For decades, Canada has boasted of its “balanced position” in trade negotiations — demanding foreign access for competitive export products, such as grain and livestock, while insisting on protection for sensitive products such as dairy, poultry and eggs.
It was a fleeting Parliament Hill meeting of political opponents Nov 22, 2005, that sealed a deal to engrave supply management protectionism into Canadian trade policy stone.
Inside the House of Commons, MPs debated a Bloc Québécois motion that Canada reject any trade deal that would liberalize highly protectionist supply management rules. Those rules set strict production quotas and prices for dairy farmers and quotas for the egg and poultry industries, while shielding them from most foreign competition with a system of high tarrifs on incoming products above certain quantities.
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Outside, two political leaders met briefly in a parliamentary side room to make it possible.
BQ leader Gilles Duceppe agreed that his party would amend its motion to add a Conservative proposal that any future trade agreement should “ensure (it) strengthens the market access of Canada’s agricultural exporters.”
Conservative leader Stephen Harper, a protectionism opponent in private life and an economist with an aversion to tariffs leading a prairie-based free trade party in public life, said OK.
Underlings worked out a deal that the two leaders ratified. Then, with the New Democratic Party on side, all that remained was to see if the governing minority Liberals would sign on, despite misgivings, and make the vote unanimous.
“I was working with the UPA (Union des Producteurs Agricoles) to get the resolution passed, and we wanted it unanimous,” BQ MP and motion sponsor André Bellavance said.
“It was not easy at the beginning of the day because the Conservatives were not sure, so we added words to the motion for them. Mr. Duceppe and Mr. Harper talked in the lobby about that. I was there. The Conservatives got on board.”
The rookie MP’s main problem was with the Liberals.
Cabinet ministers in the minority government were heading off two weeks later for a World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong, and they thought the motion would tie their hands.
“The Liberals worked all day to have changes that would give them more latitude at negotiations,” said Bellavance.
“(Agriculture minister Andy) Mitchell talked to me about it through the day. I remember I had a headache because of the pressure.”
The 41-year-old former radio announcer from a rural central Quebec riding had been elected just the previous year and had been named BQ agriculture critic only months before.
Suddenly, he was thrust into the middle of one of the most political agricultural issues in the country.
It was a day soaked with intense politics, high-level strategy and enormous electoral stakes.
Rarely in recent decades has an agricultural issue commanded such high-level attention.
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For the BQ, it was a relatively simple issue and highly political.
The following week, they planned to join with the Conservatives and NDP to bring down the Liberal government for a winter election. Supply management was a huge issue in their rural Quebec ridings, and there were fears a December WTO deal could undermine system protections.
There were politics to be played with the help of the powerful UPA.
“We knew an election was coming so I said to the UPA, I think we have a chance to ask them (the Liberals) to vote for it before an election campaign,” said Bellavance.
“They wouldn’t want to go to Quebec, Ontario and other provinces where supply management was important to explain in a campaign why they voted against supply management.”
The night of the vote, House of Commons public galleries were filled with UPA and supply management farmers.
The issue was much more complex for the western-based Conservatives.
Their voter base was largely pro-free trade, as were their MPs. In the 2004 election, when they held the Liberals to a minority, almost 70 percent of Conservative MPs elected were from the West, none from Quebec and only two dozen from Ontario’s 103 ridings.
The party needed an Ontario breakthrough and rural Ontario was the best bet.
“It was a political decision that was made around the time of the formation of the merged party (in 2003),” said Tom Flanagan, former national Conservative campaign director and former Harper chief of staff who is now at the University of Calgary.
“We knew it was bad economics at the time but believed it was the only political course. Another factor was the calculation that the only chance the Conservatives had to win Ontario seats and perhaps in Quebec were rural seats where the dairy industry is relatively strong.”
As recently as 2002, a resolution from the Canadian Alliance party (a Conservative predecessor) had said that any trade agreement affecting supply management would have to make sure those farmers were given foreign market access “and that there will be a significant transition period in any move towards a market-driven environment.”
Three years later, MPs were being told that a stand against any move “toward a market-driven environment” for dairy and poultry was politically necessary.
Despite a day of Conservative speeches extolling the virtues of agricultural exports, they all voted for high tariff protection for some sectors.
Two months later came the Central Canadian breakthrough: 15 new mainly rural seats in Ontario, 10 in Quebec and the first Conservative government elected in almost two decades.
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For the governing Liberals, the political complication was that they had to live with the decision.
Andy Mitchell spent the day trying to convince opposition MPs that the motion would be more tenable if it called for negotiators to protect supply management but not to specify how it must be done.
“I would have been more comfortable with a motion that simply dealt with the end goal,” he said.
“But at the end of the day, I was going to show Canadian producers that I support supply management and there was no option other than to support the resolution.”
Despite opposition charges that the Liberals were waffling and trying to dilute supply management support, Mitchell said his vote for the motion was never in doubt.
“I do think it was an important expression of parliamentary opinion that, although not binding, governments have an obligation to listen to.”
In the lead-up to the Nov. 22 vote, UPA leadership arranged a meeting with then prime minister and Montreal MP Paul Martin to warn about the consequences of not supporting the motion.
Afterward, Canadian export lobbyists who attended the Hong Kong WTO meeting said they overheard Mitchell apologize to then agriculture negotiator Steve Verheul about the motion.
“I don’t remember that, but it wouldn’t surprise me that I said we have just added another complication to your job,” said Mitchell, now a municipal politician in the Peterborough, Ont., area.
When the political smoke cleared after the vote, Quebec and supply management leaders cheered and returned to their farms convinced of political support.
Flanagan said the campaign for the Nov. 22 Commons vote was an important illustration of the political power of Canada’s dairy farmer lobby.
“These people are relentless,” he said.
“They won’t leave you alone unless you give them total support. It was their victory.”
In the intervening years, the Conservative party made and held gains in rural Ontario but has seen its Quebec rural base shrink.
Still, the government and agriculture minister Gerry Ritz remain steadfast defenders of supply management.
And once Bellavance’s headache cleared up after that tense day, he found his role in the vote a political winner in his rural riding on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River.
In 2011, he was one of four BQ MPs to hold their seats in the face of the NDP wave in Quebec.
He tells the story of a 2008 election visit to his riding by then-leader Duceppe, who lost his own seat in 2011.
It was a day to discuss farm policy, so a farm background was needed.
“I took Mr. Duceppe and the media onto a farm that had been a Liberal farm,” he said.
“He had been a Liberal partisan, but after the supply management motion, he called to tell me he was one of mine. I think it helped me in my riding.”
