Canada’s dairy industry accounted for 90 per cent of the responses when the federal government invited public comment on trade talks with the United States and Mexico.
Matt Malone is a scholar at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the author of Open Governments, Secret Canada: Hiding Information Other Countries Share, used Access to Information to learn that 4,572 of the total of 5,143 responses from stakeholders were dairy special interest groups or dairy farmers engaged in a letter-writing campaign.
All the public got was an opaque summary of the consultations, leaving it unclear where any specific input came from, Malone said.
“As with so much of the Carney government’s approach to trade with the United States, the attitude was tight-lipped and need-to-know,” he said.
