The pattern is familiar. A domestic industry, in this case the sugar refiners, so hard up it scarcely has two lawyers to rub together, complains it is being ruined by foreign rivals, in this case from Europe and the United States, "dumping" their product on the Canadian market. Revenue Canada sends its investigators to look into the matter and, after many months of poking about, duly concludes that, yup, it sure looks like dumping, all right.

Then everyone heads over to the Canadian International Trade Tribunal for more months of hearings to determine whether the industry has been "injured" by all this dumping and, in the end, the consumer gets ripped off via a hefty tariff on the offending imported product - not to mention higher prices for the domestic version. Quite why it should be the innocent domestic consumer who has to pay for the sins of some foreign mob never seems to trouble anyone.

About the only difference in the present case is that the CITT actually found that, despite having roughly 147,000 tonnes of Euro-American sugar dumped on it in the past year, the Canadian industry had not been hurt in any way, except for maybe its feelings. But the tribunal felt the industry might be hurt in future, and Lord knows we can't have any of that. So, just to be on the safe side, consumers will pay a 200-per-cent tariff, which would, in the mathematics of trade tribunals, just offset the estimated 40-per-cent margin of dumping. Well, you know, rounding to the nearest tablespoon.

If all of this sounds even faintly rational, you should know exactly what this word "dumping" means. It's a wonderfully evocative word, as if these nasty foreigners were backing their trucks up to the border in the middle of the night and inundating us with their waste products. In fact, in its primary definition, to "dump" is merely to sell something in an export market for less than you charge for it at home.

Of course, in a world of floating exchange rates, these sorts of comparisons are virtually meaningless, but never mind: Where is it written that everything should sell for the same price everywhere in the world? The price of gasoline varies from one city block to the next, but God forbid that a cube of sugar should sell for a peso less in Havana than it does in Hamilton. The notion of "what the market will bear" apparently has yet to reach the learned hands of Canadian trade law.

Even in its secondary meaning, to sell at below cost, it's hardly the sort of occult foreign practice that the industry's lawyers would have you believe. Canadian companies have been known to give consumers a break now and then, too. It's called a loss leader. Does it strike anyone else as odd that a practice that goes all but unremarked when it happens within our borders suddenly becomes a deep moral evil when it crosses the border?

Actually, we do prosecute Canadians for selling below cost - sometimes. Normally, there's no need: As business strategies go, it's one of the dumber ones. It's only when one company, or a group of companies, already controls virtually all of the market that so-called "predatory pricing" pays: With deeper pockets than their much smaller competitors, they can drive them out of business, and maintain their monopoly.

But if there's anybody who has a monopoly in the Canadian sugar market, it's the domestic companies, not their foreign rivals. Between them, Redpath and B.C. Sugar, the two companies behind the grandly named Canadian Sugar Institute, control fully 87 per cent of the market.

Even if they were being "injured," which they're not, it would take some doing to drive them out of business, and even if they were driven out of business, it wouldn't mean that the Canadian sugar market would fall under a foreign monopoly: there's lots of competition abroad. A lot more than we have in Canada, in fact.

If it's predatory pricing we're worried about, we've already got all the tools we need to fight it: ordinary competition law. There's no particular reason to set up a separate legal regime to fight foreign "dumping," least of all if the effect is to inhibit the only source of competition for the domestic racket. If consumers are going to take their lumps, they should at least get to choose how many.