Are Milk & Cheese Prices Fixed by a Conspiracy? Well… Sort Of.

this video is going to talk a little bit
about how subsidies to the dairy industry work and I'm in Canada remarkably if you're watching this video anywhere in the world that has access to the internet and electricity it's one the odds are that everything i would say about canadian dairy subsidies applies to your country as well the way that the dairy industry is subsidised in canada the united kingdom and the united states is remarkably similar and if you study the history of the legal changes in those three countries you'll see that they've become more similar over time all three of those countries have influenced the laws and standards of practices around the world there are third world countries that simply directly imitate the United States in their dairy policy and their agricultural policy generally in their economic development policy this is most dramatically happened probably with chicken farming where the American model of industrialized you know battery cage the the terrible disgusting system of having chickens live in a steel cage their whole lives this was really developed the United States along with new breeds of chickens and exporter in the world uh with how the dairy industry operates you have to remember government bureaucrats in general are not paid to come up with new ideas even if they're intelligent people who could be innovating new in different ways to do things they are on the one hand profoundly conservative in that they're paid to keep things the same keep things coming in under budget and on the other hand if anyone in the Canadian government ever asks what should we do about dairy industry the first thing they're gonna think of is oh well how did the Americans do it how did the British to it how of the Americans change their standards of practices in the last 20 years and they will commissioned a report a study that looks at how things have changed these other countries look look it called at comparable examples around the world and then think about how can the Canadian system budge a little bit this way or that way so in that sense it's not a conspiracy but internationally one basic model of dairy subsidy and production has been massively influential and massively imitated even if it's not really successful or effective the reason why any government would engage in a conspiracy is the need for secrecy and it sounds crazy whenever you talk about politics in terms of a conspiracy a lot of things sound crazy but historically they're true if you're under the age of 30 you've grown up your whole life with the Taliban being referred to as an enemy of the United States of America if you're over 50 years old you can remember time and let the Taliban the United States are on the same side fighting against Soviet Union sounds crazy but it's true come back to my point if i say to you dairy prices are controlled by government conspiracy in canada that sounds crazy uh in one sense it's not a conspiracy because we do have newspaper articles talking about the facts as they unfold on the other hand when you deal with what the government itself directly says and promises it is indeed secret and they even deny directly what it is they're doing because what they're doing is illegal under international law under international trade agreements so in general whatever the government decides to do is legal because the government writes the laws so it is very rare that a government program will be illegal in its own country however countries get involved with international trade agreements organizations like the WTO and they can rule that laws and standards and practices in a country are illegal Canada's whole system of dairy subsidy was declared illegal by the World Trade Organization in 1999 so the government Canada tried to change the way they do business it was declared illegal again in here too send it to and if you think things have changed dramatically since 2002 know the hell so the Government of Canada knows that a lot of what it's doing is illegal and that they could be hauled into a court or a tribunal at any time and face further consequences for what's going on in the dairy industry and this is not because a bunch of vegans or idealistic ecologists or criticizing the Canadian government and hauling it into court no this is just about money have you heard of money it's popular a lot of people care about it there is a conspiracy and I will explain why this is a conspiracy right now in Canada to make pizza cheaper and you know it is a funny thing but in most of the big cities in Canada pizza really is the food of the poor you can still find 99-cent pizza slices and two dollar pizza slices um in a country where you cannot buy a chocolate bar for one dollar anymore where one dollar Canadian is really not worth very much anymore certainly not relative to food prices and you might raise an eyebrow and wonder why that is well believe it or not the Canadian government has a special conspiracy to make pizza cheaper specifically mozzarella used for pizza has a special pricing scheme and a special subsidy but the Government of Canada can never use the word subsidy and this is quite complex every pizza restaurant in Canada has to sign an agreement with the government sign a legal document in order to receive this benefit in order to have taxpayers make pizza cheaper in pizza restaurants from coast to coast so thousands and thousands of pizza restaurants have signed up for this I have no idea why I doubt there's a single pizza restaurant in Canada that on point of moral principle says no I'm not going to waste taxpayers money to make myself wealthier and make my product cheaper I'm providing the link to this document where you sign up in the description this video if you look at section 15.1 of the legal document that every pizza restaurant in Canada signs it clarifies for you that what the Canadian government is doing is not a rebate is not a special price and is not a reduced price for mozzarella cheese and that is exactly what the agreement is okay and newspapers have reported on it I'll provide some other links newspapers and magazines here have discussed the strange fact that the continued the Canadian government set up this weird agreement to make pizza