For any Canadians reading this, adding hormones or steroids to meat and dairy animals has always been prohibited here for all types of livestock.
Antibiotics are allowed on sick cows and pigs but they can’t be used for dairy or meat until they’ve been off the antibiotics for a period of time that is supposed to be long enough to flush it from their system. Chickens are too short lived and antibiotics are prohibited if they are to be sold for human consumption.
You know how A&W advertises that their beef is free of added hormones and steroids? Well that’s actually true for all meat sold in Canada. A&W is just the only one advertising it. Pretty clever as campaign, actually.
Coincidentally, this also blocks most of the importation of chicken and beef from the U.S. giving their domestic producers an almost exclusive market.
A happy little accident I guess.
There are a lot of reasons to shit on the beef and dairy cartels in Canada, and they have definitely captured the market with regulation, but I don’t believe this is an example of that. I think this is a good safety regulation that actually is in the interest of average Canadians for once.
That’s what regulations are supposed to do, and the very large network of regulations working within and across industries are nearly invisible to the public because they’re beneficial. Some regulations were put in place to serve malicious actors at the expense of the public, but they’re not the norm, and many do get repealed when more people become aware of their damage.
This seems like a good example of regulations improving the system, which also had beneficial knock-on effects.
