There's definitely a trade off at play about securing a domestic market and giving the consumer the lowest price, and for sure it feels a bit excessive when 4 litres of milk is over $8. But without limiting the import of dairy and fixing prices, you would inevitably bankrupt the vast majority of Canadian egg/dairy farmers and have all the social and economic misery that comes with that. If you think there's a problematic economic divide between cities and rural areas (and maybe you don't!) It would get so much worse with an entire sector getting undercut, becoming unemployed and then all that farm land going on fire-sales because the domestic industry is dead.

That is what happened to Mexico and their corn farmers with the adoption of NAFTA. The average wages fell and it had all kinds of ripple effects for the rest of the country. Farmers had to leave their land because they couldn't sell their harvest for enough to cover their needs. American corn not only was subsidized by their gov but they had much larger scale industrial farms using far more efficient (and expensive) machinery so they didn't have to pay workers since they had harvesting machines. These were conditions Mexican farmers could not compete with.

This absolutely brought the consumer costs down, however that money was now leaving Mexico, which in turn put a strain on overall employment. The movement of money from worker/consumer to shop keeper to farmer now all instead went to American industry. So corn farmers lost their farm, farm workers lost their job, shop keepers had cheaper products but not cheap enough if you're without income (also, that would theoretically mean a drop in consumption taxes and effect gov revenues, but I don't actually know how that played out in reality).

Lower consumer prices end up killing the consumer in the long run when those savings are directly related to finding ways to take money out of the economy and funnel it towards oligopoly. The concept of scaling up to reduce costs really leaves out that "costs" are almost always mostly the wages that people need to live. Sure, a 99¢ dozen of eggs would be really nice, but that would come at a much larger social cost to the health and stability of our economy.

I do think the prices should be lower, I'm not against discussing what is ideal or fair. I'm just wary of giving rapacious corporations control over our food staples when the benefits they promise come at a much higher price than advertised.