Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill C-202, An Act to amend the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act (supply management), which is effectively identical to Bill C-282 from the last Parliament.

On November 30, 2023, on the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, I rose in this chamber to lay out the problems I saw with Bill C-282. That November, Joe Biden was still the President, but Donald Trump was rising in the polls, and against this backdrop, I cautioned against endorsing Bill C-282. I’d like to quote briefly from that speech:

. . . the Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development would be forbidden to make any commitment on behalf of the Government of Canada by international trade treaty or agreement that would have the effect of increasing the tariff rate quota applicable to dairy products, poultry or eggs or reducing the tariff applicable to those goods when they are imported in excess of the quota. The effect of this would be to make our dairy, poultry and egg sectors untouchable and supply management inalienable. It would not only hamstring and hamper the ability of our negotiators to get the best possible deal for Canadian exporters and importers at CUSMA, but it would undercut Canada’s position as an international champion of free trade around the world and undermine our ability to fight protectionist policies that discriminate against us. This will hurt us not just in trade negotiations with the United States and Mexico, but with all our future negotiations and trade deals with Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Indo‑Pacific.

Honourable senators, much has changed since November of 2023. Gone forever is any Canadian idealism about the protective value of CUSMA. The President’s trade policy — if I can dignify it with such a term — is a mixture of malice and caprice, with tariffs coming and going and changing with every whim and perceived slight. I had naively hoped that if we acted in good faith and went into CUSMA renegotiations with clean hands and room to manœuvre, we could emerge with a fair outcome for Canada.

But as we’ve seen, there is no effective way to placate or appease President Trump. Passing this bill would no doubt be a provocative move, but then he is so easily provoked — sometimes by the most imaginary of causes — that tiptoeing around him seems futile.

There is certainly a strong argument to be made that with this mercurial man upending all the norms of international trade negotiations, we should protect Canadian agricultural producers in whatever ways we can.

Speaking personally, I’ve never been less inclined to buy an American yogurt cup or chicken nugget. That’s not just because of my “elbows up, don’t buy American” patriotic pride. It’s because the United States’ recent relaxation of its rules around food inspection and public health should give us all pause.

Avian influenza is running rampant in the U.S. poultry sector. It has jumped the species barrier to infect the American dairy herd all across that country.

In the wake of the mad cow crisis here when bovine spongiform encephalopathy was found in Alberta, Canada banned the practice of feeding animal products to cows. But in the United States, it’s now common practice to feed used poultry litter to cattle as a cheap source of protein and nitrogen — a possible reason American dairy cows are falling ill with a disease that wasn’t supposed to infect them and, thankfully, has not reached our dairy herd.

In the United States, dozens of farm workers have also fallen ill with bird flu, otherwise known as H5N1.

Avian influenza is not the only issue. Under the leadership — if I may call it that — of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., food inspectors have been laid off in the thousands, as have many of the comms staff who were tasked with letting Americans know about outbreaks of E. coli and listeria. This spring, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service actually scrapped a plan to monitor salmonella levels in raw turkey and chicken, and it has also postponed plans to sample breaded ready-to-cook poultry products like nuggets and chicken Kiev to check for salmonella.

Secretary Kennedy, who quite literally does not believe in germ theory nor in pasteurization, wants his department to pivot instead to rooting out what he calls “toxins,” which he defines as everything from food dyes to fluoride to canola oil, rather than protecting Americans and people who buy American food products from bacterial contamination.

If we can no longer trust American food exports to be safe, the government has a greater responsibility than ever to protect Canadian consumers from food-borne diseases.

And so, yes, Bill C-202 hits differently now than Bill C-282 hit in 2023. That’s no doubt why this bill flew through the House of Commons with no committee study and unanimous consent.

But it is that very speed that leaves me uneasy.

Yes, Bill C-282 was indeed studied at length — one might say exhaustively — in the Senate last year. Witnesses, both pro and con, were given ample hearing. We did our job of sober second thought and gave the full benefit of our advice to the other place.

And, yes, the new Commons has made its will crystal clear.

