Supply Management and Relative Poverty

food prices: What are the authors' "findings" that can be laid at the feet of supply management First, they raise the old canard that food prices in supply managed sectors are artificially inflated in Canada, and are an unfair tax on poorer Canadians, according to Huffington Post Canada. It is true that low income Canadians pay more for food, but that is a function of their relative poverty, and not a result of supply management. Generally, they are based on nothing but a right wing ideology and full of shoddy research, suspect interpretation and half-baked conclusions that are not supported by data. Rather than focus on a single, very small area to alleviate this, we need a broader, more wide-ranging public policy approach. However, the assumptions made in the article about pricing in a deregulated market are just that -- assumptions. Clearly a case could be made that all consumption taxes, or price increases, impose an unfair burden on the poorest quintile of Canadians, so why focus on this one area, represented by supply management which comprises only a tiny part of the overall burden A recent study concluded that the poorest 20 per cent of Canadians pay an additional 92¢ per day for all the supply-managed products they consume than they would if the market were deregulated. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.