Food prices in Canada have risen roughly 31 per cent since 2020. Ottawa’s new National Food Security Strategy recognizes the affordability problem, but parts of its diagnosis remain far too narrow.

There are worthwhile measures. In particular, Ottawa and the Competition Bureau are taking restrictive property controls seriously—covenants and lease restrictions that can prevent competing grocers from opening nearby. This is a much more direct competition problem than simply pointing to the size of large grocery firms at the retail end of the supply chain, which also bring considerable economies of scale. They also only account for 16 % of the domestic food economy.

The strategy is otherwise remarkably unambitious on one of the largest structural problems in Canadian food markets – internal trade. Doubly so in light of supply management’s salience in trade negotiations. Beyond some useful changes for provincially licensed processors and abattoirs, there is little here to suggest that governments will go some way to streamline the overlapping rules and provincial barriers that prevent food producers and processors from treating Canada as a single market. And supply management is not addressed at all.

I discuss these issues with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois on the latest Macdonald-Laurier Institute‘s Inside Policy Talks, along with food-supply resilience through commodity cycles, algorithmic pricing, productivity and when industrial policy can actually strengthen productive capacity – when it supports the industry, rather than trying to pick winners and losers.