If the government really cared about protecting consumers, they would not care about the country of origin. They would have import controls that ensure imported foreign milk follows the Canadian standards you mentioned. Instead, they simply slap an incredibly high average duty of 218.5% on any dairy product coming from abroad, no matter its characteristics, effectively blocking any import of dairy.
There is high-quality milk made in the U.S. too. But Canada prefers to protect Canadian oligopolies and keep competitors out. And this way, consumers keep paying higher prices for the same product. Why not let consumers decide what they want to purchase?
So sadly for us to keep this standard we probably have to keep a similar system to the one we have right now.
In reality most dairy farms are large industrial operations, though.
This is great for the dairy industry, they love to advertise that most farms are small, family-owned operations, which is technically true, while selling you factory farm milk.
(If it's not intuitive, imagine a world with 10 farms with 50 cows each, and one farm with 3000 cows.
I suspect that herd size looks more like a power law distribution than a normal distribution, but a quick google search didn't turn up good data.)
My understanding is it's very hard to get quota.
Fine, then don’t allow importation of milk with those additives.
What exactly is the market reason for keeping out, say, organic US dairy?
(Oh, right, Quebec lobbyists.)