Supply management end should be common sense
Our supply management systems are throwbacks to the Soviet era and have no place in the Canadian economy.
That’s not just me speaking. A former Liberal leadership candidate agreed with that assessment when we spoke on air Monday morning.
Hang on. That must be a typo. Liberal?! We just had a Conservative leadership convention where supply management was a big issue. So I must have meant Conservative, right?
Wrong. Principled conservatives only wish that was the case. No, not all the Conservative candidates agreed with Maxime Bernier’s pitch to dismantle and phase out the system that jacks up the costs on consumers and messes with the supply and demand of our dairy sector.
But the latest politician to speak out against the system is former Liberal MP and two-time Liberal leadership candidate Martha Hall Findlay. Now the president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank, she’s released an important paper proposing how we dismantle the unfair system.
It’s a mature and nuanced assessment that looks at how things came to be in the first place and how to roll back the system in a way that’s fair to dairy farmers and consumers alike.
The three key pillars presented are to provide adequate compensation and transition assistance; do it all over time (perhaps decades) to ease the move; but remove what the paper calls all three legs of the stool simultaneously — pricing, tariff protection and production-limiting quotas. This combined should have the most stable liberalizing effect.
Will we see the Liberals pick up this plan and run with it? Don’t count on it.
Hall Findlay championed the idea during her 2013 leadership bid against Trudeau. He surely heard her talk about it at length. If he’d wanted to poach it for the Liberal platform, he’s already had the chance and taken a pass.
Well, maybe the Conservatives will lead on the issue? Again, small chance. While Erin O’Toole was the contender who got the most headlines for opposing Bernier, Andrew Scheer also supported the status quo. And now he’s the leader.
This one issue also tells us broader things about the current state of the Canadian political scene.
The first is that it’s disappointing to see how the Liberals have lost their economic street cred. This is the party known for being socially liberal but fiscally conservative, that hustled in the 1990s to clean up the books and even paid down some of the debt before losing government.
There’s a video online of Hall Findlay arguing to dismantle supply management back during a 2013 debate and party members in the audience are actually applauding.
Yet within a few short years what counts as big ideas in Liberal circles has gone from a commendable, evidence-based idea such as this to randomly running $30-billion deficits outside of a recession for no reason that’s ever been truly explained. It’s sad how far left they’ve veered.
The second is how unable the Conservatives were to see a naturally conservative issue for what it is. Too many of them went in for arguments backing the status quo.
I mean, it’s called supply management, for heaven’s sake. As in, managing supply and demand. The sort of thing Communist countries did. Even the name of the thing is a dead giveaway.
What does this shifting landscape mean? It means that if the Liberals keep moving left and the Conservatives fail to be conservative, who knows where we’ll end up.