The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food Appeal Tribunal
has ruled that Laplante was not a registered processing plant in Ontario at the
time that a deal was struck between Ontario and Quebec to stop inter-provincial
trading in live chicken.
But Laplante did gain that status a month after the deal
took effect.
The long history traced in a record of the public hearing
shows that the Laplante family suffered the loss of their dairy herd in a barn
fire in 1993, so transitioned to chicken production, starting with a quota of
40,000 birds.
Then in 2007 Robert Laplante began brokering the marketing
of Quebec-produced chickens to Ontario processors.
One of the clients he served as Remy Poultry Ltd. in
Toronto. Riverside Poultry bought Remy’s plant supply quota and it included
287,492 kilograms of chicken from Quebec producers.
When the trading ban went into effect, Riverside got the
right to have that volume of chicken from Ontario producers.
It’s that volume that Laplante wants for his plant at
Sarsfield because he says it was birds he was buying from Quebec producers.
But, as the tribunal ruled, the processing plant he was
running was not yet qualified to hold plant supply quota.
In another twist to the story, Laplante only got into chicken
processing because the marketing board and supervisory body in Quebec ruled
that only valid out-of-province processors were qualified to buy chicken from
Quebec producers. That would have put an end to Laplante’s brokerage business,
so he bought a small processing plant at Sarsfield so he could qualify.
