The folly of supply management

AFTER A NUCLEAR WAR, THE ONLY THINGS LIKELY TO BE LEFT STANDING WOULD BE COCKROACHES AND DAIRY BOARDS.

It tells you a lot that in the current Canadian political context, the only people actually talking sense on supply management are Donald Trump and a politician nicknamed “Mad Max,” for his supposedly maverick ideas.

We only wish more of “Mad” Maxime Bernier’s fellow candidates for the Conservative party leadership were as touched by the madness on this file as he is.

Alas, in his willingness to tackle Canada’s outdated system of supply management for dairy, eggs and poultry, the Quebec MP stands virtually alone.

Lisa Raitt and Michael Chong are normally sensible folk, but both have resisted calls to modernize (aka abandon) the archaic regulations that require the vast majority of milk and other dairy products consumed by Canadians to be produced by a few thousand farmers who sell only to dairy boards.

Kevin O’Leary, the selfprofessed capitalist in the room, has called this agricultural cartel “vital” and pledged to protect it during a likely NAFTA renegotiation.

Erin O’Toole has made a lot of sense and impressed many over the course of the campaign, but rejects criticism of what he charmingly terms “family farms.”

No one questions the decency of the farmers, or denies that many of the businesses — which are what farms are, after all — are family run, sometimes even by the same family on and on throughout the generations.

No one needs to deny or question those things, because they’re not relevant, and only those peddling a bizarrely narrow version of our prime minister’s “sunny ways” mantra would try to pretend that they are.

The point isn’t if a farm supports a family, the point is that such a family-run business backed by regulatory diktats is hurting millions of other families by transferring wealth from Canadians forced to pay too much for food staples into the hands of these farmers.

No matter how lovely its family owners might be, no farm has any more justification than a publicly traded company does to forcibly extract more money from our wallets than the price determined by a free market.

For a system as hard to defend as supply management, it never lacks for defenders.

And it’s perplexing.

Our columnist Colby Cosh had it exactly right earlier this week, when he noted that perhaps the only thing the supply management of our dairy products is good for is serving as a reminder of how terrible an idea protectionism always is.

Let the pathetic state of our dairy aisles constantly remind all of us who have travelled and seen the wonders of world cheese elsewhere exactly why supply management is such a terrible idea.

You’re offered far less choice, but at least you pay more for it. And yet it persists. Why? How does a marketoriented party, such as the Conservatives claim to be, dare defend a grocery tax that adds up to hundreds of dollars a year per household, is most painful for low-income families, and serves only to prop up an entrenched oligopoly?

How do our Liberals, with their oft-professed adoration for all things middle-class, defend forcing millions of Canadians — single moms, seniors on fixed incomes, refugees, aboriginals on isolated, disadvantaged reserves, you name it — to pay more for food necessities?

Milk, cheese, butter, eggs and chicken are not frills. They’re not for only the well-to-do. They’re the things our own government has long told is part of a healthy diet; the same government that punishes you for consuming them.

All to enrich a few “family farms.”

But none of this is new. Nothing we’re saying here hasn’t been said a thousand times before.

A series of columnists have made these very arguments in these pages this week, and plenty of times before that.

Supply management is immune to the logic bombs of both left and right. It endures despite having no real argument in its favour. After a nuclear war, the only things likely to be left standing would be cockroaches and dairy boards.

Perhaps the only thing that gives us any hope for some possible future change for the better comes, from all places, the Oval Office.

Donald Trump, no freemarket crusader himself, with his talk of “Buy America” policies and punitive border-adjustment taxes, has recently targeted Canada due to a spat over access of American farmers to Canada’s milk market.

We take no lessons in free trade from Trump, but on this, he may prove useful.

Canada cannot afford to alienate the United States, especially when it is led by an unpredictable president who enjoys clear political advantages in seeking trade confrontations.

If Canada knows what’s good for it, it will work hard to stay as low as possible on Trump’s trade radar.

So, perhaps, some faint glimmer of hope after all. It shouldn’t fall to just Mad Max and Trump to demand Canadian politicians put an end to this governmentbacked ripoff of consumers.

But if that’s what it requires, we’ll take it.