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Fortunately, even in the event of a flat-out Scenario 5, there would still be what the book calls the “Safety Net.” The safety net is that annual party conventions are meaningless, expensive balderdash anyway. Or, as the Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) book puts it: “The powers of the Leader are far-reaching in preventing a policy from being in the party platform. DFC has been told by the Leader’s office that he will exercise this power … regardless of the outcome at convention.”

Photo by AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger, FIle

On Sunday evening, supply-management-loving Conservative leader Scheer had a spokesman deny that any such deal had been made, and the Dairy Farmers, behaving exactly like very dear friends of a party leader they helped select, apologized for the “inaccurate” information printed in the misplaced manual.

Perhaps there never was any explicit deal between the Dairy Farmers and Scheer, although we have all seen how cravenly he behaves toward the dairy trust, and I for one might have more confidence in him if I knew he had received an explicit quid-pro-quo in return. What is certainly true is that any Canadian party leader does have near-total editorial power over the formal election platform of his party, and that he will violently obliterate any grassroots outbursts that are not to his taste or that contradict his strategic judgment. The safety net is real and made of woven iron.

The effect of the Dairy Farmers’ apology for the “inaccurate” parts of the leaked briefing book is, of course, to confirm the document’s authenticity. The survival of supply management may rest today less on party policy than on NAFTA negotiations (where Canada appears to have lost its voice while the U.S. wraps things up with Mexico). But what the Dairy Farmers of Canada book shows that supply-managed farmers are given an explicit written list of arguments to recite in defence of the regressive food tax and the restricted consumer choice that their system imposes on people too poor or too far from the border to sneak over to the U.S. routinely for forbidden yogurts and mythic cheeses.

This is not news: anyone who has argued with a dairyman could probably have guessed the exact order in which those talking points are written down for him. Still, there is a special horror in seeing the list up close, along with a roster of the personnel employed to recite it, and the precise instructions for its force-feeding to halfwit politicians. No, don’t look at the sausage. Hold your nose and eat.