Join East Coast Environmental Law and the Coalition for Protection of PEI Water for a discussion of the Water Act, looking forward to the release of regulations and another round of consultations.
Lisa Mitchell from ECE Law will provide an overview of the Act.
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
6-8 pm
The Farm Centre, Charlottetown
BY DOUGLAS CAMPBELL
I am writing this letter in response to an article by The Fraser Institute entitled, “Canada can eliminate supply management by following Australia’s lead.”
The three authors, Jon Berry, Alan Oxley and Dan LeRoy say Canadian policy-makers would be well advised to learn lessons from Australia about phasing out supply management in a number of agricultural sectors. Their article is about Australia doing away with supply management in the dairy sector in 2000.
The authors write a glowing report on what a success this has been for Australia. They say consumers are paying less for milk, national supply has been maintained, and larger farms are driving much greater productivity, allowing milk products to be the third biggest agricultural export after beef and dairy.
I would like to question this Australian success story, and offer my perspective as a Canadian dairy farmer.
First, let’s talk lower dairy prices to consumers. If the authors say it is the case in Australia then I will have to take their word for it, but someone paid the cost somewhere.
I draw your attention to the Canadian consumer reality – that the previous trade deals, which have negotiated away percentages of the Canadian dairy market, have not seen Canadian consumers reap the benefits of cheaper dairy products – as promised by negotiators and others wishing to see the dismantling of the supply management system.
What has happened as a result of the undermining of the system is an ever-increasing divide between what the dairy farmer is receiving for producing milk and what the consumer is paying. Because of the opening up of the market, farmers are receiving 1980 prices for their milk from processors, and are struggling to cover the cost of production and stay in business. On the other hand, dairy processors have seen their profits double in the last 20 years. It is supply management that has become the scapegoat.
The authors state that the stabilizing of the supply and price of Australia’s dairy products allowed for inefficient farms and the consolidation in the industry is so much more efficient. Supply management allows farmers to know what they will receive for their
product. Nowhere does it give permission to be inefficient, regardless of size, for the product must be produced within the return, or there simply is no farm. How is that inefficient?
The authors are really implying that only large-scale farms can be efficient. Why didn’t they come right out and use the term industrial farming, because that is what they are supporting.
There is also the bigger question that the authors neglected to address – and that is the health of rural communities. Just how are they doing socially, environmentally, and economically under the dismantling of supply management?
I would argue that Canada’s supply management system, prior to the start of its gradual erosion by government bureaucrats, greatly stabilized rural Canada. Farming is far more than an industry. It is the fibre of rural Canada. It appears so many of our decision makers have no understanding of this fact.
The authors were so impressed with Australian dairy now being its third largest agricultural export. But they failed to mention where it is being exported or who it is impacting. United States dairy farmers can tell you. Australian dairy products are coming into the United States taking market share. Australia is a very big reason American farmers have not been able to meet their cost of production in the past two years.
Australia dairy products are a big reason the United States wants into the Canadian dairy market. It seems Trump is not the only one to stray from the facts.
Supply management seems to be a scapegoat for many think tanks and economists. When the public reads these findings, they need to ask – is the whole story being told, and who is being served by putting this viewpoint before the public. We deserve the whole story to be told and debated.
– Doug Campbell of Southwest Lot 16, district director, National Farmers Union
The National Farmers Union (NFU) notices and welcomes the community’s new expressions of interest about the Lands Protection Act. Islanders know the painful history of the land and how easily it can be taken from the people. Now we are in a new era in how land transactions take place. In 2018, the style of take-overs is more hidden than they were in other times. However, on the community level, people know who is taking control of vast acreages. What is not clear to the Island population is why the Lands Protection Act seems to be powerless to stop the rapid land grab so obvious in the rural community.
The NFU has not said that corporations and individuals are breaking the letter of the law set out in the Lands Protection Act. We are saying that there is an alarming ignorance on the part of policy makers and other Island residents about the spirit of the Act.
In 1982, then-Premier Angus MacLean made it clear that the spirit/intent of the act was to keep farm land in the control of Island farm families and to keep all lands in control of Islanders. Control of the land was Premier MacLean’s over-arching theme. Part of this was that individuals and corporations must be prohibited from amassing large land holding. The Act also put tight restrictions on non-resident purchases of land. There was no intention to discourage new people from becoming resident owners. It was meant to prevent absentee control of the land.
Our consultations with influential people, associates of Premier MacLean, tell the NFU that limiting land holding in the Act was an instrument of keeping Island land in specific Island hands. The restriction to 1,000 acres for individuals would prevent excessive concentration. It meant that more people, rather than fewer, would actually control the land. The 3,000-acre limit for corporations, in the vision of Premier MacLean, was meant as a business convenience for farm families.
The intent was that three members of a family group, e.g. a parent and two adult children could form a corporation. In this way, the original spirit of the Lands Protection Act was to keep farm land at the service of family farming model. It was never intended that the corporation limit would be manipulated to serve the interests of industrial agriculture. In fact, a five-acre limit was placed on industrial corporations (including processors).
So, to accept the spirit of the Lands Protection Act, in fact, requires accepting the original goals of keeping farm land in family farming. What a desecration to see the corporation allowance being manipulated for massive takeovers of farm land. Contrary to the spirit of the Act, the goal of this current takeover is to enlarge the profits of the powerful corporations, and to firmly establish the industrial farming model as the predominant agricultural structure.
