Baloney Meter: Do Canada’s efforts to help dairy farmers hurt U.S. counterparts?
OTTAWA — “Time and again, Canada has demonstrated its disregard of its dairy commitments to the United States — hampering America’s exports to Canada — while pursuing ways to use its government-controlled system to unfairly dump greater Canadian exports in global markets.” — April 13 letter to U.S. President Donald Trump from the National Milk Producers Federation, the U.S. Dairy Export Council, the International Dairy Foods Association and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture.
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The rhetoric Donald Trump directed at Canada’s dairy industry this week has its roots in a new Canadian agriculture policy that predates his time in office, one that was the subject of a pointed letter from the U.S. dairy lobby.
“I’ve been reading about it,” Trump said this week in Wisconsin, which along with New York, is a state with a lot of hurting dairy farmers. They’re blaming Canada for their woes — and Trump took up their cause: “Because in Canada, some very unfair things have happened to our dairy farmers.”