Three major Canadian cheesemakers’ joint challenge against new federal rules on cheese composition have been dismissed in Federal Court.
Justice Luc Martineau, ruling Wednesday in Ottawa, dismissed an application for judicial review brought last year by Saputo, Parmalat Canada and Kraft Canada. Costs were also awarded to the federal government.
The ruling relates to the government’s amendments to the Food and Drugs Act and Agricultural Products Act, which took effect last December and put limits on cheesemakers’ use of milk solids, also called “modified milk” or milk protein. The new federal standards require cheesemakers to use more whole milk in their processing.
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Quebec farm newspaper La Terre de Chez Nous quoted Martineau’s decision Friday on its website as ruling that the new federal standards for cheese are legally and constitutionally valid.
The newspaper said Kraft, Saputo and Parmalat had not convinced the judge that the new standards somehow contravened Canada’s international trade obligations. Martineau also refuted the companies’ claim that the chief purpose of the new standards was an income boost for dairy producers at processors’ expense, La Terre said.
The three companies had argued in their application in October 2008 that the new rules would increase their costs and raise the price of cheese to consumers, in what they said would at first be a $185 million annual boon to dairy producers from higher milk sales.
“The new regulations will hurt both cheesemakers and dairy farmers. They will increase the price of cheese to consumers, may reduce cheese consumption and threaten the viability of Canada as a cheesemaking nation,” the companies said in a joint release at that time.
“There are other ways to support dairy producers’ incomes in Canada than to destabilize all of the industry,” the companies’ spokesman, Yvan Loubier, told the Manitoba Co-operator’s Ron Friesen last October.
The federal government’s amendments were first published in December 2007 to give cheesemakers time to adapt before the new rules came into place Dec. 14 last year.
None of the three companies have yet issued a formal public response to Martineau’s ruling.