Some people, including policy makers, seem to be easily confused about what a family farm is. The NFU has heard members of large corporations, controlling immense tracts of land in P.E.I., saying, “we are a family involved in farming, so we are a ‘family farm.” That does not make their operation a family farm. When we speak of family farms, we are not talking of industrial corporations with huge land spreads.
goal of industrial farming is to amass profit for the corporation, to increase its capital holdings. The family farm on the other hand is a unit of food production where the major production decisions are made by the farm family. The farm is small enough ideally to make production decisions and to allow it to be worked mainly by the family, of course with outside labour for the busy seasons. Central concerns are making a living for the farm family and caring for the land, air and water.
With new awareness in the community about land, and about the Lands Protection Act, the NFU urges Islanders to speak out. Those in power interpret silence as consent. The NFU wants to hear loud protests about the weakening of the Act and the failure of governments to protect our land for current and future generations.
– Douglas Campbell, dairy farmer in Southwest Lot 16, District Director of the National Farmers Union
June 14, 2018
Right Honorable Justin Trudeau
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,
We understand that you are under enormous pressure to give up Canadian interests in the negotiations with the USA in order to reach a new NAFTA deal. President Trump is using highly unfair arguments, especially when he targets tariffs that protect Canadian supply management. The USA, like European countries, offers enormous price support programs to farmers in general and dairy farmers in particular. They do that in order to enable farmers to survive an extreme low world-market price for dairy, caused, among other factors, by the American and European dairy producers’ double-digit production increases. Canadian farmers did not cause this glut — because they have production discipline they do not over produce. In Canada we don’t need a government subsidy program, as our supply management system rewards efficient dairy farmers sufficiently from the market place. A recent study by Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) and executed by AC Nielsen Canada, showed that dairy products in Canada are 17% less expensive than in the U.S.
We are in close contact with farm groups in the USA who are organizing to get supply management systems off the ground in their country. After studying and understanding the benefits of the Canadian system, these farm groups are squarely opposing President Trump’s NAFTA demand for dairy concessions from Canada. They see supply management as the only way for American dairy farmers to survive.
It is paramount that the Canadian government protects supply management for farmers’ sake, as well as for consumers and the tax-payer. Impairing it would be costly for government in terms of creating bailout programs for farmers and Canadian consumers would pay likely higher prices for lower quality.
We urge you to stand firm in the protection of Canadian supply management.
Already other trade agreements have watered down protection for supply management. This needs to stop. Supply management is an economic backbone for rural Canada and it has proven to be an example that others want to emulate.
Please show leadership and stand firm.
Sincerely,
Jan Slomp,
Vice-President Policy, National Farmers Union
CC: Hon. Chrystia Freeland, Foreign Affairs Minister; Hon. Lawrence MacAulay, Agriculture Minister
For more information:
To take action:
The National Farmers Union (NFU) has continuously raised the alarm in public about the conditions in which PEI land is being transferred. We therefore welcomed the announcement of the Minister of Communities, Land and Environment, the Honourable Richard Brown, that he is initiating a review of non-resident and corporate land holdings. However, we have serious concerns about the Minister putting this task into the hands of the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (IRAC).
The NFU understands and appreciates IRAC and its role to provide advice and recommendations to the Executive Council (the Cabinet) on all matters relating to the Lands Protection Act. IRAC receives all applications for land transfer to which the Lands Protection Act apply and recommend to the Cabinet either a denial or approval.
In our dealings over the years with IRAC, we take for granted the integrity of the Commission. They give as much information as possible to the public. However the NFU believes that because IRAC has authority only as delegated by government, the Commission may not be totally free to do a comprehensive and independent review of how the Lands Protection Act is administered.
It is difficult to understand the intent or scope of the proposed review, given that the Premier, the former Minister of Communities, Lands and Environment and the current Minister have all declared categorically that the letter of the Act is being followed. It would be difficult for IRAC to unearth findings which would contradict these authorities. The NFU even wonders if it is fair, given these circumstances to ask IRAC to perform this task.
The NFU has never claimed that the letter of the Act is violated. It seems, however, that there are loopholes in the Act, which appear to be easily navigated with the help of astute lawyers. The clearest example of a loophole is that a corporation can spawn various other corporations with separate directors, all of which, in reality, remain connected by access to the mother-corporation’s capital assets and management. The community knows that land is being concentrated and placed under the control of fewer and fewer corporations.
Following only the letter of the law is not sufficient for the land situation we are facing. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law must go hand-in-hand. The current proposed investigation concerns only the letter of the law. If we continue to follow only the letter of the law and ignore the spirit, intent, and purpose of the Act, then Island farmland will continue to be sold off to the highest bidder. Now is the time for government to shoulder its responsibility for this. The NFU is looking for real expressions of “political will” to truly protect PEI land according to the intent and spirit of the Lands Protection Act. The buck stops with the Government. The use of loopholes is in violation of the “spirit”, the intent, of the Act.
If we want to know the spirit of the Act we need to go back to its origins. The NFU has talked to key people who were involved in the early development of the Lands Protection Act. They speak clearly about what Premier Angus MacLean and his government intended. The intent, they say, was to keep all Island lands, including the shoreline, woods, and environmentally sensitive land in the hands of Islanders. The hope was that those who gained access to acreage would live on the land and actually farm it. People buying up farm land, and not farming it, are rightly called speculators and “land grabbers”. The original goal was to maintain farmland in responsible farming. The intent was to keep the land intact for future generations. Acreage limits were meant to serve this intent. The current excessive accumulation of land under one capital source definitely contravenes the spirit of the Lands Protection Act.
There is a central phrase in the Act, “steadfast stewardship”. Some may think this is referring only to land use practices; however in the context of the original intent it means maintaining a watchful eye and responsible policies so that land will be here and be protected not just for the few, but for the many, in the far-reaching future.
