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By Gwyn Morgan

U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policy is often chaotic and punitive. But on one point, he is right: Canada’s agricultural supply management system has to go. Not because it is unfair to the United States, though it clearly is, but because it punishes Canadians. Supply management is a government-enforced price-fixing scheme that limits consumer choice, inflates grocery bills, wastes food, and shields a small, politically powerful group of producers from competition—at the direct expense of millions of households.

And yet Ottawa continues to support this socialist shakedown. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters supply management was “not on the table” in negotiations for a renewed United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, despite U.S. negotiators citing it as a roadblock to a new deal.

Supply management relies on a web of production quotas, fixed farmgate prices, strict import limits, and punitive tariffs that can approach 300 percent. Bureaucrats decide how much milk, chicken, eggs, and poultry Canadians farmers produce and which farmers can produce how much. When officials misjudge demand—as they recently did with chicken and eggs—farmers are legally barred from responding. The result is predictable: shortages, soaring prices, and frustrated consumers staring at emptier shelves and higher bills.

This is not a theoretical problem. Canada’s most recent chicken production cycle, ending in May 2025, produced one of the worst supply shortfalls in decades. Demand rose unexpectedly, but quotas froze supply in place. Canadian farmers could not increase production. Instead, consumers paid more for scarce domestic poultry while last-minute imports filled the gap at premium prices. Eggs followed a similar pattern, with shortages triggering a convoluted “allocation” system that opened the door to massive foreign imports rather than empowering Canadian farmers to respond.

Over a century of global experience has shown that central economic planning fails. Governments are simply not good at “matching” supply with demand. There is no reason to believe Ottawa’s attempts to manage a handful of food categories should fare any better. And yet supply management persists, even as its costs mount.

Those costs fall squarely on consumers. According to a Fraser Institute estimate, supply management adds roughly $375 a year to the average Canadian household’s grocery bill. Because lower-income families spend a much higher proportion of their income on food, the burden falls most heavily on them.
The system also strangles consumer choice. European countries produce thousands of varieties of high-quality cheeses at prices far below what Canadians pay for largely industrial domestic products. But our import quotas are tiny, and anything above them is hit with tariffs exceeding 245 percent. As a result, imported cheeses can cost $60 per kilogram or more in Canadian grocery stores. In Switzerland, one of the world’s most eye-poppingly expensive countries, where a thimble-sized coffee will set you back $9, premium cheeses are barely half the price you’ll find at Loblaw or Safeway.

Canada’s supply-managed farmers defend their monopoly by insisting it provides a “fair return” for famers, guarantees Canadians have access to “homegrown food” and assures the “right amount of food is produced to meet Canadian needs.” Is there a shred of evidence Canadians are being denied the “right amount” of bread, tuna, asparagus or applesauce? Of course not; the market readily supplies all these and many thousands of other non-supply-managed foods.

Like all price-fixing systems, Canada’s supply management provides only the illusion of stability and security. We’ve seen above what happens when production falls short. But perversely, if a farmer manages to get more milk out of his cows than his quota, there’s no reward: the excess must be
dumped. Last year alone, enough milk was discarded to feed 4.2 million people.

Over time, supply management has become less about farming and more about quota ownership. Artificial scarcity has turned quotas into highly valuable assets, locking out young farmers and rewarding incumbents.

Why does such a dysfunctional system persist? The answer is politics. Supply management is of outsized importance in Quebec, where producers hold a disproportionate share of quotas and are numerous enough to swing election results in key ridings. Federal parties of all stripes have learned the cost of crossing this lobby. That political cowardice now collides with reality. The USMCA is heading toward mandatory renegotiation, and supply management is squarely in Washington’s sights. Canada depends on tariff-free access to the U.S. market for hundreds of billions of dollars in exports. Trading away a deeply-flawed system to secure that access would make economic sense.

Instead, Ottawa has doubled down. Not just with Carney’s remarks last week but with Bill C-202, which makes it illegal for Canadian ministers to reduce tariffs or expand quotas on supply-managed goods in future trade talks. Formally signalling that Canada’s negotiating position is hostage to a tiny domestic lobby group is reckless, and weakens Canada’s hand before talks even begin.

Food prices continue to rise faster than inflation. Forecasts suggest the average family will spend $1,000 more on groceries next year alone. Supply management is not the only cause, but it remains a major one. Ending it would lower prices, expand choice, reduce waste, and reward entrepreneurial farmers willing to compete.

If Donald Trump can succeed in forcing supply management onto the negotiating table, he will be doing Canadian consumers—and Canadian agriculture—a favour our own political class has long refused to deliver.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal. Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.

