In my last segment, I documented the generous help given by taxpayers at all levels to Canada’s hog industry since 2007. HyLife Foods and its forerunner, for example, received millions in assistance for its pork processing facility in Neepawa.
Then there were federal loans totaling some half-a-billion dollars to producers across the country. Many borrowers defaulted on those loans, apparently leaving Ottawa “holding the bag.”
Neepawa’s money pit
Meanwhile, back in Neepawa in 2011, not long after helping HyLife out with its wastewater treatment, Ottawa announced it would lend the company $10 m. Since it seemed to be doing well after a multi-million dollar expansion (now processing 1.69 million hogs yearly and selling its products in Canada, the US, China and Japan), I wanted to know how the company was doing with its repayments, six years after the loan was announced. The government wouldn’t tell me. So I launched an Access to Information request.
Three months and scores of e-mails later, I received a heavily-redacted document with entire pages missing.
Turns out, HyLife doesn’t have to pay any interest on the loan. While the deadline for repayment is 2023, it’s also described as a “conditionally repayable contribution.” It allows the Minister of Agriculture to grant the company more time to repay, or even to release it “from any term, condition or obligation” that may apply.
Does this mean HyLife may not be required to repay anything at all?
My attempts to clarify this question with the government have gone unanswered, so far.
Then, in 2012, the Puratone Corporation, a major pig producer in Manitoba, went bankrupt. Maple Leaf Foods, also a major player in Canada with a huge killing plant in Brandon, bought it out. Puratone owed $92 million at the time and was "in breach of its loan covenants.” But my efforts to find out whether it was Maple Leaf or the taxpayers of Canada who absorbed those costs, have also been unsuccessful.
Two years later, Ottawa loaned $5 million to Maple Leaf to help upgrade one of its Ontario plants.
And two years later, the federal and Manitoba governments teamed up to "invest" another $500,000 in Maple Leaf to help it make more bacon at its Winnipeg plant.
News reports at the time did not explain whether the “investment” was a grant, a loan with interest, an interest-free loan or, like the one to HyLife, a “conditionally-repayable contribution.”
Paradise Papers
Just weeks ago, it was revealed in the so-called Paradise Papers that the same Maple Leaf Foods owns an offshore company, the kind often designed to avoid paying taxes at home. (A truly "win-win" for the corporation - a "lose-lose" for the rest of us.)
So, by my count, government assistance of some sort has happened on at least ten occasions over the past ten years, totaling well over half-a-billion dollars.
If one extrapolates the frequency of such handouts and projects them into the future, it is not unlikely we can expect the next one, in one form or another, in a year or so.
Larry Powell, an activist and journalist, lives in Shoal Lake, where he publishes http://www.PlanetInPeril.ca
