When Dairy Farmers of Canada delegates meet next summer in Halifax, president Jacques Laforge hopes they are ready to approve his vision of a new national governance structure.
During the DFC annual policy conference Feb. 4 in Ottawa, he won delegate approval to have a committee representing the Canadian Dairy Commission, DFC and all its provincial members draw up a plan to present to the summer annual meeting. It would outline a new national decision-making body.
He said there now is no streamlined system to make decisions about changes in the national dairy supply management system.
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“There is no national governance body,” he said in an interview. “What we have is a federal-provincial agreement to run a milk supply management system under legislation.”
The system is designed to establish domestic milk requirements and to set a support price.
Everything else is voluntary and typically set at the provincial level.
Laforge said the new system would keep the existing three dairy pools in Canada, which allow market and revenue pooling in five western provinces, four eastern provinces and Newfoundland with a separate pool, but he pointed to unsuccessful efforts over the years to create a national milk pool as a symptom of the problem.
The new national governance council would set rules for the three pools.
There often are national decisions that are implemented provincially and that are not harmonized between provinces.
Laforge said the new national body would be political rather than technical.
“It’s just the politics,” he said. “It will help us deal with issues a lot faster and in a more harmonized way.”
It could also call for changes in the mandate and the workings of the Canadian Dairy Council.
The proposal is expected to be controversial because some provinces guard their decision-making power.