By Peter Best

What do children owe their parents? Love, honour and respect are a good start. But what about parents who were once political figures – does the younger generation owe a duty of care to the beliefs of their forebears?

Two recent cases in Canada highlight the inter-generational conflict at play in Canada over Indigenous politics. One concerns Prime Minister Mark Carney and his father Robert. The other, a recent book on the life of noted aboriginal thinker William Wuttunee edited by his daughter Wanda. In each case, the current generation has let its ancestors down – and left all of Canada worse off.

William Wuttunee was born in 1928 in a one-room log cabin on a reserve in Saskatchewan, where he endured a childhood of poverty and hardship. Education was his release, and he went on to become the first aboriginal to practice law in Western Canada; he also served as the inaugural president of the National Indian Council in 1961.

Wuttunee rose to prominence with his controversial 1971 book Ruffled Feathers, that argued for an end to Canadian’s Indian Reserve system, which he believed trapped his people in poverty and despair. He dreamed of a Canada where Indigenous people lived side-by-side all other Canadians and enjoyed the same rights and benefits.

Such an argument for true racial equality put Wuttunee at odds with the illiberal elite of Canada’s native community, who still believe in a segregated, race-based relationship between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada. For telling truth to power, Wuttunee was ostracized from the native political community and banned from his own reserve. He died in 2015.

This year, William’s daughter Wanda had the opportunity to rectify the past mistreatment of her father. In the new book Still Ruffling Feathers – Let Us Put Our Minds Together, Wanda, an academic at the University of Manitoba, and several other contributors claim to “fearlessly engage” with her father’s ideas. Unfortunately, the authors mostly seek to bury, rather than
praise, Wuttunee’s vision of one Canada for all.

Wanda claims her father’s desire for a treaty-free, reserve-free Canada would be problematic today because it would have required giving up all the financial and legal goodies that have since been showered upon Indigenous groups. But there is a counterfactual to consider. What if Indigenous Canadians had simply enjoyed the same incremental gains in income, health and other social indicators as the rest of the country during this time?

Ample evidence on the massive and longstanding gap between native and non-native Canadians across a wide variety of socio-economic indicators suggest that integration would have been the better bet. The life expectancy for Indigenous Albertans, for example, is a shocking 19 years shorter than for a non-native Albertans. William Wuttunee was right all along about the damage done by the reserve system. And yet nearly all of the contributors to Wanda’s new book refuse to admit this fact.

The other current example concerns Robert Carney, who had a long and distinguished career in aboriginal education. When the future prime minister was a young boy, Robert was the principal of a Catholic day school in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories; he later became a government administrator and a professor of education. What he experienced throughout his
lifetime led the elder Carney to become an outspoken defender of Canada’s now-controversial residential schools.

When the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) attacked the legacy of residential schools, Carney penned a sharp critique. He pointed out that the schools were not jails despite frequent claims that students were there against their will; in fact, parents had to sign an application form to enroll their children in a residential school. Carney also bristled at
the lack of context in the RCAP report, noting that the schools performed a key social welfare function in caring for “sick, dying, abandoned and orphaned children.”

In the midst of the 2025 federal election campaign, Mark Carney was asked if he agreed with his father’s positive take on residential schools. “I love my father, but I don’t share those views,” he answered. Some Indigenous activists have subsequently accused Robert Carney of residential school “denialism” and “complicity” in the alleged horrors of Canada’s colonial education system.

Like Wanda Wuttunee, Mark Carney let his father down by distancing himself from his legacy for reasons of political expediency. He had an opportunity to offer Canadians a courageous and fact-based perspective on a subject of great current public interest by drawing upon his intimate connection with an expert in the field. Instead, Mark Carney caved to the
requirements of groupthink. As a result, his father now stands accused of complicity in a phony genocide.

As for William Wuttunee, he wanted all Canadians – native and non-native alike – to be free from political constraints. He rejected racial segregation, discrimination and identity politics in all forms. And yet in “honouring” his life’s work, his daughter misrepresents his legacy by sidestepping the core truths of his central belief.

No one doubts that Wanda Wuttunee and Mark Carney each loved their dads, as any son or daughter should. And there is no requirement that a younger generation must accept without question whatever their parents thought. But in the case of Wuttunee and Carney, both offspring have deliberately chosen to tarnish their fathers’ legacies in obedience to a poisonous
ideology that promotes the entirely un-Canadian ideal of permanent racial segregation and inequity. And all of Canada is the poorer for it.

Peter Best is a retired lawyer living in Sudbury, Ontario. The original, longer version of this story first appeared in C2CJournal.ca.