Some may read this and naturally say "So buy butter from another country!". I'm here to tell you that this is basically impossible due to protectionist laws.
There are theoretically ways to import butter to Canada, but you need a special license, and there are very strict quotas. Generally, only large dairy corporations can get them, and only to handle major shortage.
In my entire life spent mostly in Canada, I have never seen butter being advertised as being from another country. Cheese, definitely, but never butter.
Even trying to bring some home with you from a vacation isn't allowed. It would be taken if declared at the border, and destroyed. Failure to declare it is a crime.
Why? The Canadian dairy industry is an incredibly powerful lobby group. All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that". Liberal governments and Conservative governments alike pander to them endlessly.
What a pity. Down here even the regular grocery stores will have Kerrygold (grass fed Irish butter), and the fancy gourmet stores will have imports from Iceland and France and Belgium and New Zealand as well. My favorite is Isigny Ste Mere.
Not joking, my friends and I have discussed the idea of actually smuggling Kerrygold into the country illegally. Buy it in bulk and freeze it until needed.
I know this is a serious issue for Canadians, but I can't help but laugh my ass off at the fact that you literally have an American-Prohibition-Era "Big Dairy" cartel that fucking extorts the little guy through government interference and corruption.
As long as it is restricted to dairy it's funny, but whats really sad is that a majority of people want ever more of this kind of centralization and regulation. I have a feeling that many western countries are on a slow downwards spiral to become "shithole countries". Let's see whose constitution is strongest and allows the people to buy the f*ing dairy they want. I bet this will not be our EU, the protectionist mastermind
All joking aside though, it is more complicated than a "big dairy cartel" with strong lobbying power.
See what happens at least in Quebec is that we kept the family agriculture model with single family actually owning there farm and a hundred cows. In that context, they can't be competitive with US milk which has megafarms and can mass produce basically any animal product these days.
To solve this issue the government create the milk quotas and limited imports of milk from the US. While I agree that it creates a somewhat absurd situation, I disagree that it's necessarily a bad thing. I much prefer drinking milk from my farmer friend who takes good care of his cows than some megafarm in the US.
As a fellow Québécois, I have one major issue with the current system. I live very near a dairy farm; I know the owners well and I love their approach, how they treat their cows, etc. I'd love to buy _their_ milk, but I just can't. A couple times a week, a truck comes in, takes all the milk and brings it to a plant in St-Hyacinthe or whatever (1+ hour from me) where it gets mixed with the milk from all the other producers.
So yes, we have managed to protect the "family farm" model, but you can't actually buy their milk. To me, that's pretty stupid; I don't mind the price, but I do mind not knowing where my milk comes from.
That seems to be a choice of the dairy farm to either outsource their processing or to sell to bulk purchasers. I live in the US, and a local dairy decided to start selling their product and skip the cooperative exchanges. They bottle their own milk and sell it to grocery stores. Best of all it comes in a reusable glass bottle (they charge a deposit). Their prices are higher than the more generic milk at the store, but I think the taste is much better.
I also have a coworker whose father owns a small dairy farm that sells directly to the co-ops. Different business model.
>That seems to be a choice of the dairy farm to either outsource their processing or to sell to bulk purchasers.
No, in Canada it's not a choice. Any farmer that has milk quotas cannot sell directly to consumers, even inside the farm gate.
Some provinces allow farmers a "personal use" exemption, which enables non-milk farmers (i.e., farmers who happen to own a cow or two; quota holders are ineligible) to sell very small quantities of cow milk to consumers inside the farm gates. The largest I believe is Alberta that has a 50 litre a day exemption.
I get your point but raw milk is 3.5% fat it has to be processed to be ready for human consumption so I don't see how it can get much better than a plant "only" (on a global scale) 1 hour away.
To be clear I am not a fan of all the restrictions either. One of my friend brought fresh cheese curds from his farm to a diner between friends and explained that just for doing that the fine could be as high as 4000$.
> I get your point but raw milk is 3.5% fat it has to be processed to be ready for human consumption
I'm confused - are you suggesting that raw milk is unfit for consumption due to the fat content?
I ask because I (and probably lots of the other Indians on here) grew up drinking raw buffalo (Asian Water Buffalo) milk at home. That's about 7-8% fat. I knew plenty of people who got raw cow milk as well.
Of course, it was standard practice to "cook" the milk before consumption, which would cause cream to separate out. The cream would be skimmed off for other purposes, but usually the kids got the full cream milk.
Not at all, if that what you like I don't see any issue with someone liking whole milk, but at least around here 1-2% is way more popular so for my preferred consumption it would still need to be processed, that's what I meant.
> In that context, they can't be competitive with US milk which has megafarms and can mass produce basically any animal product these days.
On top of that, the US government subsidizes/bails out those mega-farms as well.
US dairy consumption has been going down for decades, and yet production volume is up. Milk is being dumped into the (metaphorical? literal?) gutter because of over-production.
See also EU:
> Multibillion-euro dairy multinationals are exploiting rock-bottom European milk prices to expand aggressively into West Africa. Over five years, they have nearly tripled their exports to the region, shipping milk powder produced by heavily subsidized European farmers to be transformed into liquid milk for the region's booming middle class.
> I much prefer drinking milk from my farmer friend who takes good care of his cows than some megafarm in the US.
You are right in using the singular “I” in that sentence but to make it compatible with the policy you are proposing you have to swap it with “we” because thats what policies do, they force others to adhere to your preferences. To get to the bottom of it: By putting it like this you are basically stating that most individuals are not able to make this decision on their own.
First that goes against what I believe Individuals are capable of, but second exposing a society for too long to these paternalistic policies seems to subtract from the capability and willingness of individuals to take responsibility for their life
HN is an international US-based forum, that's why I used I. As far as Quebec (and Canada to a certain extent) is concerned these policies are generally popular which is why they were not struck down.
There is also the idea of food independence from the US. Trump and COVID showed that when a crisis occurs the US interests will be put first and I don't see anything positive coming from outsourcing our food production and transformation to a southern neighbour that might cut the tap with little warning.
It's one of those things that if you think too hard about it, you laugh, until you realize that it's actually real and you live under it's nonsense and then you cry instead.
If any Europeans want a good laugh-slash-cry, search 'cheese' on a Canadian supermarket site.
(I'm sure Canadians make nice stuff too, and why wouldn't Quebec produce plenty of 'French' cheeses, but you'd have to learn what the rough equivalents are called, because it's not going to have its protected-origin name. (And then there's all the stuff that's sliced or shredded or squirty, and heavily coloured, that seems way more popular in NA. But I don't include that in being sure they make 'nice stuff'. ;)))
> All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that".
Don't know about the standards - wouldn't be surprised that they are lower - but I don't recall hearing much if anything about safety issues at any kind of frequency - so what would they be 'exposing' people to??
There are theoretically ways to import butter to Canada, but you need a special license, and there are very strict quotas. Generally, only large dairy corporations can get them, and only to handle major shortage.
In my entire life spent mostly in Canada, I have never seen butter being advertised as being from another country. Cheese, definitely, but never butter.
Even trying to bring some home with you from a vacation isn't allowed. It would be taken if declared at the border, and destroyed. Failure to declare it is a crime.
Why? The Canadian dairy industry is an incredibly powerful lobby group. All they have to do is point to the very low standards in the USA and say "if we let foreign dairy in, we'll be exposing Canadians to that". Liberal governments and Conservative governments alike pander to them endlessly.