Hall Findlay challenges orthodoxy

There are issues more important than supply management. There are parties that have more support than the Liberal party, and there are people with a higher profile than Martha Hall Findlay. How is it, then, that an academic paper by a former Liberal MP on an issue that remains obscure to most Canadians has raised such a fuss? I can think of a few reasons.

One is the issue itself -- the system of supply quotas that has governed dairy, poultry and egg production across Canada for the last four decades. It is timely, with the announcement that Canada will be joining negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a nascent free-trade bloc, admission to which was until now conditional on the elimination of supply management. It may still be: the government has not been forthcoming on what terms it has accepted, or would in future.

If the government were of a mind to get rid of supply management -- it swears it is not -- that is perhaps the only basis on which it could: our trading partners made us do it. Certainly it would not dream of doing so otherwise. Such is the power of the supply-management lobby, especially dairy, that a suffocating consensus has settled over the issue, of a kind rarely seen in a democracy. Consensus is not even the word. Every party strives to outdo the others in the fulsomeness of its support.

Yet virtually every economist or policy analyst of note agrees that supply management is a disgrace. The primary effect of the quotas -- the intended effect -- is to drive up the price of these foods, staples of most Canadians' diets, to two and three times the market price. The burden of these extraordinary price differentials, of course, fall most heavily on the poor, a fact that ought to trouble self-styled "progressives" but evidently doesn't.

But it isn't only consumers who pay. Since the quotas are tradable, the premium over market prices gets capitalized into the value of the quota. The right to a cow's worth of milk production, for example, runs to about $28,000, meaning a farmer looking to get into the industry faces an initial outlay, for the typical 60-cow farm, in excess of $1.5 million -- just for the quota, never mind the cows, the barn and the rest.

Indeed, the system isn't even serving the interests of dairy farmers, rightly considered. While they remain confined to the domestic market, Australia, New Zealand and other dairy exporters are catering to the expanding middle class in fast-growing emerging markets.

So for Hall Findlay to come out against it is noteworthy in itself. Hall Findlay, an executive fellow at the University of Calgary's school of policy, is a well-regarded figure in the Liberal party who is widely expected to run for party leader. Quite on her own, she has made it thinkable for an elected politician to get on the wrong side of the dairy lobby. Her paper makes a particular contribution in this regard, pointing out how few dairy farms there really are: fewer than 13,000 across the country, a force (more than 300 farms) in just 13 ridings.

That Hall Findlay may be a candidate for leader is the second reason her intervention has had such impact. This is not, conventionally, how one kicks off a leadership bid -- by taking firm hold of what is considered one of the deadliest "third rails" in Canadian politics. Nor can it be dismissed as a mere tactic: The paper is deeply researched, and obviously sincere. One suspects this will not be the last such controversial stand she will take, but rather signals her intent to set out a sharply different vision for her party.

That's good for her, and better for the party. It is exactly the kind of bold break with the status quo the Liberal party needs to make. It is the kind of debate, the kind of politics, we all need, which is perhaps the greatest import of Hall Findlay's initiative.

We have grown used to a politics in which no one ever says or does anything the least bit risky, and no one ever tells the truth unless by accident. Our politics has become, quite literally, a fantasy world, and nowhere more so than with regard to supply management. The unwillingness until now of anyone, literally anyone, to speak out against such a clearly indefensible policy speaks of a deeply entrenched culture of falseness and opportunism.

While far from the most pressing issue before the nation, the divide between experts and evidence, on the one hand, and the political class, on the other, gives it unusual symbolic weight. Indeed, it can serve as a kind of litmus test, a benchmark of political seriousness. If you cannot bring yourself to say it is wrong to make poor families pay three times the market price of milk to prop up a handful of wealthy farmers, you are not in the business of serious politics.

I've no idea whether Hall Findlay has any chance of being elected Liberal leader. I have no opinion on whether she should. But on this file, at this moment, she has shown a quality I'll venture to suggest might be desirable in a leader: leadership.

Andrew Coyne is a national

columnist for Postmedia News.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 26, 2012 A11