The announcement
The end was announced in Delhi. On 1 August 2008, federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz came to the Delhi tobacco exchange to announce more than $300 million for Ontario’s flue-cured growers: $286 million for a Tobacco Transition Program to help them leave the industry, and $15 million for community development.1
The audit
In 2011 the Auditor General of Canada reviewed the program, putting its cost at $284 million. Its aim was for farmers to leave tobacco and not go back.2
The audit found the program’s design had been rushed, and that it lacked safeguards against recipients undermining its aims, for example by renting their land and equipment to family members or working in tobacco for them.2
The end of quota
The auction exchanges were closing too. Tillsonburg closed in 2007, and the Delhi exchange, the last of the three, closed in 2009 when quota was abolished.3
What 2009 meant
2009 did not erase tobacco from Norfolk’s fields overnight. But it ended the quota-and-auction system that had organized the industry since 1957, and with it the tobacco economy Delhi had known for generations.