Our era is a period of internationalization of domestic politics and policy making. In Canada, as elsewhere, developments, actors, and institutions beyond our borders shape our policy agendas, the content of our public policies, and our modes of governing to an unprecedented degree. The internationalization of Canadian politics is closely linked to phenomena most often described as ‘globalization’: the economic, political, technological, and informational transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.¹ The exposure to these developments varies across sectors, but the general pattern is an opening of the Canadian economy and its integration with markets elsewhere, particularly the...

Until the late 1970s, incrementally and usually in response to crisis situations, a paradigm ofstate assistancewas constructed in Canadian agriculture. As it was in other industrialized countries, the paradigm was predicated upon a particular understanding of agriculture’s place in the economy and society, its problems, and the public policies that provided solutions to those problems. The foremost belief was that the development of agriculture was contingent upon state intervention in order to realize both sectoral goals of productivity and profitability as well as other goals important to the society, economy, and polity as a whole.

Several structural features...

Claims of a paradigm shift in agricultural policies rest overwhelmingly on analyses of reforms to programs whose objective is to raise and stabilize farm incomes. As noted in chapter 2, such income safety net measures were a central plank in the state assistance paradigm and became targets for reform from the early 1980s onward. By the mid-1990s reformist pressures had succeeded in Canada, as elsewhere, in scaling back state expenditures in support of farm incomes and requiring individual producers to be more sensitive to market signals. Analysts pointed to these changes as evidence of a new, market liberal paradigm in...

The changes he was proposing to the Canadian Wheat Board Act in 1997, said the minister responsible for the marketing agency in the Chrétien Liberal government, were not ‘driven by external factors and forces’ or an attack ‘from abroad.’ Ralph Goodale’s insistence that the statutory reforms were guided by ‘Canadian reasons’ was certainly not wrong. But it fails to capture the reality of contemporary politics and more precisely, the internationalization of policy debates and policy developments. The debate over the appropriate institutions and instruments of Canadian grain marketingisa domestic debate. But it is one that has been profoundly...

The state assistance model in the first ‘generation’ of Canadian dairy, poultry, and egg supply management appeared to have escaped virtually unscathed from the thrust towards internationalization with the implementation of international trade agreements. As chapter 2 documented, Canadian farm organizations mobilized successfully during the negotiation of the FTA/NAFTA and WTO agreements to keep statist instruments virtually intact. High levels of border protection for dairy and poultry/egg products continued, leaving the Canadian market to domestic producers and processors. Trade agreements did not touch directly on the other two instruments of supply management: a pricing formula based on costs of production...

Inherent to the state assistance paradigm was a bargain between the consumer and the producer. Producers would receive public support for their enterprises in exchange for consumers’ being assured a secure and high-quality food supply.² In most countries, including Canada, the bargain was implicit, but in Europe it was made explicit. A history of wartime food shortages created real concerns about food security in terms of its supply and costs. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), embedded in the 1957 Treaty of Rome that established the European Community, identified its objectives to include assuring consumers of adequate food supplies at reasonable...

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the ‘modern technology’ most closely linked to ‘modern agriculture’ in North America has been genetic engineering of plants. Adopting genetic engineering, as the above quote from the Canadian government’s 1989Growing Togetherblueprint suggests, was seen as the route to greater profitability and competitiveness. Canadian governments (especially federal) historically invested public funds in productivity-enhancing tools (like new crop varieties) in the belief they would help farmers to become more efficient, productive and profitable.² Genetic engineering or plant biotechnology was simply the latest such tool.

Canadian governments and most Canadian farmers have seen...

This book began with two observations. First, agriculture has historically been a ‘hard case’ for internationalization, since agricultural groups and governments have resisted efforts to bring agriculture under the liberalizing premises of the GATT/WTO. Second, and notwithstanding this first observation, analysts suggest that such internationalization of domestic agricultural politics and policy making as has occurred – via international trade agreements and market liberalization, in particular – is destabilizing paradigms in the agriculture sector and engendering fundamental reforms.

This concluding chapter reviews the evidence that Canadian agriculture provides in relation to both observations and posits the future for Canadian agriculture. In terms of...