That's fine. I mean, you raise some of the obvious positive aspects about the program. It does provide a more stable source of income to a lot of farmers. It does protect them against good production years, bad production years, and those potential cyclical flows. I see that.
Like any policy, though, the costs of supply management can be shifted but not avoided. What I'm saying here is that the system itself shifts the cost of it squarely on domestic consumers. For example, by withholding what makes it to the market, essentially what you're doing is restricting supply and forcing the market price up above what it would otherwise be. That's where that steady income stream flows.
Now, how does that affect the average person? I mentioned the type of transfer the average Canadian is making to support the system. On average, per year, the OECD calculates that it's roughly $210 per household. Granted, dairy products and egg products make up only a small portion of what I walk out of the grocery store with, but when you look at the ripple effects on, say, a lower-income family, it becomes more significant.
Somewhat anecdotally, I was reading Jeffrey Simpson's article this Saturday in the Globe and Mail. In it he mentioned the fact that a lot of countries in the world, such as the United States, are considering creating a tax on soda pop, let's say, because it's just too cheap; we have this problem with obesity, and too many kids are getting fat because people are buying these goods. Well, consider it another way. If you are a low-income family and you go into a grocery store with $7 in your pocket to buy the appropriate amount of goods for a healthy meal for your kids, that $4.50 two-litre carton of milk looks a lot different when you compare it with an 89ยข two-litre bottle of pop.
What I'm saying is that I look at the benefits versus the costs, which have to be weighed against one another. Then I look at what's happening right now with the Doha development agenda. The fact is that it's being stalled. What potentially might come out of that we still don't exactly know. Essentially it's going to give us a 15-year time horizon looking in the future.