Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh joined Cowichan-Malahat-Langford MP Alistair MacGregor at the Cobble Hill Hall Tuesday night to talk alongside a panel of stakeholders about the importance of protecting local food and Canada’s supply management system, which oversees the production of eggs, dairy, chickens and turkeys.
Supply management was established in 1972 to help Canadian farmers and consumers cope with price management. Recent trade agreements, like CETA with the European Union, the CPTPP with 10 other Pacific Rim nations, and USMCA with the U.S. and Mexico are eroding supply management, said MacGregor, who is the NDP’s agriculture critic, arguing that federal agriculture minister Lawrence MacAulay isn’t doing enough to protect farmers.
“One of the things that really irks me, and I’m sure is irking a lot of farmers,” MacGregor said, “is that [MacAulay] will stand repeatedly in the House of Commons and in public and say, ‘We are the party that brought in supply management and we are the party that will defend supply management,’ but when you look at the evidence, we are partitioning, through each of these agreements, segments of our domestic market.”
Singh told the audience that he fully supports supply management.
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“I want you to know, as leader, I’m committed to defending supply management, committed to defending farming in our country for the sovereignty of our nation but also for the consumers to have access to good quality, locally grown produce,” Singh said. “That’s very important to me, so I want you to know you’ve got my commitment.”
Jen Woike of Farmer Ben’s Eggs spoke on behalf of egg farmers along with Cammy Lockwood of Cobble Hill’s Lockwood Farms, and emphasized how much farmers benefit from supply management, particularly with regard to cost of production, which establishes how much egg farmers are paid per dozen.
“What cost of production does, and it’s one of the most important things about supply management, is it ensures that the farmers get paid a fair amount for the work that they’re doing,” Woike said. “We’re not making huge amounts of money, but we’re being made whole on that end, with a little bit of a bonus on top.”
Agriculture in B.C. is affected by supply management more than in any other province, noted Robin Smith, chair of the B.C. Chicken Marketing Board, who was joined at the meeting by executive director Bill Vanderspek.
“What is supply management?” Smith asked. “It is food security. Food security for Canadians. Supply management in British Columbia consists of course of eggs, chicken, dairy, turkey, and hatching eggs. Forty per cent of agriculture in British Columbia is supply managed. It’s unique; it’s the largest sector of any province that has supply management. Take Saskatchewan, it’s two per cent.”
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Sporting a “Keep My Milk Canadian” T-shirt, Westholme dairy farmer Chris Groenendijk vigourously defended supply management.
“The system works. It’s a fantastic system. The sad thing is though, the government, they speak one way to support it, but in another way they’re slowly chipping away at it. Cumulatively, with all these trade deals, when they’re fully implemented, 18 per cent of the dairy industry is going to be supplied by [foreign nations]. A country needs to have food sovereignty. Some people say, well, produce the goods, whatever the good may be, wherever it’s the cheapest, but food, you want to produce out of your own country. You can be very wealthy, but if you don’t have food, money does not do you any good. Keep that in mind.”
Several of the speakers noted that, under supply management, the egg, dairy and chicken industries don’t receive tax-funded subsidies as they do in countries like the U.S., so consumers pay only once for the product.
Detractors of supply management are rarely connected with the farming community, MacGregor pointed out, and Smith echoed the comment.
“Most of those people don’t understand what we do, and they don’t understand how it benefits consumers,” Smith said. “Throw out the system and we’ll just be fine.”
Those detractors also point out that other countries don’t have supply management. Panelists on Tuesday had a response for that as well, noting that the U.K. and Australia had supply management and lost it, and it decimated their agriculture industries.
“In those countries, the price of milk has gone up and the farmer has gotten less,” Groenendijk said. “[Without supply management] farmers would hurt or be out of business and the consumer would most likely pay more.”
It doesn’t matter what other countries do, supply management functions well for Canada, Smith emphasized — for producers and consumers.
“We don’t over-supply. We don’t under-supply,” he said. “It’s a made-in-Canada system. We don’t care what they do anywhere else. It works for us.”
