again come in below the estimate,” Cripps says.

Actual expenditures will be known at the end of the government’s fiscal year, March 31, 2014. BF