September 23, 2026:
Justin Cantafio, directeur des politiques
My colleague Andy Horsnell recently argued that urgency isn’t a strategy. He was writing about Canada’s current push to attract investment during a period of economic uncertainty. Andy highlighted that when it comes to investments, focusing on urgency can obscure the need for deeper, systemic change.
Canada’s latest federal food financing initiative is an example of putting urgency before pragmatism. The federal government has correctly identified corporate concentration, weak regional infrastructure, and a shortage of medium-sized processors as structural problems. And on September 14, 2026, it launched a $1 billion Agri-food Project Finance initiative, which will be administered through Farm Credit Canada (FCC). We’ve heard loud and clear through our Atlantic Food Systems Visioning Project that Canada needs more processing, storage, distribution, and manufacturing capacity. Our concern, however, is who this particular financing tool is built to serve.
The initiative targets projects with capital costs between $25 million and $500 million or more. FCC expects to lend between $10 million and $250 million per project and will prioritize proposals that have secured, or can credibly secure, private debt and equity. Project financing will also favours new physical assets with high certainty cash flows and existing supporting contracts. While cooperatives and community-owned enterprises aren’t formally excluded, the program begins at a scale few of them can reach or currently operate at. The minimum project size puts most community-rooted food infrastructure out of contention before an application is ever filed.
Through our work with farmers’ markets, food hubs, cooperatives, and regional food networks, we’ve seen how much essential infrastructure sits below that funding threshold. A regional abattoir, shared cold storage facility, small processor, independent distribution network, or community food hub may be too large for ordinary small business lending, yet far too small for a $25 million project finance deal.
These are exactly the pieces of infrastructure needed to connect local producers with local institutions, retailers, and households. Yet they remain stranded between grant programs that are too small and financing programs designed for projects many times their size.
How did this Corporate consolidation develop?
Canada’s brand new National Food Security Strategy shows how serious the gap has become. Drawing on Statistics Canada’s 2025 Business Register, the strategy reports that only 7% of food and beverage processing establishments are medium-sized. It also reports that 2 firms control roughly 85% to 90% of federally inspected beef slaughter, while 4 firms controlled 70% of hog processing in 2019. In grocery retail, 5 major companies account for at least 75% of sales, following 15 mergers since 1986 that reduced the number of major grocers down to 5.
The strategy’s own diagnosis is blunt, stating, “a small number of large companies … control a huge proportion of the market” and “make it harder for small and medium sized businesses to compete.” It also acknowledges that many independent grocers depend on distribution networks operated by their larger competitors, limiting their options and forcing them to pay markups to the very companies they compete against.
Government policy hasn’t been a neutral backdrop to this concentration. A 2026 peer-reviewed review of Canadian agricultural support found that these policies have overwhelmingly focused on increasing production volumes and export competitiveness for a narrow range of feed crops, food grains, and livestock. The authors found that the benefits flowed mainly to higher income farmers during a period of farm consolidation and growing concentration throughout the supply chain.
Canada has rewarded scale, throughput, and export growth while doing far less to sustain the diverse regional infrastructure that communities need.
The imbalance also shapes who gets heard. Another recent peer-reviewed study of federal agricultural policymaking found that government relies on a tightly arranged network of non-state actors, many connected to powerful corporations, and actively supports networks that reinforce industrial agriculture. This is the terrain on which corporate capture takes hold: the same actors gain privileged access, their definition of a viable project becomes common sense, and community-scale alternatives remain peripheral to policy and investment.
These choices didn’t singlehandedly close every regional plant, but they helped set the direction. Public policy prioritized export volumes and globally competitive scale while regional processing was allowed to erode. A Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute analysis found that food and beverage processing establishments with employees fell by 25% in Atlantic Canada between 2009 and 2016. It also found that Canada imported $7.2 billion more in value-added food and beverage products than it exported in 2018. We grew and exported commodities while losing opportunities to process more of that food, and retain more of its value, within our own regions.
Canada’s corporate concentration problem didn’t appear by accident. For decades, mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing, and the centralization of infrastructure have been treated as ordinary corporate efficiency.
Maple Leaf Foods’ 2016 annual report is a case in point. The company described consolidating 11 prepared meat plants into 4 large facilities and 17 distribution centres into just 2 as part of a plan to lower costs, improve network efficiency, and increase profitability.
But profitability for whom? From the company’s perspective, its strategy worked. But across the wider food system, decisions like these have reduced the number of facilities, owners, buyers, and regional options available to everyone else. When facilities close or ownership leaves a region, communities can also lose jobs, local purchasing, tax revenue, and everyday opportunities for wealth to circulate locally.
Corporate Consolidation makes our food system vulnerable
Corporate concentration has contributed directly to the lack of resilience in Canada’s food system. The federal food security strategy says as much: when processing, distribution, and retail are controlled by a small number of firms, a disruption at one company can affect supply and drive up prices across the country. Yet the government’s largest new food financing tool is designed around the scale, cashflow certainty, and access to private capital that favour established corporate players. It risks using public money to deepen the vulnerability the strategy is supposed to address.
The first call for expressions of interest is also open for only about 60 days, from September 14 to November 13, 2026. FCC says it will consider future opportunities, but this initial rush still rewards proponents that already have financial models, capital partners, contracts, and construction plans in place.
Community-owned projects often require more time to build partnerships, establish democratic governance, complete feasibility work, and assemble financing from multiple sources. Urgency becomes another advantage for the incumbents.
More domestic capacity, by itself, won’t deliver food sovereignty. A large new plant can process more Canadian food while leaving ownership, bargaining power, and infrastructure access almost untouched. It can deepen farmers’ dependence on a few buyers and make smaller competitors more reliant on facilities they don’t control. Canada needs processing capacity, but it also needs diversity among processors, shared and community-owned infrastructure, and regional alternatives that give producers somewhere else to go.
A program presented as part of the answer to corporate concentration shouldn’t direct its largest pool of capital toward the businesses already best positioned to dominate a concentrated market. Giving incumbents access to more favourable financing can extend the same cost and infrastructure advantages that smaller regional businesses are already struggling against. If public money reinforces the power imbalance, rebuilding the missing middle will become even harder.
A dedicated investment stream
Canada needs a dedicated investment stream built for the missing middle. One practical starting point would be to support projects costing between $500,000 and $25 million, with the public contribution reaching 75% or more when a project can demonstrate strong community wealth outcomes. Those tests should include local or democratic ownership, fair employment, regional purchasing, shared access to infrastructure, local reinvestment, and clear benefits for producers and communities.
The financing itself must also fit the projects. Small and medium-sized businesses, cooperatives, Indigenous and community-owned enterprises, and non-profits need project-development funding, flexible long-term loans suited to smaller balance sheets, and grants where broad public benefits won’t produce a conventional commercial return. Governments can use procurement dollars to give regional suppliers reliable demand from schools, hospitals, universities, and other public institutions. Where taxpayers absorb substantial risk, public, cooperative, or community equity should be considered so that some of the value created stays rooted in place.
The stakes are bigger than one FCC program. We’re being asked to transform our economy quickly, and large pools of capital will help decide what the next economy looks like. If we keep directing the biggest opportunities toward the same ownership structures, we shouldn’t be surprised when wealth and decision-making power remain concentrated in the hands of the few.
Food sovereignty requires the capacity to grow, process, move, and sell food closer to home. Resilience requires many capable actors, regional infrastructure, and enough diversity and redundancy to adapt when one part of the system fails. Community wealth building asks that the assets created with public support leave communities with more ownership, stronger institutions, and a fair share of the returns.
Canada has named the change it wants. Our financing architecture now has to make that change possible.