Western Standard - April 22, 2022


Supply management Issues： Cory is triggered by dairy price spikes

Topics
supply management inflation supply management system supply management art catchers supply management
Mentioned
Leslyn Lewis Sherey Denise Martin Polyev Jane
Triggered： We can’t pretend we didn’t see inflation coming. TRIGGERED： New woke rule： If you speak English, you’re a racist.

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

198.89

Word count

1,528

Sentence count

106

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

14

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

supply management is a Soviet-style system that controls all production of dairy, egg, and poultry products in Canada. It s illegal to produce and sell any of those items if you don t have a quota issued by the state and controlled by a small number of cartels.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.240 So the time is now and the place is Canada. This is the moment. This is the time, guys, when supply management,
00:00:05.720 remember, we don't hear about it often enough in my view,
00:00:08.960 it's supposed to protect us from all these price spikes in food products during extraordinary circumstances.
00:00:14.820 This is when we should be laughing at the world as they deal with hyperinflation within their food markets
00:00:19.400 while we enjoy our coddled and price-protected dairy, egg, and poultry industries.
00:00:24.060 At least that's what proponents of supply management have been telling us for decades,
00:00:28.020 as Canadians have been soaked with some of the highest dairy prices on earth.
00:00:31.580 We were told those high prices were something of an investment.
00:00:34.940 Paying now would save us from paying later when we'd really need it.
00:00:38.420 Supply management would guarantee food security for us all when world supply becomes scarce.
00:00:44.000 Look, supply management's a Soviet-style system that controls all production of dairy, egg, and poultry products.
00:00:50.360 It's literally illegal to produce and sell any of those items if you don't have a quota issued by the state
00:00:56.500 and controlled by a small number of cartels.
00:00:59.360 Some people say it's an exaggeration to call it Soviet-style.
00:01:01.900 Well, when I could be criminally charged for selling milk or owning over 300 chickens,
00:01:07.760 what else could I compare it to?
00:01:09.760 The quotas make a mess of the market,
00:01:11.780 and some producers literally actually dump dairy products into the ditch
00:01:14.860 because if they overproduce and try to sell it, they'll have broken the law. 0.95
00:01:18.400 The system really is that ridiculous and rigid.
00:01:20.440 So now that we're seeing inflation spiking around the world due to a number of factors,
00:01:25.460 how well is supply management doing in keeping our dairy prices stable?
00:01:29.260 It's totally failed.
00:01:31.120 Not only are supply-managed products rising in price,
00:01:33.680 they're rising faster than any other food products.
00:01:36.060 They should be the slowest to rise if we were supposed to believe those people
00:01:38.460 who said this system's going to work for us.
00:01:40.440 Food produced under the supply management system is more expensive than any other products.
00:01:45.280 Supply management has accomplished the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do.
00:01:49.400 Dairy and egg inflation prices are leading all other foods right now
00:01:53.140 as prices are rising faster than we've seen since 1983.
00:01:57.280 Milk is up 8%.
00:01:58.520 Cheese, over 10%.
00:01:59.920 Butter, 16%.
00:02:01.640 And these products are essential ingredients in many other processed foods and restaurant dishes.
00:02:06.100 So those prices are going to contribute to higher costs on everything you eat.
00:02:10.140 The other aspect they like to talk about, well, how about protecting the family farm?
00:02:14.180 Proponents of supply management have insisted for decades
00:02:16.740 that small farms would be wiped out and we would be dominated by a small number of corporate farms
00:02:21.980 if we don't maintain the supply management system.
00:02:24.640 Well, in the 1970s, Canada had about 145,000 dairy producers.
00:02:28.980 Today we have less than 10,000 of them.
00:02:31.720 Expensive dairy quotas ensured that only large corporations and operations were sustainable
00:02:36.040 and the family dairy operations fell by the wayside.
00:02:38.640 Most of those massive dairy farms are in Quebec, of course, and that's a large factor in why
00:02:43.360 conservative and liberal politicians alike are terrified of speaking out against this rotten system.
00:02:48.620 The average Canadian dairy farm, by the way, nets $5 million a year.
00:02:52.920 That's net, people, not gross.
00:02:54.800 We're talking about the little mom-and-pop operations of yesteryear.
00:02:57.820 Dairy farmers love to plead poverty, but the statistics just don't show it.
00:03:01.160 While dairy producers around the world enjoy broad export markets and have flourishing small cottage producers
00:03:06.760 who make creative products such as specialty cheeses and ice creams,
00:03:10.360 Canada languishes with high prices, poor variety, and bans small producers from entering the market.
00:03:15.640 We can't pretend it's impossible to get rid of this rotten system of government control either.
00:03:19.400 New Zealand and Australia had systems just like ours, and they got rid of them.
00:03:23.700 New Zealand's agricultural sector flourished when they got rid of supply management
00:03:26.900 as new export opportunities appeared.
00:03:28.900 Getting rid of the supply management system can't be done overnight.
00:03:31.720 It's going to take some years, and current producers will have to be compensated
