SPECIAL REPORT The Billion-Dollar Bypass: What Carney’s Food Strategy Fixes — and the Grocery Chokehold It Leaves Untouched
Ottawa is spending $1 billion so independent grocers can “bypass” the big chains. There’s one problem: the regulator already told us where the real chokehold is — and the new strategy doesn’t touch it
Dear reader,
You don’t need a briefing from Ottawa to know what’s happened to your grocery bill. You’ve watched it happen, week by week, at the checkout. Grocery prices in Canada are up more than 30 per cent since 2019. This year alone, an average family of four will spend nearly $1,000 more on food than last year. And if you’re living on a pension or a fixed income — as many of you are — you’ve felt it more keenly than anyone, because your grocery bill kept climbing long after your income stopped.
On Thursday in Toronto, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada’s first-ever National Food Security Strategy: more than $3 billion over ten years. “A country that can’t feed itself or fuel itself or defend itself isn’t truly sovereign,” he said. The headline promise is a $1 billion “Food-Link Fund” to expand the Ontario Food Terminal and build new regional food hubs — so that independent grocers can finally, in the government’s words, buy and move competitively priced products “without relying on large retail chains.”
Some of this strategy is genuinely good news, and I’ll give it full credit below. But there is a flaw at the centre of its biggest promise — one the government’s own competition watchdog documented, one that a report just last month confirmed is still strangling independent grocers, and one that today’s billion dollars goes around rather than through. The major outlets will report the announcement. This report follows the money to the part of the story they’ll miss: who really controls what ends up on an independent grocer’s shelf — and why that doesn’t change on Thursday.
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