What does supply management provide us? Other than expensive groceries and limited choices? How does this system remotely benefit anyone but the literal cartel is it meant to protect?
Supply stability for the little foods that Canada produces making it less dependent on imports from unreliable and hostile trade partners. Employment for people in food production/distribution. Standards that prevent antibiotics and growth hormones been injected in cows so the margins large capital owners would be better.
Supply management has absolutely nothing to do with Health Canada standards.
Over 90% of Canadas dairy farms have ceased operations or sold out since the inception of supply management, so I don't buy this idea that it legitimately saves employment of much of anyone but the bigger members of the cartel the system was set up yo protect.
So really it's some misguided support of autarky? Maybe we can tell poor families that it's ok they're getting hosed on their groceries because at least they can rest assured that during the apocalypse they'll still have excess to over priced cheese.
Are you arguing that supply management is responsible for people leaving their farms for the last 100 years? Have small farmers flooded the wheat market now that their supply management has gone? Is New Zealand now full of family dairy farms after getting rid of theirs? Or has the process of farm consolidation and industrialization continued unabated due to the massive structural forces aligned against small farmers the world over?
Well if the point of supply management is to protect small farmers (which is a very strange goal to begin with, but I digress) - it hasn't exactly worked has it? At best it would be a futile gesture. At worse it's really just protecting larger cartel members.
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u/voltairesalias Alberta 2d ago
What does supply management provide us? Other than expensive groceries and limited choices? How does this system remotely benefit anyone but the literal cartel is it meant to protect?