Yesterday, before jetting off to the G7 in France, prime minister Mark Carney was in Toronto to unveil the details of his national food security strategy. The initial announcement was a couple of months ago, when he announced the rebranding and expansion of the existing GST credit, and the details for this new strategy could bear fruit (groan!) in the long-term, but I worry that he is raising expectations that these measures will lower food prices immediately. They won’t. Building up new food production infrastructure via greenhouses and vertical farms will take time and a lot of dollars to get off the ground, as will creating new domestic processing capabilities, which we may not even have the necessary labour for. Same thing with bolstering the rules around competition in order to attract new entrants into a marketplace dominated by oligopolies—you can’t unwind that in a day, and certainly not without just inviting in more American companies, which would go against the notion of trying to ensure food sovereignty.

Again—these kinds of investments and commitments to increasing domestic production and processing are good, and overdue. But in the vein of you can lead a horse to water, corporate Canada is not all that keen on investing in things, including productivity measures, because they are too accustomed to relying on trade with the US (which they keep pinning all of their hopes on normalising once more, as though there will be no lasting damage from the country descending into outright fascism), and their whole modus operandi is about getting monopolistic power and becoming a rent-seeker rather than investing in productivity or innovation. And yes, Canadian food prices are very high, and only part of that has to do with the fact that we’re a cold-weather country that needs to import a lot of what we eat. This is a strategy built for the long-term, and that’s great, but I know that by September, Pierre Poilievre will stand up in Question Period every day and declare that this new strategy hasn’t reduced food prices, so therefore we must burn everything down for the sake of tax cuts and going harder on trickle-down economics (and the government will respond by patting themselves on the back). They’re going to have to do the hard work of pushing this and then actually defending, and I have doubts that they are capable of doing just that.

Jennifer Robson has additional thoughts on the announcement.

My Latest:

My Xtra column points out how much Mark Carney patted himself on the back for doing the absolute bare minimum at this year’s Pride flag raising.

Ukraine Dispatch:

Russia claims to have taken two more villages, which Ukraine disputes. Ukraine’s drone commander says he wants to cut off occupied Crimea from Russia, and they have already created a fuel shortage in the region. Here is a look at the use of trench warfare in this conflict, which has now surpassed the First World War in terms of length.

Noteworthy:

• Justin Ling muses about better ways for the federal government to adopt digital asbestos, and it involves keeping out the tech-bro culture.
• Michael Geist enumerates just how many decisions the Safe Social Media bill punts down the road to be determined by Cabinet or by the future regulator.
• Andrew Coyne castigates the “federalists” in the Alberta referendum debate who are making things worse while they further their own agendas.

In my March 24th column, I suggested that Carney was going to smother CORE because it was politically inconvenient for him.Today he announced he was doing just that. But he still insists he's fighting forced labour (while he signs deals with China and Qatar).

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-12T03:06:49.028Z

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