At the recent Alberta Beef Producers semi-annual general meeting, chairman Doug Sawyer took a bold pre-emptive strike against a topic that has been whispered about in cattle industry circles for years.
He bluntly stated that his organization was opposed to the directed or directional checkoff. That took other cattle producer organizations like the Alberta Cattle Feeders Association (ACFA) and the Western Stock Growers Association (WSGA) by surprise.
Spokesmen for both groups denied that their organizations were even thinking about such a checkoff — at least that’s their official line.
For the information of the blissfully unaware, the directed checkoff concept is a method whereby a producer who pays a non-refundable checkoff can direct that checkoff that has been collected by one organization to be paid to another officially designated organization.
It’s not a common type of checkoff. An example of sorts is in Ontario, where a universal mandatory farm checkoff can be directed by the producer to one of three different designated provincial farm producer organizations.
The last time the directed checkoff concept was mentioned was during the run-up to the imposition of the refundable checkoff by the provincial government on cattle, sheep, hog and potato producers. The idea was introduced a bit late in the game, as two of the main pro-refundable groups, the ACFA and WSGA, had already committed themselves to the fully refundable scheme.
The idea had some difficulty in discussions, being that for a directed checkoff to be effective, it had to be non-refundable, but that went contrary to the then campaign to make the cattle checkoff refundable.
In effect, making a refundable checkoff also a directed checkoff is somewhat redundant — being with a refundable checkoff, the producer has already decided whether to direct his checkoff to the collecting organization or direct it to her/his own pocket.
Directing that same checkoff elsewhere would require some action by the producer — and therein lies the rub.
It would seem that some wishful promoters of the refundable checkoff had made the assumption that many producers who requested that their ABP cattle checkoffs be refunded would send those same checkoffs, or portions thereof, to more favoured groups like the ACFA or WSGA.
At least that was the hope, but at some point, a realization set in that many of those requesting refunds were probably not going to do that, but were instead keeping their hard-earned refund money in their pocket. To the chagrin of some, those producers were applying the same accountability criteria to the other cattle groups as they were to the ABP.
One of the cherished hopes of increased funding for other producer organizations was subsequently thwarted by parsimonious producers who kept their checkoffs home.
In the end, the directed checkoff idea was too late and the government subsequently changed the legislation to just a refundable checkoff. The government was also faced with the political reality that if a non-refundable but directed checkoff was implemented, they might have to designate multiple organizations as possible recipients — at last count, there were more than 100 cattle producer groups alone.
Which brings us back to the ABP pre-emptive strike. It seems the ABP learned from the last checkoff campaign that they need to lobby the government and the cattle industry early and hard to forestall any further arbitrary decisions by the provincial government on the checkoff issue.
The last time around, the ACFA and the WSGA lobby proved to be very successful in getting a refundable checkoff in place. It was a done deal before the ABP knew what was going on.
The supply-management boards, who are masters at political lobbying at every level, also provided a lesson. You might recall that when the cattle, sheep, hog and potato commissions all lost their non-refundable checkoffs, the quota boards all kept their non-refundable checkoffs in place through hardcore lobbying. It would seem that this time, the ABP intends to take any checkoff challenge, real or imagined, straight to the frontline with a bold offence.
There is also an underlying concern that with most of the ag-connected constituencies in central and southern Alberta now represented by the Wildrose opposition, that the PC government might be contemplating some surprises for the ag industry. Time will tell.