cheaper in this country and this this is not for all dairy products not for all milk specifically mozzarella pizza cheese is cheaper Canada FERC due to this program the reasons for that have to do with both this strange structure of trade disputes and also the threat that through a special loophole in our trading room with the United States cheaper pizza cheese was being imported into Canada and a sort of gray area of the rules that a Court did rule on and say look it's acceptable American companies can import pizza cheese in this particular way especially packaging the pizza cheese as a pizza kit and then the Canadian dairy board didn't want to have to compete with these American cheese producers at a lower price blah blah blah so again it's not because I d these people have an ethical objection to cattle living their whole lives basically in a steel cage on a concrete floor living in misery being impregnated with a sterile needle being separated from their infants shortly after they're born the infant's being turned into veal etc etc no no no this is not due to any more electrum it's about money but it is surreal I mean if you signed a document saying that you were joining the Canadian military don't you think it would be strange that document said you are in no way employed by the Canadian military that would be a secret agreement it might even specify you're not going to admit to the public that you work for the Canadian military so you'd be entering into a kind of conspiracy mercy why would the Canadian government sign an agreement with every pizza restaurant in Canada where the soul exclusive purpose of this agreement is to provide you with cheaper cheese and yet you have to agree in signing this that the purpose of agreement is not not at all to provide youth cheaper cheap the whole program only exists for that reason well the Canadian government as I mentioned that the big dates were 1999 2002 they've been dragged into court again and again and most of these again it's not a court in a simple sense they're tribunals but like the regular court system a lot of the time the way government settle these matters is by making a deal outside of court if you live in Canada you have seen many times the strange sight of advertisements for New Zealand butter New Zealand dairy products are common in Canada why is it because New Zealand can produce butter more cheaply than Mexico is it because New Zealand can make butter more cheaply and export Canada better price in competition with Argentina Brazil no that's the exact opposite of the truth if we had a free market trade in dairy and beef everyone in Canada would be eating beef and drinking milk from South America the industry within Canada would collapse and the taxpayers would save a ton of money because they would no longer be subsidizing the most polluting corrupt immoral industries imaginable and although I am vegan I'm not going to start drinking milk or eating beef if we start importing it from Argentina in many ways you have to say there would be less entanglement it would be less of a moral quandary if the Canadian government just open up the borders and let that happen but no no why is news eland butter the product and the shelves in Canada because of a 100-percent corrupt somewhat secretive somewhat conspiratorial deal that the Canadian government negotiated with the new zealand government so that new zealand would agree to stop having its lawyers press their case in the World Trade Organization cord New Zealand has a similar British colonial history to Canada they understand the laws in Canada very well they understand the rules the world trade organization and they were simply the country that had the hood spot to take their lawyers and press the case against canada to to persecute or prosecute canada or you want to look at it and say you guys are breaking the rules and we know we can make money out of punishing you for breaking through on how you stuff money into the pockets of dairy farm okay the situation is to some extent the same in England in the United States the United States is their dairy systems actually better managed one of the indirect effects of how all these countries subsidize dairy prices is also that all of these countries import a deluxe expensive dairy products from countries like France and Italy that otherwise they wouldn't import if France and Italy had to compete with dramatically cheaper products from Argentina it would be a different situation but they don't we have cheese that comes from France and is important to Canada and all it has to compete with is overly expensive Canadian cheese so the prices are very competitive even though French cheese should be much more expensive in canada than a cheese that's made in canada it's not the scene is true basically with competition between the united states and canada which as you can imagine was negotiated in great depth over many years as to how can the united states we're going to cope with their separate and equal corrupt systems of derry subsidy okay coming back the question I raised the beginning this video oh I grew up in Canada I heard many times just in conversation people claiming that the government made dairy cheaper that the government was promoting dairy farmers and subsidizing dairy and free to make milk cheaper however the minute you start reading any kind of detailed article on this subject whether it's in a magazine and newspaper what have you you find claims normally backed up with economic statistics that the effect of the government subsidies is actually to raise prices to make milk more expensive for the consumer um so again in almost any country in the world where you might be watching this video what I'm about to say is going to be true it's true in England it's true nited states from canada with only slight differences today the main effect of government subsidy is to stabilize prices and this has dramatic knock-on effects really throughout our whole society naturally in a free market in some kind of intact ecosystem the price of milk would be very unstable Canada is a cold country it's cold as hell in the winter do you think we would naturally produce the same amount of milk 12 months a year year in and year out no we don't produce the same amount of wheat the same amount of