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“I truly do believe that chocolate milk saved my son’s life,” Scheer joked to a room full of dairy farmers in Saskatoon on Wednesday. Said son was apparently a very picky eater in his early years. The line earned him much mockery, not least because he deployed it as a weapon against the recently updated Canada Food Guide.

Scheer is demonstrating what it actually looks like for a Canadian political leader to be utterly beholden to a special interest group

Scheer alleged a “complete lack of consultation” went into said document, and argued that it “seems to be ideologically driven by people who have a philosophical perspective” — namely, one that doesn’t see the need for Canadians to consume half a litre of milk every single day to keep their vitamin D up, and that savagely demotes milk into a nutritional category called “milk and alternatives.”

Certainly some ideology and philosophy went into the food guide de-emphasizing milk and animal proteins. But this version of the food guide is notable for having largely fended off various industry groups that have in the past successfully interceded to make a mockery of the entire exercise — for example to make fruit juice, which is basically just a sugar-delivery mechanism, a recommended food for children. This time medical science largely won the day, and whatever medical science’s flaws, we can safely trust its advice over that of the Dairy Farmers of Canada or the Cattlemen’s Association.

There’s no shame in a conservative politician opposing the federal government of a gigantic country containing multitudes of lifestyles trying to create an ideal diet for all its citizens. “I’ll eat what I want, get out of my kitchen,” is a perfectly respectable position — especially since the food guide is such a joyless, under-salted slog. But that’s not Scheer’s position. Instead he’s vowing to “get it right.” This suggests consulting people other than medical and scientific experts, most of whom were relatively pleased with this edition of the food guide. It suggests bringing industry voices back into the mix. And that’s not something anyone other than Big Dairy and Big Meat should want.