The chair of Manitoba Pork says key issues pork producers would like discussed during the federal election campaign include improvements to business risk management programs, completion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and access to labour.
Canadians will elect a federal government October 19. The Canadian Pork Council has circulated its 2015 Canadian Pork Industry Platform for the 2015 election and is calling on pork producers across Canada to engage their local candidates.
George Matheson, the chair of Manitoba Pork, notes these are very busy individuals with many things on the go, so pork producers have to get out there and make known to the candidates what issues are important to them, otherwise they just won’t know.
As far as the federal government is concerned, risk management is always something that needs to take place in all of agriculture today because it’s so expensive there’s so much risk involved and AgriStability has not worked well for us over the years. The 5 year Olympic averaging to get your profit margin, it just isn’t working because we’ve had so many consistently bad years.
Also we need the completion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It’s very important to us because we do export so much pork and the participants, the 12 participants in this partnership make up 40 percent of the world economy.
Also human resources are a big challenge for the hog sector both on the farm and at the processing plants. Temporary foreign workers, that program has worked well in the past but they have made changes that have not helped us so this is definitely also an issue that needs to be looked at.
Matheson says, like the old saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease and if you don’t make the issues known to those who can make changes you can’t really expect to see any changes take place.
