From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Dr. Sylvain Charlebois

Without reform, Canada risks losing nearly half of its dairy farms by 2030, according to experts

Few topics in Canadian agriculture generate as much debate as supply management in the dairy sector. The issue gained renewed attention when former U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Canada’s protectionist stance during NAFTA renegotiations, underscoring the need to reassess the system’s long-term viability.

While proponents argue that supply management ensures financial stability for farmers and shields them from global market volatility, critics contend that it inflates consumer prices, limits competition, and stifles innovation. A policy assessment titled Supply Management 2.0: A Policy Assessment and a Possible Roadmap for the Canadian Dairy Sector, conducted by researchers at Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph, sheds light on the system’s inefficiencies and presents a compelling case for reform.

Designed in the 1970s to regulate production and stabilize dairy prices, Canada’s supply management system operates through strict production quotas and high import tariffs. However, as successive trade agreements such as the USMCA, CETA, and CPTPP erode these protections, the system appears increasingly fragile. The federal government’s $3-billion compensation package to dairy farmers for hypothetical trade losses is a clear indication that the current structure is unsustainable.

Instead of fostering resilience, supply management has created an industry that is increasingly dependent on government payouts rather than market-driven efficiencies. If current trends persist, Canada could lose nearly half of its dairy farms by 2030 — regardless of who is in the White House.

Consumer sentiment is also shifting. Younger generations are questioning the sustainability and transparency of the dairy industry, particularly in light of scandals such as ButterGate, where palm oil supplements were used in cow feed to alter butterfat content, making butter harder at room temperature. Additionally, undisclosed milk dumping of anywhere between 600 million to 1 billion litres annually has further eroded public trust. These factors indicate that the industry is failing to align with evolving consumer expectations.

One of the most alarming findings in the policy assessment is the extent of overcapitalization in the dairy sector. Government compensation payments, coupled with rigid production quotas, have encouraged inefficiency rather than fostering innovation. Unlike their counterparts in Australia and the European Union — where deregulation has driven productivity gains — Canadian dairy farmers remain insulated from competitive pressures that could otherwise drive modernization.

The policy assessment also highlights a growing geographic imbalance in dairy production. Over 74% of Canada’s dairy farms are concentrated in Quebec and Ontario, despite only 61% of the national population residing in these provinces. This concentration exacerbates supply chain inefficiencies and increases price disparities. As a result, consumers in Atlantic Canada, the North, and Indigenous communities face disproportionately high dairy costs, raising serious food security concerns. Addressing these imbalances requires policies that promote regional diversification in dairy production.

A key element of modernization must involve a gradual reform of production quotas and tariffs. The existing quota system restricts farmers’ ability to respond dynamically to market signals. While quota allocation is managed provincially, harmonizing the system at the federal level would create a more cohesive market. Moving toward a flexible quota model, with expansion mechanisms based on demand, would increase competitiveness and efficiency.

Tariff policies also warrant reassessment. While tariffs provide necessary protection for domestic producers, they currently contribute to artificially inflated consumer prices. A phased reduction in tariffs, complemented by direct incentives for farmers investing in productivity-enhancing innovations and sustainability initiatives, could strike a balance between maintaining food sovereignty and fostering competitiveness.

Despite calls for reform, inertia persists due to entrenched interests within the sector. However, resistance is not a viable long-term strategy. Industrial milk prices in Canada are now the highest in the Western world, making the sector increasingly uncompetitive on a global scale. While supply management also governs poultry and eggs, these industries have adapted more effectively, remaining competitive through efficiency improvements and innovation. In contrast, the dairy sector continues to grapple with structural inefficiencies and a lack of modernization.

That said, abolishing supply management outright is neither desirable nor practical. A sudden removal of protections would expose Canadian dairy farmers to aggressive foreign competition, risking rural economic stability and jeopardizing domestic food security. Instead, a balanced approach is needed — one that preserves the core benefits of supply management while integrating market-driven reforms to ensure the industry remains competitive, innovative and sustainable.

Canada’s supply management system, once a pillar of stability, has become an impediment to progress. As global trade dynamics shift and consumer expectations evolve, policymakers have an opportunity to modernize the system in a way that balances fair pricing with market efficiency. The recommendations from Supply Management 2.0 suggest that regional diversification of dairy production, value-chain-based pricing models that align production with actual market demand, and a stronger emphasis on research and development could help modernize the industry. Performance-based government compensation, rather than blanket payouts that preserve inefficiencies, would also improve long-term sustainability.

The question is no longer whether reform is necessary, but whether the dairy industry and policymakers are prepared to embrace it. A smarter, more flexible supply management framework will be crucial in ensuring that Canadian dairy remains resilient, competitive, and sustainable for future generations.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

From the Brownstone Institute

By John Klar  

A recent essay titled “The Real Purpose of Net Zero” by Jefferey Jaxon posited that Europe’s current war against farmers in the name of preventing climate change is ultimately designed to inflict famine. Jaxon is not speculating on globalist motives; he is warning humanity of a rapidly unfolding reality that is observable in the perverse lies against cows, denigration of European farmers as enemies of the Earth, and calls by the WHO, WEF, and UN for a plant-based diet dependent entirely on GMOs, synthetic fertilizers, and agrichemicals.

