The former Liberal MP trying to foment a milk rebellion

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This is a conversation series by Donna Kennedy-Glans, a writer and former Alberta cabinet minister, featuring newsmakers and intriguing personalities.

“The dairy lobby is the National Rifle Association of Canada,” proclaims Martha Hall Findlay, former Liberal MP and now head of the University of Calgary’s school of public policy. Her ballpark estimate is that the dairy industry in Canada spent upwards of $100 million a year to lobby for and market dairy over a decade ago, making them “the wealthiest and most influential lobby in the country.”

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It’s difficult to figure out how much the dairy lobby spends today, but one thing’s certain, they wield a whack of influence. In April, Canadian senators voted 58-12 in favour of Bill C-282, a private member’s bill sponsored by Bloc Québécois MP Luc Thériault to ban supply management from being included in future trade talks. In 2023, the bill sailed through the House of Commons, endorsed by all political party leaders. Now the bill is on its way to the Senate foreign affairs committee, one hopes, for sober second thought.

When I meet with Martha in her office at the U of C’s downtown Calgary campus — to talk about this idea of making supply management non-negotiable in future trade deals — she’s in fine fighting form. After a woman-to-woman exchange of breast cancer survival stories, I pick up the wee plastic milk cow resting on the table between us and we launch into the dicey question of supply management. In 2010, just prior to her bid for the federal Liberal leadership (she lost to Justin Trudeau), Martha dug deep into this issue, declaring supply management an anathema to Canada’s wider trade agenda.

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“The one potential positive of Bill-282 is, it is so over the top that it will backfire and it will finally be the time when enough people in this country realize we have to deal with this,” declares Martha.

And “it is so egregious,” she argues, other countries will realize what we’re doing, pointing to the U.K.’s recent withdrawal from trade talks with Canada in large measure over their lack of access to our supply-managed markets, with cheese featuring large. The U.K. is Canada’s third largest trading partner. And whether it’s Biden 2.0 or Trump 2.0, Martha expects the Americans will be rattled when the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement comes up for review in the not-too-distant-future.

I asked the one-time Liberal MP for Toronto’s suburban riding of Willowdale why she didn’t raise the issue with her colleagues in the Trudeau government.

“There were lots of reasons for supply management to be implemented in the day,” Martha responds. “There were like 140,000 dairy farms. A lot of them were really struggling. There were big ups and downs.” But, she continues, that’s true for every other aspect of agriculture so “either you support the concept (supply management) and you should apply it across all agriculture, or you don’t support the concept and you figure out how to manage with other supports.”

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Martha’s reasoning resonates. I was a kid on a family farm in southwestern Ontario “in the day.” A few years prior to the launch of the Canadian Dairy Commission, my parents had made the difficult decision to sell a purebred milk cow herd and focus instead on raising beef.

“To protect the family farm,” Eugene Whelan — the Liberal government’s flamboyant minister of agriculture with the green stetson hailing from Essex County, Ont. — promoted the idea of national marketing boards. Quota was issued to dairy in 1970, eggs in 1972, turkey in 1974 and chicken in 1978. For decades, Martha reports, Liberal politicians didn’t question the policy, except for the few, like Martha, who were interested in trade.

It’s all politics. All politics

What we’ve learned, Martha contends, is the “concept of protecting the family farm is nonsense.” With supply management, dairy and poultry farms consolidated far more rapidly than other agricultural sectors.

Have you talked to beef producers? “Yes, They’re up in arms, understandably. They hate it.” I know this to be true: Land values are distorted by supply management in Canada, and the policy puts export markets for beef and other agricultural outputs at risk. But beef producers don’t say anything against supply management that hits home, Martha laments. “It’s the same reason the canola people don’t and the soy people don’t. All too often it’s something as simple as ‘my daughter married a dairy farmer.’”

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“This bill is craziness,” Martha continues, her exasperation growing. “No other sector gets to be enshrined like this. It creates problems for every other economic sector in the country, and why they’re not up in arms is beyond me.”

“All sorts of unintended consequences will flow from this bill if it passes,” Martha asserts. There will be pressure on other sectors in Canada to ask for similar treatment. And it will be difficult for a future government to reverse the legislation, because of domestic politics. Largely Quebec politics, to be clear.

And what about the impacts to Canadian consumers, forced to pay inflated prices for dairy? Martha snickers; recalling how Francois-Philippe Champagne, the federal industry minister, called out “greedy” CEOs of grocery stores, publicly shaming them for squeezing consumers yet sees nothing wrong with protecting dairy farmers even if it means Canadian families pay inflated prices for milk and butter.

“It’s all politics. All politics,” Martha bemoans. “I’m not sure which is worse, understanding the issue and consciously saying, we just don’t have the votes to do the right thing, or, as I encountered among many of my Liberal colleagues, who didn’t actually understand, didn’t want to understand…and would consciously avoid the issue because they didn’t want to be proven wrong.”

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Martha knows she’s tackling a third rail — a policy many political actors consider too controversial to broach. But she’s not letting go. “I wish Canadian economic interests would actually speak up, because this is hurting most of our economic interests. We’re an exporting country, we depend on trade. The Americans don’t.”

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