Peggy Thompson is my new heroine. She’s a Kelowna businesswoman who has overcome a mountain of regulations to get her thriving mobile chicken abattoir into business. She told the Vancouver Sun that she spent three years dealing with 12 different government-related agencies aimed at protecting her customers from poisoned food – as though that wouldn’t be foremost in her business plan if she ever wanted to keep her business alive.
She stubbornly stepped into this niche after new federal and provincial safety regulations in 2007, triggered by a listeria outbreak at a huge, centralized meat-processing plant, drove more than 100 small poultry processors out of business, crippling small farmers who could not afford to send their animals to be mixed with everyone else’s at distant, federally-approved slaughterhouses.
The number of government agencies lined up between Thompson and business success could fill a large barn: “The B.C. Ministry of Environment, the Agricultural Land Commission, the Interior Health Authority, local regional districts for every place I go – and there are five,” she told the Sun’s Jenny Lee. “Plus the City of Kelowna, BC Centre for Disease Control, the Canada Food Inspection Agency, the B.C. Ministry of Health and the B.C. Chicken Marketing Board, the B.C. Turkey Marketing Board, the B.C. Assessment Authority. And – because we’re mobile – the B.C. Ministry of Transportation and ICBC.”
Not only that, but a Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) inspector follows Thompson around all day, every working day.
What’s bizarre about Thompson’s struggle is that she is providing exactly what myriad government policies say is needed: more local jobs, a diversified economy, protection for family farms.
Ironically, this mountain of regulation to protect small-abattoir consumers from unsafe food was triggered by problems at large centralized processing plant where animals are corralled in disease-prone close quarters, with their meat often mixed together after slaughter, removing the chance of traceability back to individual growers – and adding to the antibiotics required to keep them “untainted.”
Further irony: grocery and restaurant customers are clamouring for more locally grown and organic food, in part because they know its chances of being safe are improved by the transparency and accessibility of a local grower’s safety practices.
All of this comes in the wake of a federal election where, for the first time in living memory, every party had a national food policy, reflecting a new awareness of our nation’s food insecurity.
The Liberals said theirs was “Canada’s first comprehensive national food policy,” while the NDP spent two years coming up with “Food for Thought,” calling for local food production as a priority. The Conservatives have pledged to create a five-year national farm and food strategy to ensure the survival of family farms, improve food safety and give farmers better access to domestic and export markets.
In addition, the Conference Board of Canada has launched a three-year, $2 million Centre for Food in Canada project targeting business and government. The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute is also working on a national food policy. And from kitchen tables around the country, the People’s Food Policy Project recently released what it calls Canada’s first food sovereignty policy.
All of these policies, as well as Metro Vancouver’s recently passed Regional Food Systems Strategy, call for rebuilding the agricultural infrastructure that has been gutted by lower-priced foreign competition.
What better place to start than by gutting some of the red tape that entraps younger agricultural entrepreneurs like Peggy Thompson?
Libertarian organic farmer and author Joel Salatin summed it all up in a recent talk at UBC: “The bureaucracy is there to protect the status quo.
Food safety is entirely subjective: junk food is OK, but homegrown chicken is not.
“If I don’t have the freedom to hurt myself, I don’t have the freedom to help myself.”