Dairy and poultry supply management in Canada
[5]: 2 The controls provided by supply management have allowed the federal and provincial governments to avoid subsidizing the sectors directly, in contrast to general practice in the European Union and the United States.
[15] According to a CBC article, "The SM-5 Organizations say federal-provincial agreements for each of the supply-managed sectors weave together the legislative jurisdiction of both levels of government to 'ensure a seamless regulatory scheme'... "designed to enable farmers to get a reasonable return while stabilizing the supply of agricultural products to Canadian consumers.
[16]: 9 The goal of the NMMP agreement was to manage the supply of raw industrial milk to meet Canadian needs, to establish provincial MSQs and to raise fees to remove surplus.
[1] The Farm Products Council of Canada "oversees the various agencies in an effort to promote an efficient and competitive agricultural sector while ensuring that the marketing system operates well, in the interests of producers and consumers.
In Canada, where there was no milk surplus in the 1970s—the MSQs were designed to "guarantee a fair level of return for producers and to promote a stable supply of high-quality dairy products for consumers.
"[55] Ed Mussell of the George Morris Centre[54] and Maurice Doyon, a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Consumer Science at Laval University[53] described the series of articles and their counter-arguments from supporters of supply management, as "a great deal of rhetoric, simplistic arguments and invalid and untested assumptions".
According to The Washington Post, "her taboo-breaking crusade inspired a deluge of favorable (sic) editorials that helped make supply management — the Canadian jargon for dairy protectionism — a household phrase.
"[60] Hall Findlay's widely cited June 2012 paper, uploaded to the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary site, where she was an Executive Fellow, called for an end to Canada's supply management system.
[41]: 249 In his 2014 paper published by Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), University of Waterloo by Bruce Muirhead, an historian and Egg Farmers of Canada Chair in Public Policy, and cited in the Library of Parliament, "supply management benefits all Canadians."
[63][64] They concluded that supply management was regressive and placed a greater burden on lowest income households with children, representing up to $592 more annually for dairy and poultry based on Statistics Canada data from 2001.
[Notes 3][66] By October 2015, as part of its commitment under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Canada, under the Harper administration, had agreed to cut back both dairy tariffs and import quotas.
[69] It evolved into the end of such surplus sales and called for the dismantling of the supply management system within 10 years, or, at least concessions, to allow greater market access for their country’s products.
[104][105] Canada's supply management system attracted media attention in 2016, when the province of Ontario responded to the exponential increase of the imports of diafiltered milk (UV) from the United States.
"[130] TRQs are two-tiered tariffs in which quotas of certain sensitive domestic products are assigned a quantitative threshold or WTO "minimum access commitments" for imports during a designated time period.
[50]: 3 At that time, it was proposed "to designate 6% of tariff lines as sensitive in exchange for raising its TRQ threshold on those products – effectively allowing more foreign supply to enter the Canadian market.
[31] According to Hall Findlay, though the responsibility of milk is under the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to ensure proper oversight of dairy production and to guarantee that strict standards of biosecurity are upheld."
[142] However, Ontario MP John Nater, the Conservative critic for interprovincial trade, expressed concerns that changes to "marketing boards and supply management" should not be "to the detriment of farmers.
"[Macleans 4] In R v Comeau, a controversial Supreme Court of Canada case on the scope of free trade between the Canadian provinces, led some supporters of the supply management system to express concern that if inter-provincial conditions were removed, then it could lead to unintended consequences.
"[Macleans 4][143] In a 2013 report by the George Morris Centre, the authors recommended reforms in supply-management system to align with changes in its environment related to market growth, improved efficiency, reduction in costs and liberalized pricing.
"[147][Macleans 5][148][Notes 9][98] Apart from Bernier, the leaked binder from that Conservative MPs, David Anderson, Kevin Sorenson, Dan Albas, Alupa Clarke, Tony Clement, Tom Kmeic, Alex Nuttall and Len Webber as not being supportive towards Supply Management.
[175] The EU pursued increased access to the Canadian cheese market and requested that provincial representatives, particularly Québec and Ontario, who are specifically concerned by potential challenges to the supply management system.
[184] Stanely Hartt argued that if supply management was ended new co-operatives, like Agropur, could emerge providing ownership interests and employment to the owners of small farms dedicated to those product lines and, with proper adjustment programs, the resulting growth would increase our prosperity and standard of living.
[citation needed] Supporters of supply management say that it protects customers from US milk produced by cattle injected with growth hormones that enables United States dairy farms to be more productive than those in Canada.
"[188] Critics such as the Frontier Centre for Public Policy's Eric Merkley,[159] Canada West Foundation's Martha Hall Findlay,[34] Bloomberg's Stephen Mihm,[189] and Maxime Bernier[122] have described SM as a "cartel".
"[190] Bernier explained in his chapter that “The word cartel applies to a system, not to individuals, and it doesn’t necessarily describe criminal behaviour,”[191] Articles in and the Globe and Mail in 2017 and in the Toronto Star in 2018 compared supply management to the bread price-fixing in Canada scandal.
Since at least 2012, when Harper announced his intention to enter into TPP trade talks, the former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley as BCC CEO, has led the call for review and reform of Canada's supply management system to increase productivity, exports, and employment.
He wrote that the combined dairy lobby funds millions of dollars in university graduate programs and research on "collective marketing of agricultural products" across the country in support of SM policies.
[207][208] Critics state that the high cost associated with supply management had led to Canada's food processing industry bleeding "market share to U.S. competitors and several major companies such as Campbell Soup Co, Kraft Heinz Co., and Kellogg Co. closing Canadian plants in recent years.
[160] Postmedia columnist Joe Childley wrote in his November 2017 article in the Financial Post that the butter crisis in France, was an "object lesson" in the limitations of Canada's SM system.
[3] In a 2015 anti-SM article by the Ottawa-based Centre for International Policy Studies' Alan Freeman described SM as a "bizarre system of agricultural market protection that seems to have been lifted from a five-year economic plan in 1950s Communist Romania".
