Affordable Food means more than lowering prices

The last time I saw this person at the Freshco supermarket, she was deciding which of the five or six items she could do without. This decision-making process was being made at the cash register by asking the cashier to remove one and then another item until the total went below her meagre cash-in-hand budget. When she shuffled through the checkout line, as bent from wear as much as her clothing, I knew her choices were limited. There was no confidence in her gait and no joy in her purchases. Once a weekly fixture on my Saturday morning grocery run, but after that day, I never saw her again. I can only guess that she had to start using food banks.

And this was before Donald Trump’s threat of tariff increases from the USA, which ended up driving up costs because the mere threat made the value of the Canadian dollar drop.

As much as we would like to assign him blame, it’s not Donald Trump who created the problem, although he is making it worse. But he also exposed how deep our problem goes and, through his bully-boy tactics, is actually providing Canadians with the impetus to maybe finally do something about it.

I’m talking about food affordability and insecurity. Not just on an individual level but on a national scale.

This is a warning. The following information becomes increasingly disturbing as you read it. Please be disturbed, very disturbed. Then, I’m going to outline ways we can solve this problem permanently.

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, we have struggled with food affordability. In 2019, the average Canadian household spent $7,536 a year on groceries. In 2024, that jumped to CAD 8,065 or $675 a month. Personally, I think that is low.

A loaf of grocery store bread went from 2.84 to 3.54. Eggs went from 3.37 to 4.75 per dozen. And here’s a surefire way to create vegetarians - beef prices went from 11.76 per kilo to anywhere between 14.46 to 31.54 per kilo in 2025.

It’s not only the price of food that is making it unaffordable. Wages haven’t kept pace. The minimum wage in Toronto is $2,416 a month. Then, there is the cost of housing. According to the Metro Toronto Federation of Tenants, the median geared-to-income rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,296. I’m not going to do all the math, but you can see where I’m going—something has to give, and for many people, it’s buying food.

This has pushed 20% of Torontonians into using a Food Bank at least once a month. The Daily Bread Food Bank says the number of visits has grown from 600,000 in 2020 to 3.75 million in 2024. As of 2024, the estimated population of Toronto is approximately 2.8 million. That’s like every person in the city going at least 1.3 times in the year. That means a vast number of people need to rely daily on the benevolence of others to feed themselves.

So what does Donald Trump have to do with this Canadian problem? Because we import a lot of our food. USD 80 billion worth of food every year, roughly USD 2,000 per Canadian. Those are wholesale prices. Half of that is from the USA. Baked goods, cereal, vegetables, fruits. Many things that we can’t grow in the ground in 6-9 months of the year or don’t have the mass production capabilities.

That means, if the now twice-delayed 25% tariff on food goes through, the average amount of our per-person bill for USA imported foods will then jump to $1,250. But it doesn’t stop there because the Canadian dollar buys less now.

On Sunday, Feb 2, it took 1.45 Canadian dollars to buy 1 USA dollar. A year ago, it was 1.34 CAD to the USD. That only means one thing: more expensive food.

Oh, and for the other $1,000 per year for the other 50% of the imported food? There might not be a tariff, but we still have to fork over in USD because that’s what the world uses for commerce. So the clementines from Morocco, which use Dirhams as their currency, need to be purchased in USD and then converted to CAD. Each time there is a loss in the exchange rate, the cost of the goods increases.

At the same time, we export $32 billion a year to the USA. Grains, baked goods, maple syrup, frozen French fries (1.2 billion USD per year!).

We can’t stop importing just as we can’t stop exporting. There are things we need or want that we can’t grow. Just as there are things we grow that we can’t eat. The entire prairie economy was created on the export of wheat. Atlantic Canada’s economy would suffer dramatically if it wasn’t for the voracious demand for French fries (shoestring, wedge, spicy, waffle) and seafood in the USA. And the greenhouses in southwestern Ontario would turn into vast pots of tomato sauce if they stopped exporting tomatoes to the USA.

We can look at substitution and import from other countries. Who knew that blueberry-growing Canadians would be eating Peruvian blueberries in the dead of winter?

But when food comes from away, we have little control over price, quality and timing. Who knows, Peruvians might get tired of Canadian miners digging up their mountains and impose massive price increases on our blueberry consumption.

The obvious solution is to grow more here or to change up what we grow. After all, we do have the space and the technology in place to grow fresh food year-round. But here are the challenges to that:

* Canada has limited the number of Foreign Temporary Workers, who make up a quarter of all farm labourers, while there are expected to be 100,000 vacancies in agriculture by 2030 (Canadian Federation of Independent Business). Who is going to harvest the crop?