corn 12 months a year right naturally they're going to be big variations with temperature with the weather with the harvest season ultimately with the cycle of life for the cattle who are not absolutely continuously pregnant this is a horrible system of impregnating them repeatedly and so on and so forth if you're vegan you already know if you don't already know check out a short documentary like from farm to fridge you can behold the horrors of the modern industrialized area system the main impact of government subsidy is to even out is to create an artificially constant price for all dairy products and that is fundamentally why if you go to a corner store derry is in everything if the supply was uneven was inconsistent if sometimes you could get dairy and sometimes you couldn't as a as an industry as a manufacturer even if it were cheaper on average that would mean that you couldn't really consistently rely on milk solids and other dairy products to go into chocolate bars and candy and I don't know toothpaste I mean dairy is used in manufacturing an unbelievable array of products in the modern Western world and most of them don't need it you know it's you know as a vegan you used to this you read the labels on things and you figure out just how many crazy products have dairy add to them often a desiccated milk powder milk solids milk fat milk protein so that's the big knock on effect in America Canada Britain and in all the countries that imitated our system is that a product that naturally would be perishable milk doesn't keep for very long in consistently available and would naturally have a fluctuating price instead is orderly artificially made into having a very consistent predictable price and then later stages of industry all find ways to make use of it with this reassurance that the price will be the same in summer as in winter and that their access to this product is going to be mathematically predictable in Canada most of the time the effect of dairy subsidy is actually to make milk more expensive for the consumer so again that's different from the effect for the owner of a chocolate factory or some other you know manufacturer producing things out of dairy products but yes you can look at the price charts we have a straight line for the imposed price that the Canadian government creates and where you can look at when the world price as it's called would be higher or lower than that now the problem is the world price includes places like Argentina you can also look at American prices you can look at kind of theoretical prices of if we just had free trade from the United States and Canada etc um uh in in the last 30 years almost all the time uh the for the end consumer dairy would be cheaper you did have some periods of time where the world price spiked up above and then dropped again but most of the time would be cheaper however the reason why I made the point about it being more reliable this way is even more important if we really lived in a world without government subsidy without government interference in how dairy production works then we would live in a world where sometimes your grandmother would go to the store and ask for milk and they would say we don't have any especially if you lived in a small town in Canada you know Toronto is our biggest city probably Toronto would have dairy products all the time in there a free market but if you got out into smaller towns into Collingwood into Kitimat into a de wapis cat some of those places would probably have no milk at all or they'd only have milk once in a while or probably people who wanted to drink milk would tell the guy at the store oh the next time you get milk can you give me a phone call can you send me an email and of course if you read just historical fiction any kind of history whether it's novels and nonfiction in most countries in Europe not too long ago not too many centuries ago that was the way milk was regarded even if you live near dairy farms it doesn't come with mathematical regularity sometimes available snows is not and that's another reason why in the pre-modern world we didn't have all of these industries relying on dairy all the time okay my final point is what's the point of abolishing dairy subsidies apart from saving money for the taxpayer which is something that the left-wing the right wing and everybody in between can agree is a good idea the most fundamental benefit whether you're vegan or not whether you're a meat eater and a milk drinker or not is that when you disentangle government from industry you get better accountability for both government and industry when the government is making money by propping up industry and what industry is making money by exploiting the government neither party is really going to do the right thing they're not going to do the right thing for consumers they're not going to do the right thing for the cows not going to do the right thing for the environment and they're not even going to do the right thing in terms of business sense and being the most efficient most optimized way to produce dairy products going it would not be a utopian dream to imagine that in the future countries like the United States and Canada simply get rid of the enormously wasteful enormously expensive bureaucracy that currently props up the local dairy industry and that they accept the fact that guess what I mean Quebec is cold as hell in winter and people in Quebec import cheese from France because France makes some of the best cheese in the world ain't nobody in France importing cheese from Canada right if we got rid of these sorts of controls then naturally Canadians would on the one hand import dairy products from the countries that can produce them the most cheaply which would not be Canada it would be South America and Latin America and the other hand would import dairy products from countries that produce them at the highest standard of excellence so France and Italy but guess what overall dairy consumption would decline access to dairy products would become more natural in a free market sense of the price rising and falling and consistently availability not being 365 days a year etc Dairy would become a luxury product again instead of something that people are expected to eat three meals a day at a very low level of quote