Chicken processors spring for producers' legal costs
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
by BETTER FARMING STAFF
The Association of Ontario Chicken Processors will pay legal costs of more than $202,000 incurred by a group of group of Francophone farmers in eastern Ontario during their legal action with the marketing board Chicken Farmers of Ontario that concluded earlier this year.
In a Superior Court of Justice decision rendered Dec. 20 and posted on a legal website Monday, the Honourable Justice Michel Z. Charbonneau ordered the processors’ association to pay $170,000, “plus disbursements of $32,221.02,” to a group of 24 farmers led by André Lamoureux of St. Isodore.
In the published decision, Justice Charbonneau wrote: “There is no issue as to the applicants’ entitlement to costs. The only issue is the quantum of the award.” Lawyer Herman Turkstra, Hamilton, who represented the processors says, “We initiated the settlement and we agreed to pay the cost.
“They (the farmers) asked for $365,000 and they got the figure that you have.”
The processors group had joined the original lawsuit as an intervener. The upshot of the court action was that Chicken Farmers of Ontario changed its regulations that had forced eastern Ontario producers to sell their chicken to western Ontario processors.
“Eastern Ontario growers are continuing to do what they have done for more than 30 years, to sell to Quebec processors in French. This was a language issue,” Turkstra says.
Asked about the “unanswered questions” referred to in the justice’s Dec. 20 decision, Turkstra said “The unanswered questions referred to are division of powers questions. Are these rules to be put in place by the provincial marketing board or the federal marketing board. These questions were raised by the Lamoureux group and it was never decided in that case.”
“We cross examined the growers over two weeks in Ottawa and we reached the conclusion that a reasonable accommodation was required for their language rights,” Turkstra says. "It had been going on, as you know, since 1960.”
Chicken Farmers of Ontario chairman Henry Zantingh, Smithville, was not aware of the Dec. 20 decision on costs until contacted by Better Farming Tuesday morning. Zantingh says he was spending time with his family and directed questions to staff at the CFO office in Burlington. “I have nothing to comment at the present time. I’m not ‘in the know.’”
Michael Edmonds, director of communications and government relations did not immediately return phone calls this morning. BF