Thursday, May 15, 2025

Charlebois challenges Carney to tackle supply management


 

Sylvain Charlebois, a leading academic on food prices, is challenging Prime Minister Mark Carney to reform supply management, particularly for dairy.


Canada’s trade protections for dairy and poultry farmers has been a consistent source of complaints during negotiations for trade agreements, particularly with the United States.

Prime Minister Carney must put dairy reform back on the table, regardless of campaign promises. The dairy sector represents just one per cent of Canada’s GDP, yet its outsized influence on policy continues to distort economic priorities — benefiting fewer than 9,000 farms out of more than 175,000 nationwide, Charlebois has written,

This is not sustainable. Many Canadian producers are eager to grow, trade, and compete globally, but are held back by a system that prioritizes insulation over opportunity, he wrote.,

It’s also time to decouple dairy from poultry and eggs, which — though also supply-managed — operate with far more vertical integration and competitiveness. Industrial milk prices in Canada are nearly double those in the U.S., undermining both our domestic processors and consumer affordability, he wrote.

He said Canadian dairy farms continue to disappear despite the claim by farmers that supply management was needed to keep them viable. There are now about 9,000 left and half of them could soon be gone, he argued. There are about 176,000 Canadian farmers,

He said 40 per cent of Canadian milk is produced in Quebec, although it has 20 per cent of the Canadian population. He argued that is not fair to producers in other provinces.

He said supply management has tied up more capital in quota and land and has diverted attention from more pressing trade and diplomacy challenges with India and China.

It's nice to have another leader in opposition to supply management. I was rather lonely for about 20 years from the mid-1970s, arguing that supply management did not really help the average to smaller-scale farmers, but locked everybody into a system that could collapse.

Without supply management, each farmer would have been free to explore options, but with supply management, there was only the expensive, bureaucratic quota route.