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Before he became a Conservative MP, Maxime Bernier worked at the Montreal Economic Institute, a rare Quebec think tank that preaches the virtue of free markets. In a 2010 speech before his former colleagues, he vowed to "do politics differently" by standing up to pressure groups that seek "regulation that favours them and keeps out competition."

"A politician who doesn't have a clear vision of the principles he is defending and of what he wants to accomplish will rapidly get caught up in [the] system," Mr. Bernier said then. "He will let himself be manipulated by civil servants and interest groups and will revert to the traditional way of doing politics."

Mr. Bernier's free-market convictions are now being put to the test in his own Beauce riding, home to the third-highest concentration of dairy farms in the country. Quebec's powerful milk lobby plans to hold a demonstration outside his constituency office on July 24, part of an intense campaign to put pressure on the federal government to resist calls from other countries to open up Canada's dairy market to foreign imports. Mr. Bernier and his Conservative colleagues in Quebec are finding that their support for free trade does not always square with good politics.

Trade ministers from the 12 countries negotiating a sweeping Asia-Pacific trade agreement are meeting next week in Hawaii in the hopes of concluding a deal. But Canada faces a difficult choice between opening up its supply-managed dairy and poultry sectors to foreign competition and risking being left out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership altogether.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists that Canada's inclusion in a final agreement is "essential" to ensuring its exporters are not disadvantaged in selling to a $27-trillion (U.S.) market that includes the United States, Japan and Australia. But the price of admission to the TPP probably includes concessions that could cost the Harper government votes in dairy-dependent ridings.

So far, Mr. Bernier has been telling worried farmers to trust the government to protect the "three pillars" of supply management that shield the dairy and poultry sectors from cheaper imports. Those pillars – price controls, high tariffs and production quotas – are decried by economists for creating market distortions that inflate dairy and poultry prices in Canada.

A pending Canada-Europe free trade deal would roughly double the market share of foreign cheese in Canada to about 8 per cent without doing away with supply management. But the United States, in particular, insists that it will not accept similar incremental measures in the TPP, raising questions of whether Canada will finally be forced to scrap the current system.

Unwinding supply management would carry a heavy financial and political price for the government. Ottawa has already promised compensation to farmers for allowing more cheese imports under the Canada-Europe deal. But those sums would be dwarfed by the compensation farmers would seek if Canada's dairy market is opened up to U.S. imports.

Nowhere is support for supply management as entrenched as in Quebec. The province's dairy farmers account for 44 per cent of Canada's milk production. The value of dairy and poultry quotas tripled in the 20 years to 2007, before prices were capped in Eastern Canada, and are worth about $9-billion in Quebec alone.

The cap on quota prices has created other distortions, leading to a run-up in land prices. Dairy farmers have borrowed heavily against the value of their quotas, which explains why several big bank officials have voiced support for supply management.

"Any transition [away from supply management] would lead to a relocation of Quebec's dairy industry in favour of the U.S.," Marcel Groleau, president of the province's powerful Union des producteurs agricoles, says. "So, it's hard to talk of a transition for these farmers. For their farms, transition means the end."

This complicates the political calculus for Mr. Harper. He has been counting on picking up more rural Quebec ridings in the Oct. 19 election. While Mr. Bernier won his seat by nearly 11,000 votes in 2011, none of the four other Conservative-held ridings in Quebec is considered safe. Each has hundreds of dairy farms, as do several of the opposition-held seats targeted by the Tories.

Last month, Mr. Bernier's former colleagues at the Montreal Economic Institute argued that Canada's "harmful" and "anachronistic" supply management system hurts the poorest households most. But after almost a decade in Ottawa, the Beauce MP has discovered that doing politics differently isn't as obvious as it sounds.

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