Juno News - April 30, 2026


Former Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz joins Marc Patrone to discuss supply management


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

174.67653

Word count

315

Sentence count

12


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 So you were agriculture minister at a time when, as we have now, supply management is
00:00:05.680 just the lay of the land and the way things work.
00:00:08.780 And we've heard, and you've heard, about the frustrations if you happen to be on the
00:00:13.860 other side of the border and looking to access dairy markets in Canada and feeling that you've
00:00:19.460 been unfairly restricted, at least the farmers, dairy producers in places like upstate New
00:00:24.780 York and Michigan and Wisconsin have been shut out of our market.
00:00:28.740 And that is one of the festering problems as far as our ability to get a trade deal with the Americans goes.
00:00:40.240 What do you think that conservatives should be advocating at this point?
00:00:44.960 I mean, is it still a position that you hold that, you know, this is the right thing to do in terms of protecting our dairy farmers?
00:00:52.500 Or should there be a change?
00:00:55.280 Well, everything evolves, Mark.
00:00:56.920 I find it very hypocritical from both sides saying what the other guy is not doing or is doing.
00:01:03.620 I mean, the Americans turtle up and protect sugar and cotton to the same extent that we protect our supply managed system.
00:01:10.400 However, saying that any time we took on a free trade arrangement, whether it was Trans-Pacific Partnership with New Zealand and Australia, both big dairy producers,
00:01:18.220 or the European Union, where there's major dairy producers, as well as the non-EU states like Switzerland, which is a large dairy producer.
00:01:26.920 SM was on the table and we negotiated back and forth and around and so on and were able to hold some of the standards that we did.
00:01:35.460 Does it need to change? Absolutely. As I said, things evolve.
00:01:38.860 There are farmers within the climatic system that want to be able to trade, that want to get past that.
00:01:45.400 So, you know, there's room for both here.