Canadian beef and pork producers are now free of U.S. country of origin labeling (COOL) laws, but lamb producers are still feeling the market losses.

In mid-December, the U.S. finally passed a bill to repeal the mandatory labeling laws for beef and pork after Canada and Mexico threatened retaliatory World Trade Organization (WTO) approved tariffs — but these laws are still in place for lamb. So while cattle and hog producers in Canada celebrated this breakthrough on the COOL dispute, sheep producers weren't so happy about the selective repeal.

"I know the feds are happy, thinking they've made leaps and bounds, but they shouldn't be," says Kate Basford, a director with the Manitoba Sheep Association. "The U.S. government is still protecting U.S. lamb, and the [Canadian] government should not be accepting this. They should be putting in tariffs, and they should not be happy unless there's complete compliance from the U.S. on the WTO ruling."

The Canadian Sheep Federation (CSF) estimates COOL laws have cost the Canadian sheep industry about $18 million annually in export revenues. CSF executive director Corlena Patterson says these laws have acted as a trade restriction for Canadian sheep.

"It's not just the revenue losses," she says, "it also means that without those market opportunities, we run the risk of seeing continued decreases in the national ewe flock, that results in continued decrease in annual production, annual number of Canadian lambs marketed, and it really impacts the profitability of Canadian sheep producers in the long-term."

But these are not far cries from what beef and pork producers experienced during the COOL era, as both sectors suffered billions of dollars in losses due to the segregation the labeling laws required.

"I think that [sheep producers] don't have the numbers that the chicken producers, the beef producers, and the pork producers do, so we kind of fall to the roadside," Basford says, "but I mean the money we are losing amounts to a substantial amount of money. They should not think of us as a secondary commodity."

Basford encourages sheep producers to write their local federal MPs to voice concerns for the industry, and Patterson says they've requested a meeting with Canada's Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay.