Bringing down barriers
WE SHOULD BE FIGHTING THE PANDEMIC WITH THE FREEST POSSIBLE TRADE
Supply management raises the price of eggs, poultry and dairy products for average Canadians, while limiting competition and enriching a small cadre of well- to- do farmers. But proponents always make the same defence: we need to ensure these products are produced locally, in case of an emergency. It was with mild amusement, then, that during the initial run on grocery stores two weeks ago, I noticed my local supermarkets were fresh out of chicken, eggs and milk.
Supply management, of course, can’t be blamed for the initial shortages — stores ran out of many basic goods, such as household cleaners, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, canned goods and other types of meat (my wife joked that they should stop selling anything they didn’t run out of, because if no one wanted those items at the end of the world, they would probably never buy them — I’m looking at you, canned salmon).
Yet having a system in place that purposely limits the domestic production, and importation, of such basic foodstuffs certainly doesn’t help at a time when we’re seeing real- world shortages of many necessities and could easily see more in the weeks and months to come.
In fact, stores have had such a hard time keeping up with demand over the past couple weeks that governments have been scrambling to reduce regulations that have been preventing them from restocking in a timely manner.
Many cities, including Toronto and Ottawa, exempted supermarkets from noise bylaws and restrictions on unloading commercial vehicles that prevented them from receiving deliveries during the overnight hours. Then the Ontario government took notice and passed legislation to waive noise bylaws province- wide, to ensure that stores could take deliveries 24/7 during the current crisis.
At the same time, Health Canada has eased off on some regulations that were preventing the importation of medical and hygienic supplies, such as licensing and labelling requirements for disinfectants, face masks, gowns and hand sanitizer. Under this interim measure, products that, say, don’t have French on the label but are authorized for sale in other developed countries with similar health and safety requirements will be allowed to come into Canada.
There’s no doubt that the COVID- 19 pandemic has forced us to take a hard look at what we produce here at home, and which products we have to rely on foreign countries to provide. And we will certainly hear increased-calls to reduce our reliance on globalization and produce more of the things we need in Canada.
But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of products we find on store shelves are produced elsewhere and there’s no way we could make them all here. If we somehow managed to do so, prices would be so high that even more Canadians would be unable to afford basic goods. And even if the government mandated more domestic production of a targeted list of goods, we could easily find that they are useless in the face of the next crisis that comes our way ( hand sanitizer would be good to have now, but not so helpful in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, for example).
We know from history that it’s much better, and more efficient, to leave the supply of goods in the invisible hands of the market, than have production mandated by some faceless centralized planners. Even in this current crisis, we are seeing private companies voluntarily shift production toward the goods for which there is urgent, pressing need.
On Sunday, for example, Labatt announced that its breweries in Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and London, Ont., would begin producing hand sanitizer instead of beer. It intends to produce 50,000 bottles of the stuff, to be distributed to Canadian food banks, front- line workers, as well as bars and restaurants. Then, on Monday, Fiat Chrysler announced that it will start producing one million face masks a month and deliver them to healthcare and emergency- service workers throughout North America.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t prepare for emergencies — Canadian governments certainly should have done more to stockpile medical equipment, such as ventilators and N95 masks. But we can never be certain about what type of situation we will face next, or what supplies we will need in the future.
Crises are dynamic and, to some extent, not entirely predictable. What we need is to ensure a free flow of goods from our trading partners, so Canadians continue to have access to the products and services they rely on, regardless of the situation. That will only happen if governments take a hard look at the regulations that obstructs goods from getting into consumers’ hands, as they’ve been clambering to do in recent days.
And once this is all over, we will have to ask ourselves whether all this red tape was really necessary to begin with.