Revelations about the evil doings of the Orwellian-monikered “United States Agency of International Development” (USAID) reveal a roadmap to totalitarian control unwittingly funded by America’s taxpaying proles. USAID’s clandestine machinations have long focused on controlling local and global food supplies as “soft colonization” by multinational chemical, agricultural, and financial corporations. European farmers revolting against climate, wildlife, and animal rights policies are harbingers of this tightening globalist noose.

The roots of the current globalist plan to “save humanity from climate change” link directly to the infamous Kissinger Report, which called to control world food supplies and agriculture as part of a globalist collaboration between nation-states and NGOs to advance US national security interests and “save the world” from human overpopulation using “fertility reduction technologies.” Kissinger’s 1974 Report was created by USAID, the CIA, and various federal agencies, including the USDA.

Fast forward to 2003, the Iraq War justified using fear-mongering propaganda about weapons of mass destruction and neo-conservative malarky about rescuing the Iraqi people. The US-led occupation of Iraq became a rapacious profiteering smorgasbord for colonizing corporations husbanded by USAID. Iraq is heir to the birthplace of human civilization, made possible by early Mesopotamian agriculture: many of the grains, fruits, and vegetables that now feed the world were developed there. Iraq’s farmers saved back 97% of their seed stocks from their own harvests before the US invasion. Under Paul Bremer, Rule 81 (never fully implemented) sought to institute GMO cropping and patented seed varieties, as Cargill, Monsanto, and other corporations descended upon the war-ravaged nation using American tax dollars and USAID.

That playbook was more quietly implemented during the Ukraine War, once again orchestrated by USAID. Before the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, prohibiting GMO technologies and restricting land ownership to Ukrainians. Within months of US intervention, USAID assisted in the dismantling of these protections in the name of “land reforms,” free markets, financial support, improved agricultural efficiency, and rescuing the Ukrainian people. In just two years, over half of Ukraine’s farmland became the property of foreign investors. GMO seeds and drone technology were “donated” by Bayer Corporation, and companies such as GMO seed-seller Syngenta and German chemical manufacturer BASF became the dominant agricultural “stakeholders” in war-torn Ukraine. Russia may withdraw, but Ukraine’s foreign debts, soil degradation, and soft colonization will remain.

The UN, WTO, WHO, and WEF all conspire to peddle a false narrative that cows and peasant farmers are destroying the planet, and that chemical-dependent GMO monocropping, synthetic fertilizers, and patented fake meats and bug burgers must be implemented post haste (by force if necessary) to rescue humanity. The argument that pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (manufactured from natural gas, aka methane) are salvific is patently false. They are, however, highly profitable for chemical companies like Bayer, Dow, and BASF.

Jefferey Jaxon is exactly correct. The Netherlands committed to robust agricultural development following a Nazi embargo that deliberately inflicted mass famine following their collaboration with Allied Forces in Operation Market Garden. France boasts the highest cow population in all of Europe. Ireland’s culture is tightly linked to farming as part of its trauma during the (British-assisted) Irish Potato Famine. The corporate/NGO cabal now uprooting and targeting farmers in these nations and across the EU in the name of staving off climate change and preserving wildlife is a direct outcropping of Kissinger’s grand dystopian scheme launched through USAID in 1974.

Americans watch European farmer protests from afar, largely oblivious that most all of US agriculture was absorbed by the Big Ag Borg generations ago. Currency control linked to a (political, environmental, and economic) social credit scorecard promises the fruition of Kissinger’s demonic plan: “Control the food, control the people.”

Modern humans suffer a double hubris that blinds them to the contemplation of the truth of Jaxon’s hypothesis: a cultish trust in technology, coupled with an irrational faith in their self-perceived moral superiority to past civilizations (Wendell Berry calls this “historical pride”). Yet, as long as mankind has had the capacity to harm another for personal gain, humans have devised ways to control food for power or profit. Siege warfare generally depended on starving defenders of castle walls into submission.

Even if globalist food control proposals are well-intentioned, a monolithic, monocultured, industrial-dependent worldwide food system is a lurking humanitarian disaster. Berry observed:

In a highly centralized and industrialized food-supply system there can be no small disaster. Whether it be a production “error” or a corn blight, the disaster is not foreseen until it exists; it is not recognized until it is widespread.

The current push to dominate global food production using industrial systems is the cornerstone of complete globalist dominion over all of humanity. The “Mark of the Beast” without which no American will buy or sell goods – including guns, bullets, or factory-grown hamburgers and cricket patties – is mere steps away. Mr. Jaxon is correct that these leaders “know these basic historical and current facts,” and that “[f]armers are becoming endangered because of government [climate] policy … and it’s being allowed to happen.” USAID has been actively seeding and watering this dystopia for decades.

Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are as fully cognizant of this fundamental truth as Henry Kissinger was in 1974. USAID has aided all three. Having lost almost all of their small farms over the last century, Americans are well ahead of Europeans in their near-complete dependence on industrial food.

That’s the plan.