The wrong facts on supply management

RE: WHEN IT COMES TO DAIRY, TRUMP IS RIGHT (JUNE 14)

Recently, Bruce Muirhead, a professor at the University of Waterloo, said U.S. woes are not due to a tight Canadian market but rather massive overproduction that has depressed the prices U.S. farmers get. There is an absolute glut of dairy products around the world and the U.S. continues to increase production by 1.5 to 2 per cent a year.

More than 100 million gallons of milk were dumped onto U.S. fields in 2016, and U.S. dairy farmers have been drawing on millions of dollars of support from the government. Washington hands out billions in subsidies to dairy farmers.

Muirhead says Canada should not dismantle the supply management system, which costs the government nothing, to accommodate bad business practices in the U.S.

With supply management, our 12,000 Canadian dairy farmers produce what we consume and protect Canadians from milk full of hormones and antibiotics from being dumped by more than 40,000 U.S. dairies.

And no matter how many times Trump says it, Canada does not have a trade surplus with the U.S.

In this age of information, it would be nice if so-called experts reported facts — not worn-out accusations to support bully tactics of the president of a country with 10 times the population of Canada.

Eva Marsh, Copetown