Half of the highly-valuable cheese import permits that come
as part of the free trade deal with Europe will be given to distributors and
retailers. The other half will go to Canadian cheese processors who are
disappointed because they wanted them all.
They are valuable because permit holders can buy up to
16,000 tonnes of European specialty cheeses and up to 1,700 tonnes of industrial
cheeses at low world prices and sell them at much higher prices in Canada.
Who gets to hold the permits has been a hotly-contested
lobbying battle, most of it out of public view.
In
a package of trade-deal-related announcements, farmers get up to $250,000 each
from a $250-million fund to improve their efficiency and productivity and
processors get to dip into a fund of $100 million to develop new products,
presumably those that have been flooding across the U.S. border and some from
Europe and escaping high Canadian tariffs because they’re so new they’re not
listed in the schedule of tariff-protected markets.
