The New Brunswick processor that’s now mandated to handle all chicken produced in the province says a proposal by its main chicken producer wouldn’t stop most of the layoffs at the packing plant.
Nadeau Poultry Farm, a subsidiary of Ontario meat company Maple Lodge, was designated by the New Brunswick government Jan. 20 as the lone federally-inspected plant for processing of chickens raised in New Brunswick.
Agriculture Minister Ron Ouellette made that designation by ministerial order, aiming to ward off up to 165 layoffs at Nadeau’s plant at St-Francois-de-Madawaska.
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Nadeau announced the layoffs after St-Francois-based Groupe Westco made plans to ship its New Brunswick birds to Quebec plants owned by Westco’s joint-venture partner, Quebec meat company Olymel.
Olymel and Westco announced plans last year to partner on “Sunnymel,” a $30 million joint-venture poultry slaughter and packing facility at Clair, N.B., not far from St-Francois.
The Sunnymel partners have since criticized Ouellette’s ministerial order as “invalid and unconstitutional.” According to a report Monday from Quebec farm journal La Terre de Chez Nous, Westco now plans to file in New Brunswick’s Court of Queen’s Bench to have the ministerial order set aside.
However, the Sunnymel companies on Jan. 24 said they had proposed a “contract-kill” arrangement with Nadeau to meet the terms of Ouellette’s order.
Sunnymel’s offer called for Nadeau to process the birds, then return the finished product to Sunnymel for marketing and distribution.
But the partners said Jan. 27 that Nadeau has rejected that offer. Ouellette responded in a release Friday that Nadeau and Westco must come to a mutually acceptable arrangement and until then, the province would not intervene further.
Rehiring
Nadeau manager Yves Landry said in a release Wednesday he was “disappointed” that Ouellette won’t intervene to further clarify the intent of the order. “The ministerial order said ‘processing,’ not ‘custom kill,'” Landry said.
If Nadeau had accepted Sunnymel’s proposal, Landry said, it would only have been able to rehire 50 of the workers who were laid off when Sunnymel began shipping Westco birds to Quebec.
And Landry contends that the order “was meant to restore the level of employment prior to the live chickens going to Quebec.”
In Nadeau’s case, the bulk of jobs cut had involved “preparation, packing, maintenance, sanitation, and selling” — tasks for which Nadeau said it was responsible before Sunnymel “began moving almost 80 per cent of New Brunswick-grown chickens out of the province.”
Ouellette and the province have offered to mediate an agreement between Nadeau and Sunnymel, but Nadeau’s Landry said his company wants mediated talks to focus also on “factors causing instability in the sector, and on longer-term solutions and strategies aimed at restoring stability of the supply-managed system in the province.”
“The legislation and my order were put in place as short-term measures to protect the workers from the current instability of the chicken processing industry in Canada and provide the impetus for the two companies to sit down and negotiate a long-term solution,” Ouellette said in his statement Monday.
“I will, however, reiterate my offer of mediation and, again, strongly encourage the companies to do the responsible thing and resolve this commercial dispute that is hindering the process that government has enabled and disregarding the needs of the workers.”
According to La Terre on Monday, Sunnymel has since continued shipping Westco birds to Quebec, so far without penalty from the New Brunswick government.
