Canada, NZ claim win on trade panel ruling over dairy market dispute

Sep 06, 2023

OTTAWA/SYDNEY- New Zealand and Canada have both claimed they had won a trade dispute over complaints Ottawa was unfairly restricting access to its domestic market for dairy products, the governments said in separate statements.

New Zealand, as well as the United States, has consistently complained that Canada is not meeting obligations under various trade deals to open its market to foreign producers.

In particular, they say that although Canada agreed to allow some dairy market access to foreign firms through a system of tariff-rate quotas, it was in fact improperly allocating some of them to domestic firms.

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a major trade pact, was asked by New Zealand to set up a dispute panel to address its complaint.

Canada on Tuesday said they had won the trade dispute case against New Zealand, while Wellington welcomed the CPTPP panel ruling calling it "a significant win for our primary sector exporters."

New Zealand Trade Minister Damien O'Connor said Canada was not following its commitments under CPTPP by effectively blocking access for New Zealand's dairy industry to increase its exports.

"That will now have to change," O'Connor said in a statement on Wednesday. "We (have) secured new dairy quota access accounting for 3.3% of Canada's market - tens of thousands of tonnes per year in key dairy products for New Zealand's exporters."

Ottawa said the panel had made "a significant finding" by recognizing Canada's sole discretion to set tariff-rate quota allocations policies.

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.