After several days on CBC and Radio-Canada discussing Mark Carney's new National Food Security Strategy, Ivey's Abell-Hodgson Chair Jury Gualandris offers a measured assessment. The strategy correctly names three problems: weak grocery competition, under-use of technology in agri-food, and over-reliance on imports. Its focus on regional processing and distribution is welcome. But it risks doing the right things at the wrong scope, and in the wrong order.
Inequality is underweighted. It barely touches economic inequality. A food system cannot be fixed without supporting who can afford to eat in it and who earns a living producing it. The essential benefits top-up of roughly $1,800 per year for a family of four covers only 8 percent of a $22,000 annual grocery bill, while grocery prices have climbed 30 percent in recent years. Extending the school food program is a strong idea, but it must be tied to local farms and processors so value circulates in the regions feeding kids. That is regional food sovereignty.
Concentration is the deeper issue. Concentration runs through the entire chain, especially upstream. Just 4.1 percent of Canadian farms generate 51.5 percent of farm revenue. Canada exports half its beef, 70 percent of its soy and pork, 75 percent of its wheat, and 90 percent of its canola. Over half of arable land grows only wheat and canola. Building more regional hubs for the same few commodities will deepen the problem. Canada needs more variety on farms, in processing, and in distribution. The Ontario Food Terminal has modelled this for over 70 years, linking 400 farms within 200 kilometres to 5,000 buyers and moving two billion pounds annually. International examples such as SEKEM in Egypt, Sustainable Food Places in the UK, Japan's organic villages, and Catalonia's Muga Valley push the model further. Exports are welcome, but they should follow from food sovereignty, not replace it.
The bottleneck is the type of technology, not its availability. Agricultural labour productivity has outpaced most sectors. What is missing is technology built for diversified production and regional processing, rather than more automation serving monoculture exports. Only $150 million targets the small and mid-sized producers most likely to diversify, while the Productivity Super-Deduction will likely be captured by the largest players, consolidating power rather than decentralizing it.
Stop prescribing. Start listening. Ottawa keeps trying to fix northern food insecurity by shipping in solutions, most recently through greenhouse tax incentives. Those communities once fed themselves; cheap imports made local food impossible. Canada has 194 ecoregions, and no national blueprint can know what each one needs. The sequence should be respect, connect, reflect, and only then direct.
The language of the strategy is telling. The word regional appears 10 times. Community and sovereignty appear only 4 times each. Diversity, variety, differentiation, and diversification do not appear at all.
From critique to construction: regional BioHubs and adaptive scale. Research on more than 150 regional BioHubs worldwide points to a fundable, replicable alternative. Successful hubs are typically peri-urban, take 5 to 20 years to mature, and succeed only when trust building precedes any agenda. They operate across three layers: building distinctive local offerings and early cash flows; anchoring a regional economy through shared infrastructure and aggregated supply; and unlocking landscape-scale ecological value through watershed, biodiversity, and carbon instruments.
The goal is achieving the right scope of production and consumption at a regional scale: shared infrastructure for data, logistics, finance, and inputs; local decision making at the edge; and continuous feedback loops. True resilience comes from diversification, redundancy, and shorter regional supply chains, not from concentration that profits from shocks. To support this goal, the Abell-Hodgson Chair in Regenerative Agriculture at the Ivey BSV Centre has been facilitating the emergence of a grass-root community of highly diversified farms in southwestern Ontario (i.e., the CAP program).
From outputs to outcomes. The strategy sets goals around outputs, such as hubs built and dollars deployed, but is quiet on outcomes. Are Canadians healthier, more food-secure, and more sovereign over what is on their plates? Three priorities remain under-delivered: less income inequality, more food diversity matched to ecoregions, and more humility about who decides what gets grown where.