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Regulating the Quebec Dairy Industry, 1905–1921: Peeling Off the Joseph Label

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Ruth Dupré
Ruth Dupré
Affiliation:
The author is Assistant Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montréal, 5255 Decelles, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3T 1V6.
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Abstract

From its beginning the Quebec dairy industry was characterized by many small factories producing butter and cheese of such a low quality that the British called all bad cheese coming from Canada “Joseph.” The Société d'industrie laitière, created in 1882 to promote the industry, asked the government to impose compulsory inspection, licensing, and grading. Between 1905 and 1921 the government finally but reluctantly responded.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 339 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1990

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References

She wishes to thank Lee Alston; the participants at the EHA Conference, Gary Libecap, Marvin McInnis, and Lou Cain; her colleagues, Michel Patry and Yvan Stringer; the editors for their helpful comments; and Chantal Malo for her research assistance.Google Scholar

1 Stigler, G., “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2 (Spring 1971), pp. 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The only studies which devote more than a few lines to the matter are the historical studies of regulation in general of Corry, J. A., The Growth of Government Activities Since Confederation (study prepared for the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, Ottawa, 1939)Google Scholarand of Baggaley, C., The Emergence of the Regulatory State in Canada, 1867–1939, (Ottawa, 1981).Google Scholar

3 The SIL documents are in French, even the few speeches originally delivered in English. I translated all the quotations.Google Scholar

4 The ratio of exports to production is calculated from the figures supplied by Duhaime, R., “Les exportations canadiennes de produits laitiers, 1867 à 1955,” L'Actualité économique, 23 (07–09. 1957), pp. 248–49, for all Canada because there are no export data at the provincial level.Google Scholar

5 Census data as reported in the Quebec Statistical Yearbooks.Google Scholar

6 The number of dairy factories declined significantly after the turn of the century: from a peak of 2, 142 in 1911 to 1,768 in 1921 and 1,318 in 1931. Their average size, however, was still much smaller in the thirties than in Ontario according to a federal government survey of cheese factories in 1932/3 reported by Drummond, W. M., “Problems of the Canadian Dairy Industry,” in Innis, H. A., ed, The Dairy Industry in Canada (Toronto, 1937), p. 146. The average volume of production in Quebec was 23.2 tons per year, with not much difference between regions, compared to 81.5 tons in Ontario (56.3 for Eastern Ontario, 62.9 for Central Ontario, and 159.8 for Western Ontario).Google Scholar

7 “Jack-of-all-trades” is perhaps more appropriate than “lazy,” the latter an accusation often found in the government reports. Inspectors complained that they often found factories locked at 3:00 P.M. or looked after by a young son because the cheesemaker was working in the fields.Google Scholar

8 For instance, Klein, B. and Leffler, K. B., “The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance,” Journal of Political Economy, 89 (08. 1981), pp. 615–41. This “reputation” idea seems to be gaining popularity in economic history. Three papers from the 1989 World Cliometrics Conference apply it to very different situations: Gary Libecap to U.S. government meat inspection in 1891, Akira Motomura to coinage depreciation in seventeenth-century Spain, and Avner Greif to medieval long-distance trade.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See Akerlof, G. A., “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84 (08. 1970), pp. 488–500.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 488.

11 SIL Ninth Annual Report for 1890, Quebec Sessional Papers, 24 (1890), p. 26Google Scholar; and SIL Twenty-third Annual Report for 1904, Quebec Sessional Papers, 39 (1906), p. 139.Google Scholar

12 SIL Ninth Annual Report for 1890, pp. 36, 41, 46.Google Scholar

13 Inspector Allard's, J. N.Annual Report to the Minister of Agriculture, in the Annual Report of the Ministry of Agriculture, Quebec Sessional Papers, 38 (1905), p. 131.Google Scholar

14 This was stated at least twice: in the SIL Thirteenth Annual Report for 1894, Quebec Sessional Papers, 29 (1895), p. 56, and in the SIL Twenty-third Annual Report for 1904, p. 180Google Scholar; and confirmed by Minville, E., L'agriculture, Etudes de notre milieu (Montreal, 1943), p. 256. Joseph is the first name given at their christening to all Catholic males. As very close to 100 percent of French-Canadians were then also Catholic, Joseph was synonymous with French-Canadian.Google Scholar

15 Ruddick, J. A., “The Development of the Dairy Industry in Canada,” in H. A.Innis, ed, The Dairy Industry in Canada, pp. 33, 44, 49. He should be one of the most credible authors on the subject. As Innis wrote in his introduction (p. 10), Ruddick's curriculum vitae reads like a history of dairying in Canada: from cheesemaker in Ontario and in Quebec in the 1880s to instructor and superintendent of the Queen's University dairy school in the 1890s to federal Dairy Commissioner from the 1900s to the 1930s.Google Scholar

