What explains public support for Canada's supply management regime?

Abstract

We investigate elasticity of policy preferences to information about the economic effects of policy tools. We survey approximately 5,000 people and ask a referendum question about liberalizing supply management in Canada. Supply management regulates production and marketing of dairy and poultry products in Canada through production restrictions, regulated pricing, and import barriers. Support varies widely across political-party affiliation, and across individuals with different views on redistributive fiscal policies, international trade liberalization, and perceptions of how supply management affects food prices. We estimate causal effects of information about personal costs and distributional effects of supply management on support for the policy in a randomized experiment. Treated participants receive personalized information about how supply management affects household grocery costs, and information about the policy's distributional effects. Policy support is responsive to information treatments, but these effects are small relative to differences in support across individuals' views on economic issues such as international trade and fiscal redistribution policies. We find little evidence of heterogenous treatment effects across respondent characteristics, suggesting the effects of our information treatments are not tied to views about political and economic issues.