Time to end supply managementManley thinks it's now time, in fact well past time, to begin to phase out supply management, the marketing board system that keeps our production of dairy and poultry products artificially low so their prices can be jacked up artificially high. To make the system work, we have to put very tight restrictions on imports, which we used to effectively ban but now, because of WTO rules put in place in the 1990s, merely charge sky-high tariffs on.
Piling two and three hundred per cent tariffs onto dairy and poultry prices is obviously very bad for consumers, especially poor consumers. But it also hurts us internationally. Manley argues our insistence that marketing boards stay off the table in all trade negotiations is killing our influence on the evolution of multilateral trade rules. We used to be "in the Green Room in Geneva," he says, meaning we were among the small group of countries that put the final touches on any General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or World Trade Organization deal. But now, because of our insistence on sheltering our supply-managed sectors from foreign competition, we're "outcasts."
As an ex-politician, Manley understands it would be hard to simply slash the tariffs and let the supplied-managed sectors fend for themselves. People who got into the industry and made significant investments in good faith under the existing regulatory regime would suffer big capital losses if the rules changed overnight. The government that took on supply
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