16 Drummond, “Problems of the Canadian Dairy Industry,” pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

17 SIL Thirteenth Annual Report for 1894, p. 49.Google Scholar

18 SIL Fifteenth Annual Report for 1896, Quebec Sessional Papers, 31 (1897), p. 88.Google Scholar

19 SIL Twenty-first Annual Report for 1902, Quebec Sessional Papers, 37 (1904), p. 147.Google Scholar

20 SIL Twenty-fourth Annual Report for 1905, Quebec Sessional Papers, 40 (1907), p. 193.Google Scholar

21 SIL Thirteenth Annual Report for 1894, p. 46.Google Scholar

22 SIL Twenty-third Annual Report for 1904, p. 145.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., pp. 142–44.

24 As the SIL reports often point out, this legislation was seldom, if ever, enforced; the factory owners were fighting for milk and thus accepted almost anything because they feared that the farmer would otherwise go to his neighboring competitor.Google Scholar

25 Excerpts from the speech by the Honorable Jules Allard, Quebec Minister of Agriculture in SIL Twenty-fifth Annual Report for 1906, Quebec Sessional Papers, 41 (1908), pp. 193–95.Google Scholar

26 The SIL also strongly supported the cooperatives as a solution to the problems of a uniform price and of bad reputation. The Quebec Cheesemakers' Cooperative was founded in 1910 under the patronage of the Quebec Minister of Agriculture and of the SIL. Kesteman, J. P., Hisroire du syndicalisme agricole au Québec (Montreal, 1985), p. 31, writes that it was a great success from the beginning, but a more critical reading of the Coop annual reports shows that it met with a certain success but also many difficulties.Google Scholar

27 Bernard, A., La politique au Canada et au Québec (2nd edn., Montreal, 1977), p. 36.Google Scholar

28 This is what Corry, “The Growth of Government,” argued for Canada and Gow, J. I., Histoire de l'adminisrration publique québécoise (Montreal, 1986), p. 140, for Quebec.Google Scholar

29 I did an analysis of the content of Quebec electoral platforms—as compiled by Roy, J. L., Les programmes électoraux du Québec, 1867–1966 (Montreal, 1970)—which concerned agriculture. Not surprisingly perhaps, the candidates talked very little about regulation and, later on, price fixing, and much about subsidies, agricultural credit, and electrification.Google Scholar

30 Reported in Linteau, P. A., Durocher, R., Robert, J. C., Histoire du Québec contemporain (Montreal, 1979), pp. 439–40.Google ScholarMorisset, M., in L'agriculture familiale au Québec (Paris, 1987), identifies three phases in the evolution of modern Quebec agriculture: a traditional or “selfsufficient” era from 1854 to 1939, a diversified market-oriented period from 1939 to 1966, and a specialized one from 1966 onwards. Although one can argue that 1939 is late for traditional as the dominant type, it is clear that specialization did not occur in the period under discussion.Google Scholar

31 Between 1900 and 1910 the production of cheese in Quebec declined from 81 to 58 million pounds while the production of butter increased from 25 to 42 million pounds, to which should be added between 18 and 20 million pounds of homemade. The number of factories followed a similar trend, with those producing butter increasing from 445 to 787 and those producing cheese decreasing from 1,207 to 1,062 between 1901 and 1911. One cannot infer, however, from these figures any conclusion about the average scale of production because some 300 combined factories (producing both butter and cheese) should be added to the above firms but the available data do not allow us to break down the production of these “combined.” See Angers, F. A., “Documentation statistique,” in Minville, E., L'agriculture, pp. 512–13.Google Scholar

32 This is what the few existing studies on the Quebec dairy industry at the time argue. See Perron, N., “Genése des activités laitières, 1850–1960,” in Séguin, N., ed, Agriculture et colonisation au Québec (Montreal, 1980), pp. 122–24,Google Scholar and Duhaime, , “Les exportations canadiennes,” p. 261.Google Scholar

33 The proportion of butter made on the farm went from 50 percent in 1900 to 25 percent in 1920. The proportion was even larger in the rest of Canada, as homemade butter still represented 75 percent in 1900 and close to 50 percent in 1920 of Canadian production. The Quebec government regulations on inspection and licensing concerned only the factories, defined as having at least three milk and cream suppliers for butter and five for cheese.Google Scholar