Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm appearing as an individual.
I'm a former MLA and minister of agriculture in Prince Edward Island. When I was still a graduate student, before I got into politics, I was directly involved with the PEI Marketing Council in the tumultuous early days that marked the formation of the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency and the Canadian Chicken Marketing Agency. After that, as part of my studies, I was hosted by marketing boards in Manitoba, Alberta, and B.C. to study their marketing board systems. Prior to academia, I served as secretary to the board and manager of the Ontario Processing Vegetable Growers.
I support Bill C-282. I see Canada's supply management programs in the dairy and poultry sectors as uniquely Canadian business practices that have proven themselves several times to be fair trading practices in the international market.
I recall the founding of the national egg and chicken marketing agencies, which was a response to the chicken and egg wars in the early 1970s between Quebec and Ontario. The response by each province threatened to interfere with open borders among Canadian provinces. As we do in this country, in our uniquely Canadian way, we came up with the concept of parallelism to solve the problem and at the same time respect the shared jurisdiction of the federal government and the provinces.
The federal government's unilateral move and recent trade negotiations to open up more of our market to trading partners was, in my view, disrespectful of the organized marketing system put together by producers under provincial legislation. Bill C-282, as I understand it, will restrict federal authorities from giving away further access to our well-served, organized and safe system of providing food.
I would point out that Canada’s supply management system has survived scrutiny under GATT rounds, the World Trade Organization rounds—which is the new name for GATT—and then the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, shortly followed by the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European trade agreement, the TPP; and now the just-concluded USMCA.
What’s the secret to Canada’s brilliance? Could it be that we are tough negotiators? Is it because we are willing to give away anything to preserve supply management? That's nonsense.
Canada’s supply management system has survived close examination over the last 40-plus years of trade negotiations because it has been found to be fair and does not break trade rules, regardless of what the other negotiator may say.
It is seen as not breaking rules because supply management in Canada is not a subsidy program that puts competitors at a disadvantage. Under Canadian law, farmers can stabilize prices legally by getting together and sharing the market. We have always shared a piece of our market with other countries. We are deemed fair because the share of the market is there.
Supply management is a standard business practice. Consider the logic. With any form of supply management, a business is simply trying to limit production of something to closely satisfy the demand in the market. There are great challenges in doing that in agriculture, but each commodity group has designed different systems in different ways of supply and management.
The idea that our trading partner, particularly the United States, doesn't engage in supply management is simply incorrect. Our main trading partners all practise some form of supply management for farm commodities.
I can talk about other examples, but I'm just going to mention one that I was very familiar with when I was with the vegetable board. In this case, the U.S. maintained several food purchasing programs for foreign aid, the military, school lunch programs and food stamp programs.
For example, if I was watching the price of canned peas softening, I could almost predict that within about two weeks or so the USDA would announce a major food purchase of canned peas for school lunches or the military or whatever. The point is that they remove product from the market, and subsequently the price of canned peas rises.
In supply management—