“Barriers” like supply management, transport rules and labour legislation are good for working people
By Liz Rowley
In the current trade war, one of Donald’s Trump key demands is that Canada get rid of interprovincial trade regulations. The US president argues that these regulations facilitate Canada’s supply management system in products like milk, eggs and poultry, which is the main obstacle to US access the Canadian market for these and other commodities.
Under supply management, the government gives farmers an annual quota for eggs, milk, poultry and other food products, and guarantees them a specific annual income for meeting this quota. This system ensures farmers a guaranteed income every year (unlike dairy farmers in the US, who are facing poverty) and the public is guaranteed a steady supply of fresh foods, produced under strict Canadian laws.
Until the last amendments made to the USMCA free trade deal, supply management was not part of free trade agreements between Canada and the US. With USMCA, for the first time, US producers were given a small opening for milk and eggs sales in Canada. This access includes a small amount of US milk produced with bovine growth hormone – banned in milk production in Canada – which is mixed with milk from Canadian cows and sold to the public here.
Now, Trump wants full access and an end to supply management and interprovincial trade regulations in Canada.
This is about food sovereignty and food safety, in conflict with deregulation, privatization and huge profits for big agriculture corporations on both sides of the border. It’s a struggle against concessions that corporations and right-wing governments have been demanding since 1988, when the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was negotiated.
In addition to supply management and food products, interprovincial trade regulations also apply to transportation. The different rules take into account changes in geography, extreme temperatures, climate change and other conditions which vary across Canada, and which affect workers as well as goods.
The focus on working conditions and health and safety issues is one of the main reasons the labour movement largely supports interprovincial trade regulation. This includes laying out the qualifications required for employment in specific fields, including licensing in healthcare and other regulated professions and trades.
Another key area is provincial government procurement rights, which include purchasing to support local businesses over large national and transnational corporations. The public expects governments will use procurement rules to put the public interest ahead of private, corporate interests and profits.
Essentially interprovincial trade regulation is about provincial jurisdiction and the rights of elected provincial governments to make laws and pass regulations. Deregulation is part of the free trade agenda that includes privatization, corporate tax cuts, and the liquidation of labour and democratic rights.
Trump is opposed to anything that involves regulation, or local or provincial jurisdiction, or anything that would limit profiteering, or interfere with corporate power and authority.
How important is this issue? Very, if we look at the powerful of corporate interests in Canada who are supporting abolition of interprovincial trade regulation, in the name of liberalizing trade and labour mobility – what they call “free trade” inside Canada.
This list includes the Business Council of Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the McDonald-Laurier Institute, the National Post, and Liberal and Tory governments provincially and federally. And of course, it also includes Donald Trump, US corporations, and the International Monetary Fund.
These corporate interests claim that eliminating interprovincial trade regulation would increase Canada’s GDP by up to $240 billion annually, but economists such as Marc Lee and Marjorie Cohen say these figures don’t stand up to even a cursory examination.
They argue that the interprovincial trade is not harming the economy at all. Between 2007 and 2021, total interprovincial trade increased by 44 percent to $451 billion. This is comparable to international export growth of 47 percent and import growth of 56 percent.
Cohen and Lee conclude that attempts to remove interprovincial trade regulations are really “a push for ‘mutual recognition’ of regulations – a process by which all provinces could be forced to accept the least stringent regulations for safety, environmental protection and consumer protection. It is a way of attacking provinces’ ability to pass laws for environmental, worker, and consumer protection.”
In the face of this attack from monopoly corporations in the US and Canada, the Communist Party is campaigning to protect supply management, and to defend interprovincial trade regulations with regular reviews and updates. During the current federal election and beyond, communists will work to build opposition to the efforts by Donald Trump and big business to level laws and regulations, in their drive to maximize corporate profits at the expense of working people and the environment.
[Photo: Quebec dairy farmers rally in defense of supply management]
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