Backing a dairy cartel is not standing up for Canadians: Selley

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What do you call a Canadian political leader, in the age of Trump, who seems to put their own interests “ahead of the country” in the matter of Canada-U.S. relations?

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It depends on the province, and it depends on its particular interests. If you’re Premier Danielle Smith in Alberta, and the particular interest is oil and gas, and you really lean into it — “Our province is no longer agreeable to subsidizing other large provinces who are fully capable of funding themselves,” she said last month — you get called a traitor and a quisling.

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If you’re Premier François Legault or any other Quebec politician, insisting hydroelectricity must be as sacrosanct in trade discussions as Smith insists oil must be, hardly anyone outside of Quebec will likely even notice. (Legault has since softened his stance somewhat on leveraging hydro prices or even limiting exports.)

If you’re Ontario Premier Doug Ford and you wrap yourself in the flag and you’re more subtle than Smith about trying to protect key industries — in Ontario’s case manufacturing, especially auto-making — you might even get called “Captain Canada,” and in the international press to boot!

So what should we call Mark Carney after this week?

“Supply management is part of our economic sovereignty,” Carney (who is both prime minister and the election campaign’s Liberal leader) averred on Wednesday, referring to Canada’s dairy and poultry cartels. “When it comes to negotiations with President Trump, it’s off the table.”

If you feel like you heard Carney very recently say that “nothing is off the table in defending our workers and our country,” your memory is sound. That was less than a week before he yanked off the table cheaper eggs, milk and poultry products — which would certainly help a lot of workers. Whoever’s interests he is representing here, it’s certainly not the majority of Canadians’.

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This should have shocked nobody. That one must defend supply management at all costs — but never propose expanding it into other agricultural sectors, weirdly — is part of the basic received-wisdom package uploaded into all federal politicians’ cerebral cortexes upon their arrival in Ottawa. Otherwise they will feel the wrath of the Terrifying Big Dairy Lobby.

Perhaps we should ask what Carney’s position says about his patriotism and his commitment to all Canadians over the few

Maxime Bernier is the only figure of any note to have opposed supply management in recent years while he was running for the Conservative Party of Canada leadership, and Big Dairy just went ahead and bought Andrew Scheer’s victory prevent it. No doubt that confirmed to many in Ottawa how fearsome the milky lobbyists really are. But in fact that was an easy and cheap operation, the by-product of a leadership-election system that’s just begging for that kind of outside interference, whether domestic or foreign.

In a paper published more than a decade ago, former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay, now director of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, demonstrated conclusively that the idea of farmers in supply-managed sectors (or their lobbyists) turning a general election on its ear is simply a fallacy: There aren’t enough farms, they (and their suppliers) don’t have enough employees, and they’re not concentrated enough in ridings where they could swing the vote.

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Hall Findlay’s paper having made no difference whatsoever to anything, perhaps we should ask what Carney’s position says about his patriotism and his commitment to all Canadians over the few — the standard by which Smith, most notably, has been judged.

In 2022, Statistics Canada reports there were 6,055 dairy farms nationwide employing 31,603 people; and 2,123 poultry and egg farms employing 15,539 people. Combined, that’s just 15 per cent of the roughly 280,000 people who were working in agriculture. It’s 15 per cent as many people as work in manufacturing; 11 per cent as many as work in health care and social services; nine per cent as many as work in wholesale and retail.

All those people overpay for some of the most basic staple goods in order to keep dairy and chicken farmers happy, and for what? And why would a prime minister negotiate trade with Washington at a press conference, anyway? Why would an opposition leader, for that matter?

Indeed, complain as one might about Carney’s position on this matter, it’s Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s position as well. “I will defend farmers when it comes to supply management and protect the regions of Quebec,” he said in Quebec last week.

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There is no hope of relief. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give them an earful.

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com

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