Billings, Mont. – In a letter sent today to President Barack Obama, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and U.S. Trade Ambassador Michael Froman, R-CALF USA stated the U.S. has a new and unique opportunity to persuade Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to cease Canada’s saber rattling against the U.S. mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL) law.

The letter states there are many country-to-country issues and matters the U.S. could use with Canada to offer Trudeau a concession that would benefit his country in return for Trudeau’s support of the U.S. mandatory COOL law. Underpinning the letter is the group’s belief that Trudeau is more likely than his predecessor to respect the need of U.S. livestock producers to differentiate meat products in the marketplace and the desire of U.S. consumers to know where their food was produced.

“Canada’s long-serving Agriculture Minister, Gerry Ritz, was so vehemently opposed to our mandatory COOL law that he repeatedly and appallingly threatened U.S. industries with financial sanctions. He did this long before Canada even bothered to seek permission from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to institute retaliatory actions,” states the letter.

Under Ritz’s reign, the government of Canada filed a brief in the lawsuit brought against mandatory COOL by Canadian livestock organizations and other entities. The letter states Canada used its brief before the court to reiterate the same anti-COOL arguments it was making at the WTO.

“The Canadians lost that case and the constitutionality and lawfulness of our U.S. mandatory COOL law were conclusively upheld by our second-highest court in our land. It would be shameful, if not outright treacherous, for the United States to do nothing while unelected and unappointed panels of international jurists – including the blatantly conflicted Mexican-national jurist whose country to which he was a loyal citizen was a party to the complaint – empower the governments of Canada and Mexico to undermine, negate and otherwise overturn the decision by our U.S. Constitution-based court system,” the group wrote.

“Even if the United States is incapable or unwilling at this time to address the serious erosion of our nation’s sovereignty implicit in allowing the WTO to circuitously dismantle important, U.S. Constitution-based laws, that does not in any way impinge the obligation of this Administration to do everything else possible to defend and preserve for the citizens of the United States such an important domestic law as mandatory COOL,” the group added.

Regarding the prospect that the WTO could grant Canada and Mexico the authority to impose retaliatory tariffs on other U.S. products in order to coerce Congress to repeal or weaken COOL, the letter states that “this barbaric WTO-sanctioned method of achieving political ends would, in virtually all other circles, be defined as unlawful extortion or blackmail.”

In clarifying the group’s position, the letter states, “R-CALF USA strongly opposes any concession that would repeal the current mandatory COOL law or weaken it in any way, such as by converting it to an ineffectual voluntary program. Instead, we believe the law must remain unchanged for now so that, in a more favorable Congress, it can be amended to include more meat items under the law’s jurisdiction, a change that would actually redress one of the chief criticisms leveled against the law by the WTO.”

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R-CALF USA (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America) is the largest producer-only cattle trade association in the United States. It is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the continued profitability and viability of the U.S. cattle industry. For more information, visit www.r-calfusa.com or, call 406-252-2516.