Former federal agriculture minister John Wise is urging Ottawa to be
politically vigilant in its defence of supply management tariff
protections when a new world trade agreement is negotiated next year.
“It’s on the table, no question,” the former Progressive Conservative
MP said in an interview from his home near St. Thomas in southern
Ontario.
“There are people calling for it to be traded away to benefit export
industries or to lower Canadian prices. That would be a mistake.”
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But Wise, who was agriculture minister in 1979-80 and 1984-88, also
argued that based on his own experience negotiating the Canada-United
States Free Trade Agreement in 1987-88, there will be little enthusiasm
among government officials or trade negotiators to defend high tariffs
in the face of demands for
reductions.
“In my day, and I’m sure it’s the same today, there was great pressure
from public employees at a senior level in trade matters to go along,”
Wise said.
“Political will prevailed. I’ll never forget the pressure on me, but I
got the support of the prime minister and cabinet and the officials
were instructed to do the job.”
Supply management import controls were excluded from the FTA and later
the North American Free Trade Agreement.
However, the Conservative government in its dying days during the early
1990s and then the newly elected Liberal government were unable to
exclude the protections from the new world trade agreement signed in
1994.
Import controls were replaced by high tariffs that protected the system
in the short term but will be under strong pressure during the current
round of World Trade Organization negotiations.
“There is no doubt they will be under attack,” Wise said.
“The government and their negotiators must resist, although some
reduction does seem inevitable.”
Wise said he was speaking out because he sees some farm export lobbies,
domestic processors and newspaper columnists lining up to demand that
supply management protections be bargained away because they are bad
policy and inconsistent with Canada’s trade liberalization stance.
“If the Canadian government sacrificed supply management in the current
Doha round of WTO talks, as some commentators suggest, not only would
our prices go up, but our food probably would be supplied by U.S.
producers,” he wrote in a recent newspaper column warning against
destroying supply management.
