Canadian agriculture is plagued by trade barriers yet premiers who say they want to get rid of interprovincial trade barriers are not saying anything about agriculture and food.
Meat packing and processing is one. The outfits that can’t or don’t want to meet Canadian Food Inspection Agency standards can’t sell to another province. Yet their in-province consumers seem perfectly content to buy their meats and poultry products.
I’m not claiming it would be easy, but surely this could be solved. Take the people in Lloydminster who can’t cross the street to sell their products in either the Alberta or Saskatchewan sides of the border.
Chicken is another glaring example. Processing plants in Ontario and Quebec can’t buy chickens from producers in the other province. Why? Because price competition apparently undermines supply management.
More specifically, it would undermine plant-supply quotas under which processors don’t compete to buy chickens, but are allocated a set slice of the market.
The same situation exists for milk. The processors hold plant supply quota and pay to either rent or buy more quota. And no out-of-province processor can buy that quota. Or sell to a processor in another province.
Nor can any quota-holding chicken, egg or turkey producer buy or sell quota out of province. And in Ontario and Quebec, demand for quota is so high that marketing boards impose restrictions and price caps. Yet this happened at a time when Prince Edward Island had rock-bottom milk quota prices, persuading Mennonites to go there to set up dairy farms.
And Newfoundland can’t sustain chicken and egg farming without feed subsidies and other financial aids. Any farmer in Ontario or Quebec could easily market products there at lower prices and costs – except for those trade barriers.
And then there are hosts of food and agriculture-industry regulations on products such as pesticides, packaging, licences, etc.
Hardly any of these trade barriers benefit consumers who pay more than necessary. But they do protect businessmen and women.
Inter-provincial trade barriers have been estimated to be more costly than United States President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs.
But blaming the other guy is so much easier than cleaning up domestic messes.
