Ontario premier to visit Leamington

by SUSAN MANN

Premier and Agriculture Minister Kathleen Wynne plans to visit Leamington Friday and meet with local business leaders, municipal officials and growers to hear their concerns about H.J. Heinz closing its plant after more than a century of operation in the community.

The meeting will be held at Leamington town hall. It’s also being held to assure people the Ontario government “is working feverishly to do what we can,” says Mark Cripps, Wynne’s agriculture ministry communications director. The government has been working to “leave no stone unturned to create and capitalize on new opportunities there,” he says.

The Ontario government sees “opportunity there” for the growers and the community to come together and government will be there with them on a new plan to move forward, he says.

Heinz announced last week it is closing the processing plant by the middle of next year in a staged process over the next six to eight months. At the same time the company will add 485 employees across five existing facilities in Ohio, Iowa, California and Canada. Heinz’s two other processing plants in Ontario are in St. Mary’s and Toronto. Production by the Leamington plant, which makes ketchup, tomato juice, sauces and baby food, will shift to other factories in the United States and Canada, Heinz says in a statement.

Cripps says the message they’ve heard loud and clear from people in southwestern Ontario is a federal government proposal to deregulate food package sizes will be detrimental to area businesses. Package deregulation may not be the main reason for Heinz’s decision to close the Leamington plant but it “will provide an opportunity for multi-nationals to remove their footprint in Ontario and Canada,” he says.

Federal government officials didn’t attend the Council of Federation meeting of Canada’s premiers Friday, so Wynne didn’t have chance to raise package deregulation with them at that meeting, and the matter didn’t make it on to the meeting’s agenda.

Cripps says there hasn’t been any direct contact with federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz since Wynne issued her statement Nov. 13 saying the federal government’s plans to deregulate food container sizes in Canada is putting a chill on Ontario’s business environment. But Ontario has raised the matter with the federal government a number of times since December 2012, he notes.

Officials with the Ontario agriculture ministry have been in contact with Ritz’s office “regarding the Heinz announcement and coordinating government response efforts,” he adds.

Heinz isn’t blaming the federal government’s package deregulation plans or high energy costs in Ontario as the reasons it’s closing the Leamington plant. Heinz senior vice president Michael Mullen says by email the “decision is based primarily on excess capacity in our factories across North America and specifically for Leamington, the underutilization of capacity and the level of investment that would be required to upgrade the aging infrastructure in a 104-year-old factory.”

Mullen wouldn’t answer questions about the plant’s size or what Heinz plans to do with the facility once they close it next summer.

For its part, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says no changes have been made yet to package size regulations. Agency spokesperson Rachael Burdman says by email CFIA and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have held detailed discussions with individual stakeholders focusing “on specific foods with container size requirements and the potential effects deregulation would have on those sectors.”

Burdman says “the intent of these discussions was to verify that any changes to these regulations be made in the best interest of the Canadian agricultural and food processing industry.”

CFIA is using the results of those discussions along with federal agriculture department input to assess “the information obtained in order to determine the most appropriate regulatory path forward for all sectors,” she says. BF