Charlebois peddles “alternative facts” in his anti-supply management diatribes
He’s at it again. More bluster, more pronouncements, criticizing Canada and advocating policy that chases an imagined golden age, without a care for the real harm that would result from his faulty thinking.
Of course, I’m referring to Sylvain Charlebois and his straw man campaign to completely misrepresent supply management. In one of his latest diatribes, “The dairy monopoly that holds Canada hostage“, Charlebois claims that the tariff spat and the ongoing barriers to interprovincial trade are largely down to, you guessed it, supply management. While this facile analysis is on par with Trump’s fentanyl justification for tariffs on Canadian goods, Trump at least has the sense not to believe his own explanation.
While Charlebois appears to hold with widely accepted opinion that the threatened tariffs are really about redressing trade imbalances and not drug running, he decides to ignore the fact that cross-border trade with the US in dairy products plays no role at all in that trade imbalance.
On interprovincial trade, he calls supply management “a structural roadblock” to “a freer domestic market [by] reinforcing regional monopolies that make real change virtually impossible”. What does this even mean? Supply management has no impact on the interprovincial trade of goods and services—including dairy products widely available in grocery stores across the country, regardless of their province of origin.
For a perishable farm product like milk, Supply Management efficiently organizes the journey from farm to dairy plant, with a simple and direct system that keeps careful control of the supply of milk from local farms balanced with the demand coming from regional milk processors, to ensure that our dairy processing plants run at peak efficiency. At the same time, this system has to ensure that destabilizing tsunamis of dairy products do not flood across Canada’s southern border. This safeguards the incomes of farmers and farm workers, and the safe and stable food supply of consumers.
That’s the agreement that has served as the basis of the strongest, most resilient dairy system in the world: a system with exceptional quality standards, and reasonable consumer prices balanced with farmgate prices that reflect the cost of production. By way of this agreement, for over 50 years Canadian dairy farmers have avoided the intense industrialization, massive concentration, wild market price fluctuations, race-to-the-bottom practices and tenuous livelihoods characteristic of the dairy industry in the US and elsewhere in the world. Thanks to supply management, Canadians have also avoided paying significant, regular government subsidies to producers and dairies, as we see in the US and many other countries, to prevent collapse when overproduction crashes their farm-gate prices.
But of course, as an expert on supply management, one might expect that Professor Charlebois knows this history, just as he knows that supply management has no impact whatsoever for all of the non-dairy Canadian products that flow across provincial borders.
Judging by the relentless flow of misinformed, often contradictory articles, Charlebois’s obsession with supply management seems to occupy nearly all of his waking hours. Yet he offers no proposals to address the near monopolies that control much of the agri-food system in Canada, and use their excess power to the detriment of farmers and consumers—the handful of corporations that control grocery retail (and food prices, including dairy products), or farm inputs from fertilizer and seed to chemicals and farm equipment.
In the approaching trade disputes, which will raise challenges for farmers and food consumers alike, and make it clear just how precarious is our reliance on extended, cross-border trade in food, we need to concentrate on how best to improve our regional food resilience, and not raise false hysterics over a system that has delivered a resilient, uniquely Canadian regional food supply solution for half a century. Supply Management isn’t the problem – it’s the solution.
