Farm groups say Bloc legislation seeking supply management trade protections is driving division in agriculture

Apr 28, 2023

A private member’s bill seeking to provide more protection to Canada’s agricultural sector in trade negotiations is proving to be the latest source of division between farmers and ranchers across the country.

The legislation, known as Bill C-282, made its way to committee to be studied last month. It would amend the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act, forbidding the Canadian government from entering any trade deals that would adjust tariff rates or quotas for dairy, poultry and egg products — essentially taking those sectors off the table during trade talks.

The bill passed overwhelmingly in late February in the House of Commons with a vote of 293 to 23, before moving onto the international trade committee where it is currently being studied. It has garnered support from the dairy, poultry and egg sector that claim they have lost out on domestic market access due to recent trade deals. However, others representing producers who don’t belong to the supply management system say the legislation would put export-reliant agriculture at a tremendous disadvantage.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids