William Watson: Keep the state out of kitchens
The Liberals want to have a $40-million food program to support existing food programs
The new Liberal national food policy is not so much a policy as a lovely five-page brochure—four if you don’t count the full-page photo of bright-red tomatoes—listing several no doubt focus-grouped talking points. My favourite line is where it says a Liberal government will spend “$40-million over four years to implement a new federal Healthy Start program to support existing programs helping 250,000 children from low-income families access healthy, homegrown foods.”
That last bit is peculiar. Do we want healthy foods for poor kids only if they’re home-grown? Or is it that only homegrown food is healthy (a view we hope foreigners don’t take of our own multi-billion food exports)?
What really catches the eye, however, is “a new … program to support existing programs.” It has come to this: we now need programs to support programs. Wall Street is being broiled on a spit this week for having produced collateralized debt obligations made up of other collateralized debt obligations. But programs to support programs? No problem here, I guess.
What arguments could justify “programs to support programs”? If the programs being supported are federal programs, why not just give the old programs more money? Why invent a new program with its own letterhead, website, consultants and publicists to support the existing ones? On the other hand, if the existing programs are provincial or municipal or Indian band programs, the logic must be that these are good programs but underfunded. “Junior” levels of government must have made wrong decisions about their priorities and aren’t giving enough to these programs. (Maybe they need their own programs to support programs.) But if so, why not just send the lower levels of government the $40-million and let them decide whether Healthy Start is their absolute best use for new money?
My second favourite line, not in the policy but in the Michael Ignatieff press release announcing the policy, was: “Zsuzsanna and I always enjoy a trip to the local farmer’s market … ” Could you in your life conceive a more condescending, less substantive way of introducing a national food policy? “Whether here in Ottawa or visiting markets on our travels through Canada, people we meet always express the same sentiment: they want, and appreciate, access to healthy, safe food.”
I guess if you’re a party leader you meet strange people. Most Canadians don’t actually spend our time obsessing about our food. Some clearly do. They have blogs and sometimes newspaper columns. But until now we haven’t indulged their idiosyncratic and in some cases at least mildly neurotic preoccupations by introducing a national food policy.
Is there really a food problem in Canada? Do Canadians generally not have access to safe, healthy food? If we were about to enter a six-year world war, as we did in 1939, we might need a national food policy, complete with ration tickets and waste avoidance campaigns.
But war is not imminent and if you visit a typical urban supermarket, with its aisle upon aisle of brightly-lit, carefully-spritzered, hygienically packaged, continuously restocked food, much of it from places in the world that 50 years ago were simply unattainable gastronomically, you’ll very quickly conclude that the only possible problem is that some Canadians may not have enough money to visit these cornucopia on a regular enough basis. But that’s not a problem you fix with a food policy.
Yes, there are occasional well-reported examples of both local producers and importers allowing tainted meat or g****s or cheese onto the market. But the firms that make such mistakes have very strong commercial reasons for fixing any problems and if for some delusional reason they give up on caring about their reputation, they also have food inspection laws to contend with. If food inspection agencies are ineffective, governments may want to address this problem, but low-grade institutional maintenance of this sort doesn’t really have to be dressed up as a national food policy.
My grocer and I are consenting adults. We don’t really need the federal government to intervene in our decisions about what he or she will stock and I’ll buy.
It’s obvious why some members of the Canadian food industry are not satisfied with the choices my grocer and I make. In a free and open market for food, they haven’t succeeded in persuading us their product is worthy of our custom. But all the usual remedies of economic competition are available to them: lower your price, improve your product, do a better job of marketing. If after trying all that, we still prefer the imported alternative, well, it might be time to accept the dictates of comparative advantage and try another line of work.
The natural jingoism and xenophobia of a substantial part of the population are very strong commercial advantages for Canadian producers. If despite these built-in advantages and now on top of it the advantage of a misconceived environmentalism that supports anything done close by against anything distant, they can’t persuade grocers to stock and Canadians to eat their output, having Ottawa tilt the ground even further in their favour is all that much more an offense to common sense.
There was a time, before it became the proponent of small-minded food protectionism, when the Liberal Party of Canada stood for grand principles. Seeking instruction and inspiration, I found, on Google — a foreign facility, I’m afraid — an 1877 pamphlet by Wilfrid Laurier in which the future prime minister explains in 29 eloquent pages how the Liberal Party is the party of liberty. He makes no mention at all, not a one, of busy-bodied fiddling and pandering.
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/04/28/william-watson-keep-the-state-out-of-kitchens.aspx#ixzz0mq3h7UTR
The Liberals want to have a $40-million food program to support existing food programs
The new Liberal national food policy is not so much a policy as a lovely five-page brochure—four if you don’t count the full-page photo of bright-red tomatoes—listing several no doubt focus-grouped talking points. My favourite line is where it says a Liberal government will spend “$40-million over four years to implement a new federal Healthy Start program to support existing programs helping 250,000 children from low-income families access healthy, homegrown foods.”
That last bit is peculiar. Do we want healthy foods for poor kids only if they’re home-grown? Or is it that only homegrown food is healthy (a view we hope foreigners don’t take of our own multi-billion food exports)?
What really catches the eye, however, is “a new … program to support existing programs.” It has come to this: we now need programs to support programs. Wall Street is being broiled on a spit this week for having produced collateralized debt obligations made up of other collateralized debt obligations. But programs to support programs? No problem here, I guess.
What arguments could justify “programs to support programs”? If the programs being supported are federal programs, why not just give the old programs more money? Why invent a new program with its own letterhead, website, consultants and publicists to support the existing ones? On the other hand, if the existing programs are provincial or municipal or Indian band programs, the logic must be that these are good programs but underfunded. “Junior” levels of government must have made wrong decisions about their priorities and aren’t giving enough to these programs. (Maybe they need their own programs to support programs.) But if so, why not just send the lower levels of government the $40-million and let them decide whether Healthy Start is their absolute best use for new money?
My second favourite line, not in the policy but in the Michael Ignatieff press release announcing the policy, was: “Zsuzsanna and I always enjoy a trip to the local farmer’s market … ” Could you in your life conceive a more condescending, less substantive way of introducing a national food policy? “Whether here in Ottawa or visiting markets on our travels through Canada, people we meet always express the same sentiment: they want, and appreciate, access to healthy, safe food.”
I guess if you’re a party leader you meet strange people. Most Canadians don’t actually spend our time obsessing about our food. Some clearly do. They have blogs and sometimes newspaper columns. But until now we haven’t indulged their idiosyncratic and in some cases at least mildly neurotic preoccupations by introducing a national food policy.
Is there really a food problem in Canada? Do Canadians generally not have access to safe, healthy food? If we were about to enter a six-year world war, as we did in 1939, we might need a national food policy, complete with ration tickets and waste avoidance campaigns.
But war is not imminent and if you visit a typical urban supermarket, with its aisle upon aisle of brightly-lit, carefully-spritzered, hygienically packaged, continuously restocked food, much of it from places in the world that 50 years ago were simply unattainable gastronomically, you’ll very quickly conclude that the only possible problem is that some Canadians may not have enough money to visit these cornucopia on a regular enough basis. But that’s not a problem you fix with a food policy.
Yes, there are occasional well-reported examples of both local producers and importers allowing tainted meat or g****s or cheese onto the market. But the firms that make such mistakes have very strong commercial reasons for fixing any problems and if for some delusional reason they give up on caring about their reputation, they also have food inspection laws to contend with. If food inspection agencies are ineffective, governments may want to address this problem, but low-grade institutional maintenance of this sort doesn’t really have to be dressed up as a national food policy.
My grocer and I are consenting adults. We don’t really need the federal government to intervene in our decisions about what he or she will stock and I’ll buy.
It’s obvious why some members of the Canadian food industry are not satisfied with the choices my grocer and I make. In a free and open market for food, they haven’t succeeded in persuading us their product is worthy of our custom. But all the usual remedies of economic competition are available to them: lower your price, improve your product, do a better job of marketing. If after trying all that, we still prefer the imported alternative, well, it might be time to accept the dictates of comparative advantage and try another line of work.
The natural jingoism and xenophobia of a substantial part of the population are very strong commercial advantages for Canadian producers. If despite these built-in advantages and now on top of it the advantage of a misconceived environmentalism that supports anything done close by against anything distant, they can’t persuade grocers to stock and Canadians to eat their output, having Ottawa tilt the ground even further in their favour is all that much more an offense to common sense.
There was a time, before it became the proponent of small-minded food protectionism, when the Liberal Party of Canada stood for grand principles. Seeking instruction and inspiration, I found, on Google — a foreign facility, I’m afraid — an 1877 pamphlet by Wilfrid Laurier in which the future prime minister explains in 29 eloquent pages how the Liberal Party is the party of liberty. He makes no mention at all, not a one, of busy-bodied fiddling and pandering.
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/04/28/william-watson-keep-the-state-out-of-kitchens.aspx#ixzz0mq3h7UTR
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