Canada taps into strategic reserves to deal with shortage of maple syrup

That’s only partly true. The other side of it is that many of these regulations also ensure that the giant players remain firmly entrenched. As an example, it is illegal for me to go directly to a dairy farmer and buy a gallon of milk directly; it has to work its way through the entire supply chain first, even though the producer is running his operation in compliance with all food safety regulations (otherwise his milk wouldn’t be allowed into the supply chain anyway)

Edit: or, before the Wheat Board was torn down, a farmer couldn’t directly sell his wheat to the grain mill down the road (or across the border), it had to go through the CWB. This kept a lot of middlemen very happy.

I read something about how a certain famous politician who supposedly cleaned out the "X" mob was actually a tool of the "Y" mob taking over.

That's one way to choose to look at it. Protectionism has two sides. If you allow foreign imports to undercut the price of domestic goods that will filter down to the folks producing it, and hurt them too. Competition is good for the consumer but not the producer. I think we often forget that the consumer and producer and usually the same group of people.

Looks like 52% of all dairy farms in Canada are sole proprietorships. Partnerships were 23%. Another 22% were family corporations. [1]

Those folks collect more money as a result of keeping the market closed and live better as a result.

I'm generally pretty pro free-trade, except in agriculture.

If you are trying to build a dairy market that values and seeks to grow small producers then reducing competition helps achieve that as they are not necessarily competitive. You would force consolidation among independent producers by opening up the border for these ag products. I don't think industrial scale farming as a necessity is good for the animals, the farmers, the environment or the country, and I'm willing to pay more for that.

The US is a ruthless competitor and has some pretty shady agricultural practices - especially dumping corn. [2] Frankly any edge Canada is able to retain against its much larger, strong-armed neighbor to the south is likely to benefit Canadians.

> Agricultural “dumping” – the practice of exporting commodities at prices below the cost of production -- can be devastating for farmers in importing countries, especially in low-income countries with little power to use trade rules to defend their markets. It is unfair competition for producers in other exporting countries. And by encouraging overproduction in the U.S., it traps U.S. producers, too, in a never-ending need for higher yields, or bigger farms, or both. [2]

> Third, dumping creates an economic environment that undermines the realization of environmental objectives. [2]

That's not what I want. I can see your argument, too, but I do respectfully disagree.

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/170510/dq170...

[2] https://www.iatp.org/documents/who-wins-and-who-loses-us-dum...

This is very unlike the other food cartels Canadians have a gun to their head to deal with.