If only food were like the movies.[rssbreak]
With the Ontario government’s new tax incentives for hiring local in the film business getting a top-up just two weeks ago, it’s time for a little cinematic fantasizing about what such a move would do for our food industry.
Contrary to stereotypes about the ineffectiveness of governments, they do know how to make things happen. If they could ever get into the habit of being proactive, as they’re doing with some artsy industries, Ontario’s promising food sector could be cooking with homegrown biogas.
At the end of June, the province boosted the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit by $80 mil, increasing the already generous incentives for hiring cultural workers from Ontario.
Here’s how the buy-local talent incentive works: production companies get a tax credit worth up to about 35 per cent of their wage bill and travel expenses for any Ontario workers they hire.
In 2008, which was a tough year, Ontario hosted 223 film and TV projects that spent $671 million in the province. In 2006, before the recession, $881 million was spent on 238 projects.
Culture Minister Aileen Carroll told the media that “this bold move” ensured film and movie production “remains a vital player in Ontario’s innovative economy.”
The incentives are money well spent. They’ve helped build a cultural sector that creates 276,000 highly skilled jobs and $5.3 billion a year of economic activity.
But I’m interested in the reasons why such programs aren’t employed in food and agriculture, which have equal potential to be the creative hubs of a local sustainable multicultural cuisine that relies on artisanal skills and good pay levels.
The likely explanation is that most industrial incentive programs date back a century, when governments were desperate for ways to lure industry into the province and move beyond an economy of primary resources.
According to Henry Vivian Nelles’s study The Politics Of Development, a whole series of government incentives in the 1890 to 1914 period, including the creation of gigantic Ontario Hydro as a supplier of cheap electricity for manufacturers, transformed the province into a hothouse of industrial jobs. Market forces and advertising jingles to buy local had nothing to do with this incredible success story. Incentives and infrastructure made it happen.
More recently, back in the 1980s when I worked for an Ontario government think tank, Robert Reich’s book The Next American Frontier was all the rage among policy wonks.
Reich, a well-known American liberal, argued that dirty industries dependent on cheap labour and lax enviro laws would soon be deserting North America and heading for Asia. The only way to make up for this loss of low-end jobs was for governments to actively create opportunities for highly ?skilled post-industrial employment.
The cultural, film and TV tax credit programs date to the same decade and the heyday of interventionist government thinking, once a mainstay of Ontario conservatism. Since then, the entire political spectrum has shifted far rightwards, and proactive moves to stimulate certain economic sectors are only cool if they deal with fiction, like TV and film.
But the food and ag sector remains the second-biggest employer in Ontario, likely to become first after the collapse of the auto sector.
Ontario food processing is second only to Chicago in North America. Opportunities for artisanal employment are everywhere: season-extension growing methods so ingredients from other climates can be cultivated here, stoneground breads made with a variety of grains, fusion dishes that express Ontario’s reality as a new multicultural homeland, foods grown sustainably, and on and on.
If no strong moves are made, the already aging ag sector – most farmers are well into their 50s and unable to convince their kids to take over the farm – will soon die of old age.
All it would take to create tens of thousands of such jobs would be a tax credit for processors, restaurants and cafeterias that buy the products of local farmers.
This kind of government support doesn’t have to be limited to the make-believe world of television and film.
Eating into the economy
Ontario’s agri-food industry is one of the most diverse in the world, producing over 200 commodities. Here’s what it looks like.
• Exports $8.5 billion worth of commodities annually.
• Accounts for 28 per cent of Canada’s total annual agri-food exports.
• Totals 113,395 firms and farms.
• Provides 726,200 jobs.
• Generates $85.2 billion in annual revenues.
• Expands in the creative food sector (organic, specialty, ethnic) by 15 to 20 per cent a year.
By contrast
• Ontario’s cultural and entertainment sector consists of 276,000 jobs.
• Ontario’s auto industry employed 400,000 directly and indirectly in 2008.
Sources: Martin Prosperity Institute, Government of Ontario
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