Juno News - April 30, 2026


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

Mentioned
Mark
Conservative MP exposes Liberal tactics for recruiting floor-crossers Leaked military docs reveal surge in foreign CAF recruits

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

174.68

Word count

315

Sentence count

16


Summary

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

In this episode, former Canadian Agriculture Minister Mark Phillips joins us to talk about the challenges facing dairy farmers across the border and the need for a free trade deal with the United States. We discuss the challenges faced by dairy farmers, the need to protect their interests, and the importance of free trade.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.