Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
Why does what other countries do have anything to do with us?
We could easily choose to have neither subsidies nor quotas/proce fixing. You'd probably keep tariffs in that situation.
When I was 7 my mom told me if one of my friends does something stupid I shouldn't do it just to follow along. That applies here. Bad policy in other countries doesn't require bad policy here.
And this is bad policy that disproportionately hurts poor children, which I'd suggest is one of the worst kinds of bad policy there is.
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Well, it stands to reason that if other industrialized nations can't have lower dairy prices than Canada without government subsidies, then Canada likely can't achieve that either.
New Zealand and Australia are good examples of countries that don't have quota systems and have very limited subsidies. But they also pay more for milk than we do, so it doesn't seem like that really accomplishes anything if the goal is cheaper retail prices. 4L of 2% milk retails for about $4.75 in Canada (1.19/L). Looking at a few grocery chains, and in New Zealand it's about
$1.60 CAD /L for the cheapest store-brand milk I could find and in Australia it's about
$1.48 CAD /L (that's whole milk, but it's cheaper than 2% there).