(Scott Bauer photo courtesy ARS/USDA)

Supply management limits growth in Canada, Saputo says

Reuters — Canada’s tightly managed dairy sector limits domestic opportunities for Saputo, the country’s largest dairy, forcing it to focus on growth elsewhere, the company’s chief executive said Thursday. CEO Lino Saputo Jr. emphasized in an interview that the company is not lobbying Ottawa to either dismantle or preserve Canada’s supply management system for dairy, […] Read more

maple syrup being poured

Lessons to learn from Quebec’s agriculture and agri-food industry

Canada is about food and Quebec is about processing — 
employing 475,189 in 2,100 facilities, most co-operatively owned

Reading Time: 3 minutes I spend a lot of time in Quebec and find the culture and the history of the province fascinating. It is in many regards, Canada’s little bit of Europe and the feel in the country is cosy. What most folks don’t see as they travel the countryside past long narrow tracks of land, vineyards and […] Read more


Conference board’s supply management reform ill conceived

Scrapping the current system would require government to subsidize both 
domestic production and exports

Reading Time: 2 minutes The Conference Board of Canada embraces the mantra that “all growth is good.” Its plan to change supply management for growth is a prescription for weakening, if not eliminating, the three pillars of supply management for dairy production in Canada — production controls, import tariffs and farmers’ cost-of-production pricing — in order to produce more […] Read more

Dairy cattle in a field

The time has come to scrap supply management

Canada has a unique opportunity to supply the world with dairy products, 
but first it must phase out supply management

Reading Time: 2 minutes Dairy supply management is an old solution to an old problem. The approach of setting dairy prices, controlling production, and controlling imports has been costly to Canadians as a whole and to dairy farmers for a long time. Today, Canada has an opportunity to break with supply management for the benefit of everyone — and […] Read more