Protecting your own country's production capacity and industry doesn't come without cost. It likely would absolutely be cheaper if we allowed our core industries to fail and be replaced wholesale with American exporters, but that's not what the majority want for the country.
As we're seeing with this trade war as a whole, tightening economic integration with an asymmetric partner puts your sovereignty at risk as well. If we have no industries of our own, and are utterly dependent on a single unreliable superpower, then we lose the freedom to decide on our own future as the rug could be pulled out from under us at any time. The only way to mitigate that risk is to diversify trade and ensure self-sufficiency in our own industries.
Yes. I am well aware of this. I just find it hard to believe that dairy, poultry, and eggs are some special snowflake type of farm that requires the quota and supply chain management, while every other type of farm, we can manage with direct subsidies.
For reference, there are about 190k farms in Canada, 8% of those farms are dairy, poultry, and eggs whose viability is ensured with supply chain management. The other 92% of farms, are managed with direct government assistance (AgriStability, AgriInsurance, AgriInvest, and AgriRecovery). The latter costs the government $1.5-$2 billion most years. While the recent report on supply chain managed farms suggests the cost born by Canadians to be around $10 billion. Even if that number is off by an order of magnitude, we're looking at $1 billion for 8% of farms, and $1.5-$2 billion for the other 92% of farms.
All I'm saying is it seems like the solution to help ensure viability in dairy, egg, and poultry farming is wildly inefficient and merits a look from first principles. Is there a solution to achieve the same outcome at a lower cost? The world has changed drastically since the policies were implemented in the 1970s.
I admit I am far from an expert, but I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading about this shit out of curiosity in the past couple days. Broke my brain when I saw the numbers around the costs born by canadians in the checkout aisle due to supply chain management.
I am not sure if this factors into it but an interesting difference between dairy and eggs and most other types of farms is that those are highly perishable. Grain can be stored and released gradually to even out market gyrations but dairy is just lost if they don’t match supply closely with demand in real time.
Yeah, that's a fair point but it still seems like a huge delta.
And my rabbit hole over the last couple days has led me to spend a bunch of time looking into Fonterra, which is the farmers processing Coop that happened in NZ when they got rid of their quota system. It's turned NZ into the largest milk product exporter on earth, and their whole strategy is processing milk into more shelf stable products. Cheese and Butter is about 20% the remainder is skim milk powder, whole milk powder, whey protein, and caseins.
Anyhow, all of this is to say, that there are solutions that ensure no milk goes to waste by processing it into more shelf stable ingredients, all of which have massive demand on the global markets. Whether we do much of this in Canada, I am not sure, but, feels like a missed opportunity if not, and likely partially caused by a lack of necessity to innovate due to the artificial moat.
Eggs, haven't looked into but presumably similar to milk in that it can be processed into shelf stable powders.
But, on the poultry front, beef, pork, etc, are all in the 92% of farms group, managed by subsidies, so, while chickens have a shorter lifespan, I don't see why we can manage cow and pork farms with subsidies, but not chicken.
You could argue back in the day reddit was a forum rather than a social media. But after the new UI and several years of changes, particularly when they started to ignore your subscribed subreddits and just showing whatever in the home feed, it’s now fully social media.
While I completely agree with you on [1] and it's tiring to have to re-litigate this issue every few years, [2] was from 2021 and doesn't reflect Canada's current policies.
Canada's current policies seem like a continuation of their previous policies. The only major change is the weakening of links to the US, which is likely to make the economy worse, not better. Even bill C-22 is a zombie bill from the Trudea era (C-63). Tech investment is still flat (nearing zero)[1], taxes are up, and 20% of the workforce have government jobs[2]. This country is cooked.
This feels like a false dichotomy. Even if sauna doesn't impact long term health in a way that can replace exercise, that doesn't mean that it doesn't improve health.
I found that strange as well. Who were they quoting, given that the Department of War hasn’t existed since 1947 and as far as I know Jimmy Carter didn’t pretend that it still did.
Things had been kinda quiet for the last couple of decades. We continue involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan but didn't start new ones. We even pulled out of those by five years ago. So yes, definitely, we did a lot more warring with the Department of War.
Longer term, the "Department of Defense" got into an awful lot of wars from its name change in 1947. The Department of War might have more wars on a per-day basis in its short time under that name, but not a lot more.
But really, the answer to your question is "yes". We decided we wanted to do a lot more war, and we branded the department to go along with it.
From my perspective it would make a lot more sense to only allow index fund purchases as an elected official. If the economy does well you still do well, but there would clearly be no insider trading going on.
Or at least there would be less - you could only trade on the knowledge of full-market swings rather than per-company swings.
> From my perspective it would make a lot more sense to only allow index fund purchases as an elected official.
The new leader[1] of the Norwegian wealth fund[2] had a large stock portfolio. There was some debacle given the influential nature of the wealth fund.
He agreed to sell the stocks and buy index funds instead, until he resigned from that position.
As you say, I think that's very reasonable. They can still make money off the general stock market lkkd the rest so they're not disadvantaged, but have very limited opportunity to benefit significantly from inside deals.
For further context, he said that the right was doing everything in their power to portray him as anything but one of them. I.e. in the absence of evidence they were attempting to pin the blame on the left.
As a local to the area, a lot of the pushback is coming from the fact that this is not a closure of public parkland, but a restriction from entering any wooded area in the province - public or private.
Is the 'private' part being aggressively enforced? How many arrests (on private land)? I can't find any reports of any. Presumably Nova Scotians are voluntarily complying with the temporary ban.
As we're seeing with this trade war as a whole, tightening economic integration with an asymmetric partner puts your sovereignty at risk as well. If we have no industries of our own, and are utterly dependent on a single unreliable superpower, then we lose the freedom to decide on our own future as the rug could be pulled out from under us at any time. The only way to mitigate that risk is to diversify trade and ensure self-sufficiency in our own industries.
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