Crying Over Spilled Milk

Common sense dictates that when you have people lining up at food banks in record numbers, spilling literally millions of liters of milk in the name of “supply management” is clearly unacceptable. And yet, that is our country in 2024. The food professor, Sylvain Charlebois, called attention to a study that asserts that these vast quantities of milk have been “discarded” since 2012 as part of our supply management system. This should be on the front page of every major newspaper given the heightened degree of food insecurity in Canada today, but it’s not. It’s not because the media would rather focus on the political circus here to the one down south, and because none of our politicians want to be seen as picking a fight with farmers, or their union for that matter.

Supply management has been a touchy subject in Canada for years. It’s that serious issue that never really gets enough attention because agriculture is not one of the sexy ministerial portfolios and because agriculture doesn’t necessarily make for great TV on nightly newscasts. It does need to be a more front of mind issue though.

For starters, if we are wasting millions of liters of milk, we’re probably wasting lots of other produce also. Fruits, vegetables, meat, etc. All of this is produce that could alleviate needs. With this extra supply, maybe food banks in this country wouldn’t have to turn away hungry Canadians as they do today. Food prices at grocery stores might even go down and relieve the pressure on Canadians. Ah, but that’s the kicker. Those who control what farmers can and cannot put out to market don’t want lower prices. They want milk, for example, to remain two dollars higher here than in Buffalo just across the border. These people are not acting in the interest of Canadians or even farmers, but purely in the interest of their own greed.

Waste and price gouging aside, our lack of a proper strategy to manage surplus in this country is bringing us into conflict with our trading partners. Speaking of milk and its associates, dairy products such as cheese and butter, did you know Canada is embroiled in a legal battle with New Zealand over blocked dairy exports? And did you know New Zealand was being backed in this dispute by Japan, Singapore and others? Not only is our failed system of surplus dumping we call “supply management” failing us at the grocery store and the dinner table, it is failing us in the diplomatic theater. And we cannot exactly afford many more diplomatic spats at a time when Canada is not seen as a serious player on the world stage. We need friends, and we cannot be losing them over spilt milk because union bosses want higher profit margins.

I’ll leave it to the experts to propose specific solutions to our problem. I just wanted to call attention to it because even though agriculture is not my area of expertise, I like many others can see that our inability to properly handle surplus is a threat to Canadians. It threatens our standing in the world, our credibility as trade partners, and our already strained financial resources here at home. My goal is to do my part in putting pressure on the politicians to give supply management the attention it needs before it becomes a bigger issue in Canada.