Canada’s supply management marketing agencies are accusing a Liberal politician of using misleading numbers and false arguments as she promotes the end of the system.
Last week, former Liberal MP and trade critic Martha Hall Findlay issued a University of Calgary-sponsored report that argued supply management penalizes consumers with higher prices, jeopardizes poor families who have to pay hundreds of dollars more each year for milk and hurts Canada’s trade interests and agricultural exporting sectors.
Hall Findlay is expected to announce soon that she will run for the second time for the federal Liberal leadership.
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She said last week dairy product prices are as much as three times higher in Canada than in the United States and cited U.S. figures that four litres of milk cost on average $9.60 in Canada.
She touted the example of Australia, which ended dairy supply management 12 years ago and paid farmers a transition fee funded by a consumer levy.
“The Australian dairy industry is thriving,” she said.
The same day, the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute issued its own report damning supply management. It was called Defending the Indefensible and included an essay from George Morris Centre senior researcher Larry Martin, who argued that the “overwhelming financial burden” from supply management falls on Canada’s poor.
Dairy Farmers of Canada had a three-word response: wrong, wrong and wrong.
The DFC said in a June 21 statement that the normal price for a four-litre milk pack is $3 to $4 less than Hall Findlay cites, supply management has not stopped Canada from negotiating trade deals and Australian farmgate dairy prices have been volatile since deregulation and have not kept up with increasing consumer prices.
The report’s “inaccurate assertion that Canada’s supply management system for dairy products overcharges consumers and interferes with international trade negotiations is based on deeply flawed research,” it said.
A survey of consumer dairy prices shows average Canadian retail prices are lower than those in Australia and New Zealand, which have ended dairy regulation, said the DFC.
DFC president Wally Smith said dairy producers in the United States and the European Union, which are lobbying to undermine supply management, are subsidized so that consumers pay twice: in the store and through their taxes.
He also noted that Canada has concluded many trade liberalization agreements without compromising supply management.
Although the industry is concentrated in Quebec and Ontario, the British Columbia dairy farmer said dairy is one of the two top agricultural sectors in seven provinces.
“Supply management works for farmers, processors, consumers and governments,” Smith said in a statement.
Still, DFC directors were in full defence mode following Hall Findlay’s report, fending off increasingly numerous criticisms from a variety of academic, industry and media sources.
