When Canadians wince at the price of a pack of ground beef or a tray of pork chops, they tend to blame the usual suspects: Donald Trump’s trade war, a weak loonie, drought-ravaged harvests, or the stranglehold of a few powerful grocery chains. Politicians are happy to lean into those explanations, and sometimes they’re right. But a growing body of research is pointing to a culprit far less headline-worthy one hiding in government filing systems and permit queues.
Researchers at the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University have reviewed a number of confidential cases involving imported meat shipments that were held up inside Canada’s regulatory pipeline not because the food was unsafe, not because paperwork was missing at the source, but because the administrative machinery on the Canadian side moved too slowly.
In one case, a fully approved meat shipment sat in detention for more than five weeks while permit-related issues were resolved. The product had already cleared the country of origin’s inspection process. It had already been loaded, shipped, and physically delivered to Canadian soil. It was the paperwork or rather, the waiting on paperwork that kept it locked in a refrigerated container, bleeding money by the hour.
Refrigerated containers don’t sit still in an economic sense, even when they’re going nowhere physically. Storage fees accumulate. Refrigeration units keep running and burning fuel. Port penalty charges kick in when containers overstay their allotted berth. Financing costs continue to accrue. And all the while, the clock is ticking on the product’s shelf life something that has no equivalent in, say, a shipment of machine parts.
Industry figures suggest these delays can run between $700 and $2,000 per day, per container. A single week of administrative limbo can translate to more than $10,000 in added costs on a single shipment. Those are not abstract numbers they are real expenses that get passed along, step by step, through the supply chain.
Processors who were counting on that meat to arrive on schedule scramble to find alternatives, often at a premium. Retailers face inventory gaps and the pressure to source product from elsewhere. Food-service businesses restaurants, institutions, caterers absorb higher input costs and adjust their menus and margins accordingly. At the end of that chain stands the consumer, paying more at the checkout without any clear understanding of why.
Canada imported roughly $6.7 billion worth of meat products in 2025. The Dalhousie researchers argue that even if avoidable delays affect only a modest fraction of those shipments, the cumulative cost to the industry runs into the tens of millions of dollars annually. Under more realistic assumptions about how frequently these bottlenecks occur, the figure could surpass $100 million per year.
What makes that number particularly striking is what it is not. It is not a drought. It is not a trade war. It is not a currency shock or a global supply disruption. It is, in the researchers’ phrasing, “largely self-inflicted” an efficiency problem within Canada’s own regulatory system, and therefore one that Canada has the power to fix.
None of this amounts to an indictment of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency as a whole. Importing meat into Canada is genuinely complex work. Before a single kilogram of foreign beef or pork can enter the country, the exporting nation must be formally recognized by the CFIA as having food safety standards comparable to Canada’s. Individual processing facilities must be approved. Permits must be in order. Veterinary health certificates must accompany every shipment. Upon arrival, products may face additional verification and physical inspection before they can enter commercial distribution.
These requirements exist for real reasons. Foodborne illness outbreaks are expensive, dangerous, and erode public trust in the food system. Canadians have every right to expect that what they buy at the supermarket meets rigorous safety standards. The CFIA’s mandate is not optional, and no serious observer is suggesting otherwise.
The concern is different: that safety and efficiency are being treated as if they were in tension with each other, when in practice they need not be. A regulatory system can have robust standards and move quickly. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Food inflation is typically discussed in terms of big, dramatic events a frost that wipes out a citrus crop, a war that disrupts grain exports, a pandemic that shutters processing plants. Those events are real and their impact on prices is real. But inflation also has a quieter face: the accumulation of small, avoidable costs at every stage of the supply chain, each one invisible to the consumer but collectively significant.
An imported shipment waiting five weeks for a permit is not a headline. It does not show up on a commodity price index or a currency chart. But it shows up eventually on a grocery receipt.
If Canadian governments are genuinely serious about food affordability and the political rhetoric in recent years suggests they are then the Dalhousie researchers are offering a rare opportunity: a problem that does not require negotiating with foreign governments, managing weather systems, or restructuring the global economy. It requires looking inward, at administrative processes that have grown inefficient, and making them work better.
As the researchers put it, sometimes the explanation for why food is so expensive is not a macroeconomic force at all.
Sometimes a shipment is just waiting for paperwork.
