June 17, 2026:
Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy
Canada’s new $3.2 billion National Food Security Strategy represents an unprecedented shift in federal food policy.
For years, farmers, co-operatives, independent grocers, food access advocates, Indigenous food leaders, researchers, and community organizations have been clearly naming that food security isn’t just about growing more food. Food security also depends on infrastructure, market access pathways, public procurement, living wages, and whether communities have any real power over the systems that feed them.
The strategy gets several things right. It correctly names corporate concentration in Canada’s grocery sector. It mentions the limited sourcing options facing independent grocers. It highlights gaps in food distribution, processing, storage, terminals, food hubs, and regional infrastructure. It recognizes that Canada needs more places for farmers to sell their products, more alternatives for smaller retailers, more domestic processing capacity, and more food grown, processed, purchased, and consumed locally.
Directly in the strategy, we see sentences like, “a small number of large companies that control a huge proportion of the market along Canada’s supply chain” and “consolidation exists at all levels of Canada’s food system, sometimes at the expense of producers and consumers.” These statements represent a real shift at the federal level.
Alongside its 10-year, $1-billion Food-Link Fund, the strategy includes $750 million over seven years for controlled environment agriculture, a new $1-billion Agri-food Project Finance Fund through Farm Credit Canada, and several targeted streams for agri-food projects, innovation ecosystems, regional growth, food security, and global innovation clusters. It also points to Nutrition North reform and a permanent National School Food Program as part of the broader food security ecosystem.
These are great first steps. For too long, Canadian food policy has leaned on a fairly narrow story. Grow more, export more, automate more, and food security will eventually follow. Yet farmers are going out of business. Farm debt is rising. Local and regional processing capacity has disappeared. Public institutions often struggle to buy from local producers even when they want to. Independent grocers face supply chains dominated by larger competitors. Food insecurity is reaching record levels in many communities, often inequitably. And many regions have become deeply disconnected from the systems that feed them.
None of this happened by accident. Since at least the Mulroney, Reagan, and Thatcher era, our economy has been reshaped by a broader political project built around liberalization, privatization, deregulation, globalization, and market concentration. Food systems weren’t exempt from that project. Our agriculture and food systems were steadily reorganized around efficiency, scale, profit-taking, and shareholder value.
That model created abundance for some, but it also produced fragility. It hollowed out the middle of the food system, concentrated ownership, and treated food less like a public good and more like a commodity moving through increasingly centralized channels.
It eroded food sovereignty, and in the language of Community Wealth Building, it weakened the ability of communities to own, govern, shape, and benefit from the economic systems around them.
That’s why the federal government’s decision to name corporate concentration in its own food security strategy is a major moment. It suggests we’re turning a corner, or at least beginning to admit where the road has led.
The strategy notes that five major grocery retailers dominate Canada’s grocery sector. It also recognizes that independent grocers often rely on distribution networks controlled by their competitors. It highlights property controls as a barrier to competition, and it acknowledges concentration in processing, inputs, wholesale grocery distribution, and other parts of the food system.
The diagnosis now needs to lead somewhere. Canada needs stronger enforcement from its Competition Bureau, tougher action on property controls, closer scrutiny of wholesale distribution, and a broader strategy to reduce corporate concentration across grocery retail, processing, agricultural inputs, seed systems, agri-food logistics, and food manufacturing. If public dollars flow into food infrastructure without safeguards around ownership and governance, we risk creating new logistics assets that still feed into the same concentrated system.
Community Wealth Building
This is where Community Wealth Building is useful. Community Wealth Building asks simple but demanding questions: Who owns the assets? Who gets the contracts? Where does public spending go? Who captures the value? Are we strengthening local suppliers, co-operatives, independent businesses, producers, workers, and community-rooted institutions? Or are we subsidizing supply chains and large corporations that keep extracting wealth from the places they claim to serve?
The new 10-year, $1-billion Food-Link Fund could be a major step if it supports food terminals, food hubs, independent grocers, aggregation, cold storage, regional distribution, co-operatives, and farmers’ markets. This is exactly the kind of federal recognition that many careholders have been pushing toward for years. But $1 billion over 10 years amounts to $100 million per year nationally. That opens a door, but it definitely doesn’t rebuild what we’ve spent decades dismantling.
Canada needs a much larger and longer-term commitment to local and regional food infrastructure. At CLP, we believe local food infrastructure funding should be scaled to at least $500 million per year, with dedicated streams for Atlantic Canada, Indigenous food systems, co-operatives and independent retailers, and the physical infrastructure – processing, cold storage, abattoirs, food hubs.
Local and regional food systems need the “missing middle”: the processors, aggregators, distributors, storage facilities, markets, buyers, and co-operative structures that allow food to move from producers to communities in ways that are viable, accessible, and fair. A farmer can’t sell into a school, hospital, long-term care facility, independent grocer, or regional market simply because demand exists. The infrastructure has to exist too.
At CLP, we believe that progressive public procurement, one of the five pillars of Community Wealth Building, must sit at the heart of that work. Hospitals, schools, universities, long-term care facilities, correctional facilities, and other public institutions already spend enormous amounts of public money on food. Those dollars can either reinforce existing supply chains, or help build the regional systems we say we want. Public institutions can become anchor institutions – purchasers that give farmers, fishers, processors, food hubs, and distributors the confidence to invest, hire, and plan ahead.
