The Canadian supply management system is a classic case of concentrated benefits and diffused costs … all Canadians pay more for milk, cheese, and other dairy products, but the extra profits go to those who hold the quota allotment for production. During the last federal Conservative leadership race, the “temporary conservatives” were enough to push the Milk Dud over the top to defeat Maxime Bernier — because Bernier was outspoken in his opposition to the whole supply management cartel and threatened those guaranteed profits for the insiders. The Milk Dud has announced he’s stepping down, so who will Big Dairy choose to replace him?
Andrew Scheer, paid tool of Big Dairy, chugs some milk during a Press Gallery speech in 2017. I’ve called him the “Milk Dud” ever since.
Screencapture from a CTV video uploaded to YouTube.
To my mind the defining image of Andrew Scheer’s efforts to become prime minister of Canada, which officially came to an end Thursday, comes from the 2017 Press Gallery Dinner in Ottawa. “There’s some suggestion out there that I’m beholden to a certain group within the Conservative family,” he told the crowd, grinning. And then, dimples at maximum, he took a swig from a one-litre carton of Neilson two-per-cent milk.
It’s nice when politicians can poke fun at themselves. Most are really bad at it, betraying only their own ego. Scheer’s routine, by contrast, reportedly brought the house down. The problem is that, by all the evidence, Scheer was utterly beholden to the dairy industry. And absent the effects of alcohol, that’s not really very funny.
We knew at the time that, days before, Scheer had barely beaten Maxime Bernier in the party leadership contest with help from a few thousand votes from people whom Bernier not unreasonably called “fake Conservatives” — i.e., people who had purchased memberships for the sole purpose of voting for Scheer, for the sole purpose of maintaining supply management in the dairy industry (which Bernier opposes) intact.
We came to know later, thanks to a Dairy Farmers of Canada briefing book discovered by an aggrieved delegate to the 2018 party convention in Halifax, that the dairy lobby considered Scheer a “safety net.” Regardless of any vote by the party membership that might recommend freer markets in dairy, the book alleged, the farmers had Scheer’s commitment never to undermine supply management in an election platform.
Scheer denied any such deal existed, of course. But it seemed doubtful the dairy industry’s notoriously fearsome, professional and effective lobbyists could have been so misinformed.
It ought to have been a liability from the start: Here was the self-styled middle-class alternative to Justin Trudeau, the man who knows what it’s like to plan a family budget around the breakfast table, to scrimp and save, whose parents didn’t own a car, declaring his fealty to a cartel dedicated to inflating milk prices for the benefit of wealthy businesses. Har, har, har.