And yet having spent the last three years as Deputy Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, I think I have some responsibility to put the concerns of agricultural producers on the record. I proudly represent Alberta and Albertans in the Senate, and since every single Alberta MP, including every single Conservative MP, voted in favour of this bill, I feel it falls to me to step up and share with this chamber and this country the concerns of Alberta’s cattle producers, pulse farmers and grain and canola growers, a number of whom reached out to me this week.

Here’s how Greg Northey, the President of the Canadian Agri‑Food Trade Alliance, described the bill:

As with previous iterations of this bill, C-202 would undermine Canada’s agri-food sector, damage our trade relationships, and harm the thousands of farmers, ranchers, processors, and agri-food exporters who rely on open access to global markets to make a living . . . .

Tyler Fulton, the President of the Canadian Cattle Association, put it this way in a statement released yesterday:

Bill C-202 is not a one-off trade policy and is not about supply management — it will be incredibly difficult to reverse the momentum and damage to our global reputation and our trade opportunities. . . . Unfortunately, this Bill will not only tie the hands of our trade negotiators, but it is fracturing rural communities, and pitting Canadian farmers against Canadian farmers.

Just this afternoon, I heard from Shane Strydhorst, Chair of the Alberta Pulse Growers. He wrote to me:

Pulse growers export the vast majority of what we produce with over 85% of Canadian pulses sold into global markets. The decision to support a bill that undermines the rules-based trading system we depend on raises serious concerns about Canada’s ability to negotiate meaningful deals for our sector.

My friends, with protectionism running rampant, when tariff and non-tariff trade barriers are popping up everywhere, Canada should not be giving in to populous protectionism. We should set an example as world leaders by taking down barriers, not building them higher.

Remember, Bill C-202 doesn’t just apply to the United States. It has never been more important for Canada to build strong trading relationships with countries other than America. We may want to send a signal of defiance to Donald Trump, but what messages are we sending to our global economic allies? How, for example, do we strike a new trade deal with the United Kingdom with British cheese off the table? Our arteries may need to be protected from clotted cream, but do our farmers need that?

Scott Keller farms barley, wheat, peas and fava beans in New Norway, Alberta. He wrote this to me just this morning:

In an increasingly volatile trade environment, Canada should be doubling down on market access, diversification and diplomacy, not signalling a retreat into protectionism.

Finally, I worry about what Bill C-202 means for national unity. The bill, of course, is a private member’s bill from the Bloc Québécois, which speaks, powerfully and effectively, for Quebec’s dairy farmers, and which advocates for the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada.

It does seem strange to allow a separatist party to set Canada’s national trade policy to such an extent, and at the expense of Western Canadian producers and agricultural exporters. Separatist rhetoric in my own province of Alberta is, sadly, growing louder and more strident, with a small but zealous group of hardcore separatists exercising a disproportionate influence over provincial politics, and with some provincial leaders who ought to know better pandering to those separatist agitators for their own strategic reasons. It would be bitterly ironic indeed if, in a bid to keep Quebec separatists happy, we ended up playing right into the hands of the separatist lobby in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

At a time when we must stand together as Canadians against the economic and political threats posed by the Trump government, we must be careful about the risks of playing the interests of one part of the country off against another, especially in light of what might be the hidden fatal flaw in this bill. The text of Bill C-202 makes a truly awkward amendment to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act, shoehorning this reference to supply-management into the broad section that defines the powers, duties and functions of the minister, thereby tying his or her ministerial hands. But I leave you with this provocative question: Does that minister actually make trade agreements, or is that instead a Crown prerogative? Is it possible this whole bill is merely symbolic and not, in fact, binding on the executive? If so, doesn’t that make playing one region off against another even more mischievous and dangerous?

Still, at the end of the day, we are not elected. We are appointed, and we are not accountable to the voters of Canada. The House has spoken clearly with one united voice, and our parliamentary traditions and conventions ask us to defer to them.

Nonetheless, I am grateful to have been allowed the opportunity to give this speech tonight to remind us all and to remind Canadians that we, too, have a voice and a responsibility to use it.

Thank you, hiy hiy.

I will.

I only wish I had the capacity to predict what Donald Trump and his government will do. I think the answer to that is impossible to know. Given the President’s capacity to perceive malice where there is none, and to inject malice where none is required, I don’t know that this is the most strategic move. But, again, it’s not in our hands.