THERE IS A SPECIAL HORROR IN SEEING THE LIST UP CLOSE. — COLBY COSH The dairy lobby’s vile plan to screw us all — revealed!

It’s a famous quotation — and, like all famous quotations, it is inevitably misattributed: Bismarck was probably not the first person to say “Laws are like sausages; it’s better not to see them being made.” The implication here is that if you did see how sausages are made, you would never eat one.

But if this is true, surely the maxim should just be “Never eat sausages.” Alas, that’s a choice we don’t have with laws. We are subject to them even if we have been vouchsafed a glimpse at the revolting, unhygienic process of their creation.

Something of the kind happened this past weekend at the federal Conservative party’s 2018 convention in Halifax. A copy of a “briefing binder” that the Dairy Farmers of Canada had given to representatives of supply-managed agriculture was carelessly discarded, found by a Calgary delegate named Matthew Bexte, and splattered onto the internet. The contents of the binder describe the strategy and outline the available forces of the supply-management squad. The resolutions being discussed by the convention included one favouring the repeal of expensive tariff protection for Canada’s egg, dairy, and poultry cartels, and the binder lists the particular responses and tactics to be used depending on how far the offending freetrade resolution advanced in the debate.

Which it didn’t. The motion in favour of letting Canadian suckers buy foreign cheese in dangerous unregulated quantities died noisily in a “breakout session,” never even reaching a vote, much less the plenary session of the convention. As the National Post’s uncannily versatile MarieDanielle Smith documented before the briefing book was leaked, free-trade delegates had already caught the scent of a rat, complaining that the motion had been suppressed through strategic delay by operatives working for party leader Andrew Scheer.

The Dairy Farmers of Canada briefing describes this motion-suppression tactic as “Scenario 2,” calling it a “sub-optimal” outcome: “It buys us (supply-managed farmers) a reprieve, but doesn’t put the issue to rest.” According to the briefing notes, if the motion had passed in the Friday breakout session, that would plunge the world into “Scenario 3.”

Under Scenario 3, a Friday evening reception at an Irish pub, with free food and potables, would come into play: quota-sucking farmers and their public-relations goons would have been given a chance to mingle with well-lubricated CPC delegates, with “infographics on a slideshow” pulsing subliminally in the background.

The hope here would be to prevent a devastating “Scenario 5,” in which the destruction of supply management came before the whole CPC assembly for a vote and won it. The prospective talking points accompanying Scenario 5 warn that “Members of the Conservative Party of Canada have sent a clear signal that they do not support Canadian farmers” and they hiss menacingly that “Canadians will remember the position taken by Conservatives today.”

Fortunately, even in the event of a flat-out Scenario 5, there would still be what the book calls the “Safety Net.” The safety net is that annual party conventions are meaningless, expensive balderdash anyway. Or, as the Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) book puts it: “The powers of the Leader are far-reaching in preventing a policy from being in the party platform. DFC has been told by the Leader’s office that he will exercise this power ... regardless of the outcome at convention.”

On Sunday evening, supply-management-loving Conservative leader Scheer had a spokesman deny that any such deal had been made, and the Dairy Farmers, behaving exactly like very dear friends of a party leader they helped select, apologized for the “inaccurate” information printed in the misplaced manual.

Perhaps there never was any explicit deal between the Dairy Farmers and Scheer, although we have all seen how cravenly he behaves toward the dairy trust, and I for one might have more confidence in him if I knew he had received an explicit quidpro-quo in return. What is certainly true is that any Canadian party leader does have near-total editorial power over the formal election platform of his party, and that he will violently obliterate any grassroots outbursts that are not to his taste or that contradict his strategic judgment. The safety net is real and made of woven iron.

The effect of the Dairy Farmers’ apology for the “inaccurate” parts of the leaked briefing book is, of course, to confirm the document’s authenticity. The survival of supply management may rest today less on party policy than on NAFTA negotiations (where Canada appears to have lost its voice while the U.S. wraps things up with Mexico).

But what the Dairy Farmers of Canada book shows that supply-managed farmers are given an explicit written list of arguments to recite in defence of the regressive food tax and the restricted consumer choice that their system imposes on people too poor or too far from the border to sneak over to the U.S. routinely for forbidden yogurts and mythic cheeses.

This is not news: anyone who has argued with a dairyman could probably have guessed the exact order in which those talking points are written down for him. Still, there is a special horror in seeing the list up close, along with a roster of the personnel employed to recite it, and the precise instructions for its force-feeding to halfwit politicians. No, don’t look at the sausage. Hold your nose and eat.