It used to be that in our political system, the politicians told voters the unpleasant truths, prepared to pay the price for laying out the consequences of policy choices. In public, bureaucrats were afraid of their shadows, saying no more and usually less than they knew the politicians were prepared to say. They did their frank talking in private.
The supply-management issue has turned that old rule of thumb on its head.
Bureaucrats now are voicing the unpleasant truths. Politicians still are using weasel words like “evolving” and “flexibility” to mask the truth that supply management as Canadian egg, poultry and dairy farmers have known it has a very limited life expectancy.
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When the Canadian government agreed at world trade talks in 1993 to accept a deal which substituted tariff protections for volume import controls, it signed supply management’s death warrant.
The government negotiated high tariff protections that clearly were meant to be a transition. It was clear that tariffs are not a permanent supply management protection because any system which controls domestic production and sets prices needs reliable import controls.
Tariffs are anything but reliable, since international trade rules dictate that tariff protections will continue to fall. Trade liberalization is the trend.
In a few years, tariffs will fall to a level at which it is practical for American companies to send their products north.
The additional product in the Canadian system will drive prices down and disrupt the system. A protected supply management system cannot survive with the uncertainty of tariff levels low enough to allow in unpredictable quantities of rogue or adventurous cheaper foreign product.
Yet to listen to the Liberal politicians who run the federal government, supply management is a sacred cow.
Yes, it is evolving and accepting more competition and developing an export policy, but it still is supply management. The Liberals campaigned to protect it.
Meanwhile, farmers on the ground are facing a different reality as they are forced to produce more and more product at less than cost of production to meet export markets and processor needs.
The idea of cost-of-production pricing as a payback for limiting production – one of the three pillars of supply management – is becoming a joke.
So, before too many years, will be border controls. Yet the politicians breathe barely a word.
So it is left to bureaucrats like Guy Jacob, chair of the Canadian Dairy Commission, and Robert Lancop of the federal competition bureau, to go public with the truth.
They have said: traditional supply management is playing out its last years. Tariff protections are not a long-term strategy. Supply management farmers should be told the truth so they can adjust.
For those who depend on the system and have invested on the basis of security, these are unpleasant truths.
Still, they are truths.
It is surprising they have to come from hired hands of the government, rather than the politicians who still seem to prefer spinning unrealistic political dreams.
