Trump Just Threatened To DISMANTLE Quebec's Dairy Cartel
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
141.42146
Summary
Dairy farmers in Canada dump billions of liters of milk each year to keep prices high and keep food prices stable. While millions of Canadians visit a food bank every month, and many children go hungry, the Canadian supply management system has farmers dumping millions and billions of litres of milk every single year.
Transcript
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Canada, by the way, imposes a 250 to 300 percent tariff on many of our dairy products.
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They do the first little carton of milk at a very low price,
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but after that it gets bad and then it gets up to 275, 300 percent.
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If American exports exceed this amount, they can be subject to high tariffs.
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For example, milk tariffs are at 241 percent and butter, 298.5 percent.
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And nobody in Ottawa wants to say it out loud, but I'll say it.
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In Canada, we dump billions and billions of gallons of perfectly good milk year after year on purpose.
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Not because people don't need food, but because supply management is designed to keep prices high.
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While families are flooding food banks in Canada,
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a small, well-connected dairy cartel, mostly in Quebec, gets protected profits.
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And that same system is blocking real free trade with the United States.
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And now we have a massive trade dispute over it.
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Okay, here's a tweet from Canada's food professor.
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A joint Dalhousie and McGill University study estimates that Canadian dairy farmers discard as much as 1 billion liters of milk each year.
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Not because of food safety concerns, but to prevent oversupply and maintain elevated prices.
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That's what's happening in Canada today with supply management.
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While millions of Canadians visit a food bank every month and many children go hungry,
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the Canadian supply management system has farmers dumping millions and billions of liters of milk every single year.
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Here's a video talking about the problem supply management creates for Canadians.
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First, you really have to understand what supply management is.
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The second, it puts artificial limits on the prices.
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It puts the prices up higher, controls the price, the production inside the country.
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And the third is it has to have limits, tariffs and quotas to keep it from outside.
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So in Canada, what we do with supply management is say, we're only going to produce for our markets.
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The flip side is in the U.S., they give a subsidy to everybody.
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We are their best market to sell milk because we're right next door.
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So the Americans want to take their overproduction and sell it to Canada.
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And our system is made to have no additional needs because of supply management.
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And it's designed to keep a very well-connected group of farmers from going bankrupt.
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If they're so confident in their product, oh, we got better milk up here in Canada,
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then open up the market and let the market compete.
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Here's a video that I'm sure many of you who are familiar with this topic have probably already seen.
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It is a dairy farmer talking about the reality of him having to dump thousands and thousands of liters of milk
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because he's already reached the quota and he can't sell it.
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We're here at Gibbon Bo's Farm in Southern Ontario.
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Right now, during the winter months, we do milk quite a bit more milk because the feed is very consistent.
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And as you do a good job, you will produce quite a bit of milk.
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It's regulated by the government and by the DFO.
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But the problem is, is what they don't understand.
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There's millions of people who look at this milk running away.
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I count 30,000 liters of milk and it breaks my heart.
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By the way, this here, Canadian milk, it's $7 a liter.
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When I go for my haircut, people say, wow, $7, Jerry, for a little bit of milk.
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I say, well, you have to go higher up because we have no say anymore as a dairy farmer on our own farm.
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And no matter how we stand up, for this time, I'm going public.
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I want the people to see the pain that us growers have.
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In 25 days, as a little boy, we grew up on a dairy farm, came from Europe.
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Thank God this farmer was transparent and shared this online.
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Because, again, when people talk about it, it doesn't impact you as much.
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But when you see it, when you see the actual milk with how expensive milk is, especially here in Canada, being dumped, being disposed of, being wasted, it just hits different when you see it.
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And the farmer himself is like, it breaks my heart to have to get rid of this.
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It breaks my heart to have to dump it when I know that there are kids out there who don't have a cup of milk.
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When I know that there are families who can't afford milk.
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And here's another article from CTV News reporting on that exact same issue.
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Billions of liters of Canadian milk were discarded in the last 12 years.
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There's reason to cry over spilled milk, researchers say.
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They found that the discarded dairy product has a massive financial, environmental, and nutritional impact.
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Systemic deficiencies in Canada's supply management system have led to billions of liters of milk going to waste
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since 2012, according to a new study published in the journal Ecological Economics.
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The cost of dumped milk, between 6.8 billion and 10 billion liters of milk, was discarded.
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Between 7 and 10 billion was discarded on Canadian dairy farms over 12 years,
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according to researchers based in Denmark, Michigan, and Halifax, Dalhousie University.
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They found that the amount of tossed milk made up about 7% of milk produced on dairy farms over that time
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In addition, researchers estimated that as much as 10 billion liters of milk was discarded,
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which contributed to significant land and water resource waste
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and about 8.4 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or the amount of emissions from 350,000 passenger vehicles each year.
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Not only are they wasting food, which is a travesty in a country where millions of Canadians need a food bank in order to survive,
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but they're also wasting a ton of water as well.
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And they're also generating a lot more emissions, the equivalent of 350,000 passenger vehicles while they're doing this.
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But then they want you and I to reduce our carbon footprint or whatever.
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These people are full of it, and they've always been full of it.
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And the issue is that it's regular Canadians that pay the price.
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Mark Carney doesn't care if milk is $10 a liter.
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He doesn't care if the gallon of milk reaches the $30 mark.
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It's regular Canadians that are going hungry and are having to visit food banks more than ever.
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