The cash-losing Atlantic Beef Products plant on Prince Edward Island may get up to $11 million in federal and provincial funds to keep running, according to a CBC News report Friday.
The report said an actual deal may be two weeks away but quoted unnamed sources as saying the federal government’s Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency is ready to put up $5 million and the Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and New Brunswick governments would each kick in $2 million, pending approval from their provincial cabinets.
The three provincial agriculture ministers held talks last month in Moncton aimed at saving the Borden, P.E.I. plant, which is the region’s only federally-inspected beef slaughter facility.
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The plant, one of several bids across Canada to boost domestic beef slaughter capacity in the wake of the BSE crisis, was founded by the Atlantic Beef Producers Co-op and started production in 2004, but was said in recent news reports to be losing $250,000 a month — an improvement from previous monthly losses of $500,000.
The P.E.I. government, which is an investor in the plant and built its waste treatment facility, said its most recent cash infusion to the plant, back in June, would be its last unless other governments also began to chip in.
The provinces said in a joint statement last month that they were waiting on a mutually agreeable business plan,being developed by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers at the request of the Maritime Beef Council. No deadline was given at the time for PwC to complete its plan.
P.E.I. Agriculture Minister Neil LeClair said last month that this next phase “should produce a comprehensive plan that will give all of the players a new level of comfort, and provide the basis for a final decision by all three provinces on the plant’s future.”
