SUPPLY MANAGEMENT IS AN EVIL CON
Even a jackass can be right, as Donald Trump has just proved through his stupidity. When he goes after Canadian agricultural producers, showboating for dairy states, all Canadians who buy dairy products, eggs, chicken and other items protected by what the bureaucrats call supply management, which is just a fancy name for theft, should urge him on.
I have written about it for decades. So have many journalists not caught up by the careful reporting by the CBC on anything to do with the family farm and the callous disregard for the majority by Liberals and Conservatives.
I recall business writers like Mary Janigan winning major awards years ago when they detailed how much less the inhabitants of Buffalo had to pay for milk and eggs and chicken than we did on this side of the border.
Buffalo may be infamous as one of the major shrinking cities of the U.S. but one of the reasons their Anchor Bar chicken wings became so famous is not just because of the recipe but because they were so inexpensive.
I saw an estimate that supply management costs the typical Canadian around $275 annually because of the protection given our dairy farmers (significantly many of them in Quebec) forcing consumers like you and me to pay much more than if there was open price competition.
I think that guesstimate is far too low. As a family who loves cheese and buys several bags of milk and cartons of eggs on every grocery run, one who salivates at suggestion that milk would be halved in price if our gutless politicians finally kicked supply management in its diseased teeth, I am sure my savings would be several times that.
(And let's not even get into our bread and beer where the cost of ingredients is kept artificially high.)
The ironic crusher is that the whole foundation, the rationale for our politicians to side with farmers against consumers, is that it was said to benefit all the farmers.
Hardly!
Thanks to all the rules 'n' regs which force dairy farmers to pay more than $20,000 for the right to milk just one cow, the experts agree that maybe 10% at most of the dairy farmers benefit from supply management.
So these milk millionaires are happy as hell to lobby to keep their lucrative flow of dollars coming from the 35 million consumers and have conned so many politicians with their supposed voting power that only one major candidate in the current Tory leadership race, Maxime Bernier, is willing to say without qualification that supply management is political BS that was outdated decades ago....that is if it was ever in the consumer's interest.
I started school in Chesley, a furniture town in Bruce County so rooted in the farms around it that we took agriculture in high school and I knew how to do the Babcock test for butter fat in milk.
I have lived on a farm and had two brothers-in-law which were farmers. I have listened to my fellow directors from the farm lobbies at the Canadian National Exhibition. (The myth is that when the CNE started in 1879 that it was an agriculture fair. Nope, it was an industrial fair.)
So I have seen the inside of the propaganda from agriculture as the 100-acre mixed farm started to vanish and agribusiness took over. I have read the stories of all the expensive equipment that the farmer needs and how they need to be protected and subsidized on their now giant operation.
No one ever did that for me.
Surely at some point most Canadians will rebel and insist that all this has to stop, this favouring of farmers so their votes are more important than urban voters because rural riding are always much smaller in population than city ridings.
Surely we should demand that agriculture not continue to get all these special government deals, whether in property and income tax or even the right to gamble.
The victory of Trump is seen as the revenge of blue-collar voters who felt ignored by fatcat establishments. They don't care that he's simplistic and out-of-his-depth and that he lies and blusters and doesn't understand that trade and tariffs are two-way streets where Canada has weapons too.
Yet wouldn't it be delicious if this inept boor blundered into a fight against Canadian supply management that if he won would reduce the price of every one of our meals.
After all, supply management has been supported for decades by both Grits and Tories pandering to the rural millionaires. Now it may be quashed by a developer who specialized in bankruptcies and reality TV and is looked down on by all the politicians for life.
At least now The Donald has trumped the Benjamin Disraeli quote that seemed to sum him up. "He was distinguished for his ignorance; for he had only one idea and that was wrong!"
For Canadians, this idea is right!
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