00:03:34.480 for the quotas they're reliant upon.
00:03:36.500 It can be done, though, and there's no better time to start down that road to deregulation than right now.
00:03:41.920 Canadians have been ripped off by supply management
00:03:43.840 for the tune of over $600 per year per family for decades.
00:03:47.140 And this is only going to get worse as we stunt our local food production
00:03:50.560 in order to protect a small number of corporate operations.
00:03:54.020 There just isn't any excuse left any longer to protect the archaic, inefficient supply,
00:03:58.700 management system in Canada.
00:04:00.440 It doesn't protect us from worldwide price fluctuations.
00:04:03.280 It doesn't protect small domestic farms.
00:04:05.300 And it certainly doesn't do Canadian consumers any favors.
00:04:08.860 Canada is one of the most vast and rich agricultural lands on earth.
00:04:13.220 We should be one of the world's leading dairy producers and poultry and egg producers
00:04:16.980 with a vast array of products and exporting around the world.
00:04:19.780 Instead, we've limited product options.
00:04:21.780 We have growing factory farm operations.
00:04:23.900 We're hardly touching our export potential.
00:04:26.140 And that's all due to supply management.
00:04:28.280 Beef, pork, grain, even mushroom producers operate without a supply management system.
00:04:32.500 Why is it apparently impossible for dairy, egg, chicken, and turkey producers to do so?
00:04:37.040 Are they really that incompetent?
00:04:38.400 They can't compete in the world market?
00:04:39.700 Then maybe it's time to flush them aside and let real producers get in there.
00:04:43.060 We need to tackle inflation on many fronts.
00:04:45.220 The world's heading into tough times, and we're not going to be immune from them.
00:04:47.660 One of the most obvious and effective moves we could do to reduce the food cost burden
00:04:51.420 among Canadian consumers would be to end our terrible supply management system.
00:04:55.700 Now, if we only had some politicians with the balls to do it. 1.00
00:04:58.340 And so even ones who claim to be conservative will not touch this rotten system. 1.00
00:05:05.060 And again, think of how stupid it is. 1.00
00:05:07.720 Literally, it's 300 or 400. 1.00
00:05:09.780 I've looked it up with chickens that you can own.
00:05:11.960 I know it's a number.
00:05:12.500 But if you own 401 chickens and you don't have a quota, you'll go to jail.
00:05:19.800 Yeah, like technically anyways, and maybe it'll start with a fine and so on.
00:05:23.140 But the bottom line is it's illegal.
00:05:24.260 It's criminal to have more than 400 chickens without a quota,
00:05:30.000 without this special permit from the government that they keep strangled.
00:05:32.860 Same with producing eggs and the rest.
00:05:35.520 Why?
00:05:36.120 Why on earth do we need this?
00:05:38.360 And nobody can make a living on anything less than a few thousand chickens.
00:05:41.960 It doesn't mean you have to be a mega operation with hundreds of thousands of chickens.
00:05:44.800 But you see these mid-range affordable ones cannot compete.
00:05:47.900 And why? 0.95
00:05:48.460 It's ridiculous. 0.93
00:05:49.140 It's absurd. 1.00
00:05:50.140 We don't have a minimum amount of, you know, you don't have a quota on pigs.
00:05:53.360 We don't have a quota on goats or on cattle.
00:05:56.400 And those industries make it. 0.87
00:05:57.900 I'm just tired of the supply management art catchers who keep making excuses for this broken system. 0.96
00:06:03.380 It's a Soviet-style crappy system.
00:06:05.420 And Canada's one of the last countries on the whole planet that still has it. 0.75
00:06:09.160 Denise Martin asking, is it Canada-wide?
00:06:10.520 Yeah, it's federal policy.
00:06:13.280 You, and I've used that analogy, and I'll use it again for people who haven't heard it before.
00:06:17.140 You know, Jane, my wife, grew up in Rockiford, Alberta, a small dairy operation.
00:06:21.600 And her father had a quota to sell cream, only a certain amount of it, but cream.
00:06:25.980 But he didn't have a quota for milk.
00:06:27.780 So they would milk the cows, and this story is so common, and lots of people in rural communities can share it with you, and they know about it.
00:06:33.900 Milk the cows, skim the cream, sell that, make some bucks for the family, use the milk as much as you can around the house.
00:06:39.500 If you've got pigs, you'll feed it to the pigs. 0.87
00:06:41.440 If you don't, you pour it in the ditch, because it's illegal to sell it. 1.00
00:06:44.080 That's how stupid it is, and that's really what happens. 0.99
00:06:48.240 So, I mean, I'm just tired of defending this. 1.00
00:06:50.680 Like I said, Leslie Lewis wouldn't defend it.
00:06:53.420 I had Sherey on.
00:06:54.300 That's not surprising.
00:06:55.900 He wouldn't, I say Lewis wouldn't speak out against the cartels.
00:07:01.840 Sherey predictably wouldn't. 0.99
00:07:04.220 And Polyev, unfortunately, I was surprised, but I guess I shouldn't be.
00:07:09.160 He said he would keep the dairy cartels going as well, which is too bad.
00:07:13.520 He's been fantastic on every other front, but nobody, nobody can pretend to be a free market conservative and support supply management.
00:07:21.900 You can't.
00:07:22.480 You're lying.
00:07:23.300 You're lying.
00:07:24.340 Supply management is the opposite of free market, the complete opposite, the complete opposite.
00:07:30.020 So do you cherry pick on what you support?
00:07:32.520 Are you, can you be part, you know, you can't.
00:07:35.720 You can't be half pregnant, guys.
00:07:37.320 You either support free markets and you don't. 0.99
00:07:38.820 If you support this crap, you don't support free markets. 0.99