Livestock farmers in Powell River won't be able to turn a profit under new regulations introduced by the province in Sept. 2007, says the Powell River Regional District (PRRD) - and they're taking their message to the province.
"If there are any meetings in Victoria, we'll be there," said PRRD chair Colin Palmer. He and the board are unanimously opposed to the province's Meat Inspection Regulation (MIR), which came into effect in Sept. 2007, more than three years after going through legislature. The regulation requires all meat to be slaughtered at an approved abattoir and be inspected before it can be sold - a problem for communities on the Sunshine Coast, where there is no abattoir.
"It would be almost impossible to arrange for animals to be slaughtered here," said Palmer. "This is how unbelievably crazy this is, when meats processed in the big abattoirs are seeing outbreaks of E.coli."
B.C. Health Minister George Abbott said the MIR is a necessary step in preventing the outbreak of disease amongst livestock, a stance supported by Larry Copeland, the director of food protection services for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
"Unfortunately, the notion that small farms don't harbour the same pathogens is untrue - they're just as likely to infect small animal herds as they would large herds," he said. "Slaughter plants play an important role in minimizing food-borne pathogens."
Copeland said until last year, B.C.'s meat inspection rules have had a "notwithstanding clause" that had allowed local government to decide whether to become a "specified area" under the provincial program. The Sunshine Coast Regional District, acting as a local board of health, became a specified area in 1998, while the PRRD elected not to. "With any other food commodity, [inspection] is applied equally - now we have one consistent regulation for meat," Copeland said, noting the province's need for uniform regulations is not aimed at meeting requirements of trade agreements. When asked whether the need for safe food outweighs the costs involved in shipping livestock to an abattoir, he deferred to the Ministry of Health.
PRRD Texada Island director Dave Murphy said the costs have stopped some farms from expanding and have caused others to give up.
"It's an industry that could be developed more - here [the province] is promoting the 100-mile diet and sustainability, and it seems we're taking a step backward."
Outcry from NDP and Liberal MLAs resulted in the creation of a transitional licence that can exempt farmers from the regulation until the end of March 2008, but Murphy said farmers won't be able to turn a profit once that expires. The MIR is subordinate to the province's 2002 Food Safety Act and, as a regulation, was not subject to parliamentary debate before it was passed in July of 2004.
"That piece of legislation took five days to pass," said Powell River-Sunshine Coast NDP MLA Nicholas Simons. "Third reading took less than one minute."
During a late January visit to Powell River by Rick Thorpe, minister for small business and revenue, concerned citizens told him the new meat regulations are hurting local farmers. Thorpe said he hadn't appreciated the isolation of the community and will consult his staff to see "how we can make that work given the new rules."
One area in which the Ministry of Health has sought to help is by offering $100,000 in seed money to help establish community abattoirs - a sum Murphy said is "about a tenth of what the cost would be." PRRD directors and Sunshine Coast environmental health officer Bob Weston also discussed bringing in a mobile slaughter facility for the Powell River area, but Palmer said it wasn't economically feasible. "The mobile abattoir seems to work OK in the Interior, but for Texada Island, where I'm from, it's impossible," said Murphy.
The Regional District of the North Okanagan has also voiced concerns about the MIR. A survey report released by the district on Tuesday (Feb. 5) outlined the impacts of the regulation on the region's slaughter capacity. Ninety per cent of farmers who responded said they'd experienced a lack of slaughter capacity after the MIR came into effect, in contrast to just 26 per cent having the same problem before the MIR. It also said four of the eight pre-MIR custom slaughterhouses in the area have since closed.
When the PRRD board last met with Abbott and Minister of Agriculture and Lands Pat Bell in 2006, Palmer said their concerns fell on deaf ears. But the board plans to continue trying to get Powell River excluded from the MIR.
"We'll just keep giving them information until they listen," he said.