But that won’t happen through vague encouragement. If governments are serious about local food, they need clear and binding minimum procurement targets, supplier development programs, aggregation support, flexible tendering processes, and the infrastructure that connects small and medium producers to institutional markets. Public spending should serve the public good, not simply chase the lowest sticker price.
Former Nova Scotia Premier Joseph Howe’s language still offers a useful test. We should ask what public policy is doing for “the public good.” Food procurement should be judged by more than the cheapest unit cost on paper. It should also be judged by whether it supports farmers and producers, strengthens regional economies, improves health, reduces vulnerability, builds ecological resilience, and keeps wealth circulating locally. Those knock-on effects are exactly what make public spending genuinely public.
Income Security and Food System Transformation
At the same time, we have to be honest about food affordability. Making food cheaper won’t solve food insecurity on its own. Food insecurity is driven first and foremost by inadequate incomes. People can’t eat with dignity if they can’t afford rent, utilities, medication, transportation, childcare, and groceries. Any serious food security strategy needs stronger income supports, affordable housing, adequate disability benefits, decent wages, universal basic services, and sustained investments in Indigenous food sovereignty, particularly in remote and rural communities where food insecurity remains unacceptably high.
The reverse is also true. Income supports alone won’t transform the food system. If we increase purchasing power without addressing corporate concentration, regional infrastructure gaps, and economic leakage, too much of that new public investment will flow through the same concentrated channels and into the hands of the same corporations.
We therefore need both income security and food system transformation. Farmers can’t keep absorbing rising costs for labour, fuel, feed, fertilizer, equipment, and transportation. Eaters can’t simply be told to pay more when so many households are already stretched past the breaking point. A better approach has to support people’s ability to afford the basics while rebuilding food systems that are less extractive, less concentrated, and more rooted in communities.
That’s what we mean by community-rooted food systems. Community-rooted food systems are grounded in food sovereignty, local and regional ownership, fair livelihoods, ecological resilience, democratic participation, and place-based infrastructure. They recognize communities as careholders, producers, workers, eaters, stewards, knowledge-holders, and decision-makers.
This is also where climate justice and food justice meet. The new federal strategy uses the language of resilience, as nearly every policy document now does. The word is everywhere. But resilience can’t become another slogan detached from the systems that produce fragility in the first place. In ecological terms, resilience comes from diversity, redundancy, interconnection, and the ability to adapt.
As mentioned during our witness testimony for the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food at the House of Commons on June 11, a food system built around concentrated ownership, long supply chains, fossil fuel dependence, just-in-time logistics, and disappearing regional infrastructure may look efficient under stable conditions. Under stress, it breaks.
A just food transition has to be part of a just energy transition. Food systems depend on fuel, fertilizer, refrigeration, transportation, plastics, machinery, and global logistics. Fossil fuel phase-out will affect food systems deeply. The question is whether that transition will be planned democratically and fairly, or whether farmers, workers, rural communities, Indigenous peoples, low-income households, and small-scale producers will once again be asked to absorb the costs.
Centre for local Prosperity work:
Atlantic Canada Food Systems Listening Project
Through our Atlantic Canada Food Systems Listening Project, CLP and partners are now moving into a synthesis phase. We’re beginning to identify the common narratives, shared principles, and recurring tensions that have emerged across more than 150 conversations with farmers, processors, distributors, researchers, Indigenous organizations, municipalities, institutional buyers, food businesses, community organizations, and other food system careholders across the lands and waters of Atlantic Canada.
What’s striking is how often people working in seemingly isolated subsectors are naming the same underlying problems: disappearing regional infrastructure, rising costs, weak market access, loss of ownership, food insecurity, climate pressure, labour shortages, procurement barriers, and a deepening disconnect between communities and the systems that feed them.
Over the coming months, CLP will be releasing two resources from this work. The first will explore the “Pillars of Community-Rooted Food Systems”, bringing together the key principles, narratives, and visions we’re hearing across the region. The second will be a practical roadmap focused on policy tools, institutional changes, infrastructure needs, and organizing strategies that can help move us toward those systems.
Canada’s new food security strategy creates an opening. It recognizes pieces of the problem, names some of the concentration, and acknowledges parts of the missing middle. It states that more of Canada’s food should be grown, processed, purchased, and consumed here. And it also provides targeted funding that could help rebuild parts of the infrastructure we’ve lost.
Now the real work starts. This means funding local food infrastructure at the radical, war-time style scale actually required. It means acting on corporate concentration and addressing oligopolies. It means using public procurement as a nation-building tool and ensuring mandatory buy-local purchasing minimums for all publicly-funded institutions. It means supporting Indigenous food sovereignty. It means making sure people have the incomes and services required to eat with dignity. And it means building food systems that are more democratic, more resilient, more just, and more rooted in place.
The strategy is a welcome start. But it’s nowhere near enough. The next task is to turn promising language into institutions, infrastructure, procurement systems, ownership models, and public investments that actually serve communities.
If Canada wants to feed itself more securely, it has to ask a deeper question: who is the food system actually for? Is it for the profit-takers, or is it for the public good?