* Our arable land continues to be gobbled up for housing, industry and highways,

* Natural disasters such as flooding, drought and wildfires have wreaked havoc in many food-growing areas of Canada.

* Despite technological advances, many of the products we don’t grow in Canada, or only grow seasonally.

* Small communities in the far north produce nothing other than what they can harvest from the wild, such as seasonal berries and wild animals (deer, fish, etc.).

Like war, this level of food insecurity is existential. Our future well-being depends on how we handle it.

Have I provoked enough existential anxiety for one day? How about a solution or two?

Some will argue, mainly those who are very much in the purely free market corner, that the marketplace will solve the issues by adjusting to consumer needs. For instance, most fast food places now feature meals for $4 or $5 because they are losing so much business. Loblaws has been introducing frozen fish packages for $10. If the tariffs do go through, we will have an abundance of seafood from Atlantic Canada, but the people who catch it will be paid a lot less because of the glut on the market. In the end, market forces will drive up prices as the demand for higher profits outweighs the communal good.

One simplistic answer, and one that doesn’t entirely fix the problem, is to watch the products you buy. If you see a massive jump in the prices of your usual products, look for ones that aren’t experiencing that massive jump. That means it’s probably made/grown in Canada or elsewhere where we aren’t being hit with tariffs. By the way, many pundits (both professional and amateur - like me) believe President Trump will quickly pull back on the tariffs because his base will start to push back.

But even if he does, that doesn’t address key underlying issues that make food unaffordable in Canada.

We can’t continue to rely on imports from other countries to the point where if we lose the ability to receive food from them (for whatever reason, political or climate issues), we won’t be able to afford groceries.

We cannot continue to rely on Food Banks. They were set up as temporary solutions, and they are starting to fail due to the massive demands. The Mississauga Food Bank recently had to lay off staff to ensure its core service of providing emergency food wasn’t affected.

It’s worth noting that the key ways to fight food insecurity are not new. And when we were on top of these, people had housing, good paying jobs and therefore, the freed-up income to pay for food.

* Affordable housing will free up more disposable income. There are many ways to build this. Credit Unions, unions, co-ops, governments, religious groups and non-profit organizations can provide the seed funding necessary to get the critical pre-construction costs covered. I’m avoiding talking about for-profit as they have always wanted to turn affordable housing into full-market rental units as soon as their government contracts expire.

* Review minimum wage rates - it’s now $17.20, but it needs to be at least $22.08 (but even that number is outdated).

* There is a growing interest in a basic guaranteed minimum income.

* Protect all farmland from development. Period.

* Find ways to ensure small farms can succeed by protecting farmland from development and giving them the financial tools needed to buy or lease long-term (The drop in the number of small farmers is so severe that even farm suppliers like Peaveys’ are going bankrupt).

* Develop year-round fresh fruit and vegetable growing operations. You can now buy Ontario and Quebec strawberries year-round because they are grown in greenhouses. I’m sure the greenhouse owners in BC, Ontario and Quebec will love to build more facilities if they know they can get a long-term commitment for their produce. Maybe all it will take is for the tariffs to be implemented, and large corporate farms will increase their crop diversity (in Ontario, they focus on strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers)

* Small northern communities can create entire indoor farms with container farms. Community-owned growers in small rural and northern communities can be set up if there is enough affordable energy (building more non-diesel electricity generation - hydro, wind, solar, etc will be needed).

* Growing food closer to where it is consumed will reduce the high costs of transportation that rural and northern consumers must pay for fresh food.

* Improve the quality of plant and animal stock to handle drought and flooding better. We’ve developed strains of wheat, canola, blueberries, etc. We can put a real push on to do more.

* We can also encourage people, like we did in WWI and WWII, to grow more of their own food. Apartment dwellers can be given access to land.

Most of these things are too big for one person, one Buy Canadian App, or even one food producer to solve. What it boils down to are two factors. Can we produce food for less, and can we put more money into people’s pockets? It is certainly not within the realm of people like that woman at Freshco to effect any changes on her own.

Mahatma Gandhi helped overturn the British Empire by encouraging Indians to stop buying salt through British-controlled processes and start producing their own. The 21st-century Gandhi-esque online movement is to identify Canadian-made products. That will help Canadian companies produce even more. But that won’t solve the cost of food, nor will it increase the minimum wage to a livable level. Maybe the 21st-century movement should look back to the early 20th-century movement of unionizing for higher wages and the mid-century movement to rekindle the affordable housing push, and we can change that Freshco shopper’s future from eating less to being able to buy what she needs.