Does supply management really mean Canadians pay more for milk?

"It is a cartel. It is the opposite of free markets."

That's how Conservative Party leadership candidateMaximeBernierthis weekdescribed the highly contentiouspractice of supply managementfor Canada's dairy, poultry and egg production. He encouraged his party comrades to follow suit.

It's certainly not the first time a politician has railed against supply management.

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There are few issues that conjure more discord than supply management, especially in rural Canada, where farmers produce our milk, chickens, turkeys and eggswithout the boost of direct government subsidy. Instead, they work on a quota system based on demandinreturn for predictable,stableprices.

Do we really pay more?

Callingit a cartel may be a bit dramatic, all things considered, but there's arguablysome merit in the "free markets" part ofBernier'ssurprise declaration. And that's convincedsomeCanadiansthat supply management means we pay more than most other countriesfor milk, cream, butter and cheese.

But anew look from the Nielsen research firm,commissioned by the Dairy Farmers of Canada, suggests that the prices Canadians pay for milk are comparable to thosein many countries throughout the world, at anaverage retail price of around $1.30 per litre.

Still, Canadians who buy milk regularly might disagree.

The website Numbeo, which collects user-contributed data, pegs the average price for "regular" milk in Canada at $2.11 per litre, with a range of $1.29 to $3, based on entries from nearly 6,000 users over the past 18 months. Statistics Canada also reports higher average prices for partly skimmed milk, at $2.30, and homogenized milk at $2.46 per litre (StatsCan does not include diafiltered milk).

Americans, whom we often use as a benchmark comparison,payslightly less at $1.15 on average. But Norwegians, for example, pay a whopping $2.90 for a litre of milk. And in China, it's $2.35 per litre, though individual Chinese tend to consume far less than Europeans.

Over the years there have been many attempts to quantify how much consumers pay for milk, a product that is consumed and used for all sorts of applications all over the world, and often the results of those studies are spectacularly different.

'Protectionist nightmare'

Part of the problem, however, is that it is "very, very difficult to come up with a number for what Canadiansor Americansor Australians really pay for milk because there's so many different factors involved in that calculation," says AlMussell, aresearcher and founder ofAgri-FoodEconomic Systems, Inc., in Guelph, Ont.

An oft-cited look by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example,found that Canadians pay $2.6 billion more for milk each year than if supply management was phased out, though that study has been criticized for comparing apples to oranges, generating an astronomical number.

But there are still many authoritativevoices who say supply management should be phased out of the dairy sector.

In an op-ed published earlier this spring, Sylvain Charlebois, dean of the Faculty of Management and a professor in food distribution and policy atDalhousie University,called Canada's supply management system a "fiscally inept ... protectionist nightmare."

"It is supported by production quotas and high tariffs on imports that have clearly reached their expiry dates," he wrote, adding that Ottawa has failed to take the lead on the issue and let it fester.

"At the heart of the global economy's DNA are open markets. In that kind of marketplace, with no clear and workable trade strategy, Canada is highly vulnerable," he wrote.

The Conference Board of Canadahas argued "the policy effectively cuts Canada off from a burgeoning world demand for dairy products."

Supply management or subsidies?

But BruceMuirhead, a professor of history at the University of Waterloo who studies food systems, argues that those who say phasing out supply management would make milk cheaper are only looking at U.S. numbers, and that that's a misguided approach.

"Look, the dairy industry in the U.S. is heavily, heavily subsidized by the government every year," he says.

In Canada, the cost of milk pays for the price of producing milk.

"So why bother shelling out billions in taxpayers' money every year to support an industry that is paying for itself? If we ditch supply management, mark my words, prices will be higher, they will not be lower," hesaid.

MuirheadspentJanuary,February and March visiting dairy farms throughoutNew Zealand where the dairy industry is the country's largest exporterand Australia, two countrieswhich he says have been decimated by the deregulation that occurred in the early 2000s.

New Zealand, for example, signed a free trade agreement with China in 2008 to sell it powdered milk. But over time, China stockpiled the powderand drastically reduced demand from New Zealand in 2014. The government was forced to bail out farmers with a $550-million package.

In Australia, according to Muirhead, dairy farmers are leaving the industry in droves and family farms are almost non-existent.

No compensation in Liberal budget

Canadian dairy farmers are fighting hard to keep the quota system. On Thursday, farmers from Quebec and Ontario brought dairy cows and tractors to Parliament Hill to demand compensation for potential trade deals that would mean more dairy products from other countries coming into Canada.

The former Conservative government had promised them $4.3 billion in compensation if the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Europe and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal go through, though it remains to be seen if either will see the light of day.

When the Liberals tabled their first budget earlier this year, there was no mention of a compensation package.

Either way, phasing out supply management would take well over a decade and likely cost billions.

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