Canada has never been a country that worries about feeding itself. With some of the most productive agricultural land on earth, a reliable water supply, and generations of farming families, food security has long been treated less as a policy concern and more as a given.
That assumption is beginning to crack.
Grocery prices have climbed more than 30 percent since 2021, according to Statistics Canada. The Canada Food Price Report 2026 estimates that a family of four will spend upward of $17,000 on food this year alone. Those numbers are striking on their own. What is harder to see and what a series of public hearings in Kelowna last March brought into focus is the pressure that has been building long before those prices appeared on a receipt.
The National Citizens Inquiry convened hearings in Kelowna, British Columbia in March 2026. Witnesses from across the country came forward to place their experiences on the public record. What they described was not one isolated problem but a cluster of pressures — legal, economic, and administrative bearing down on people who grow and raise food for a living.
Constance Seutter, president of the Canadian Cervid Alliance, described the destruction of 587 animals on her farm following regulatory action she contested. She said the compensation she received fell well short of her actual losses and spoke of an industry that has been hollowing out for years. The alliance, she noted, once represented more than 600 farms across Canada. Today, roughly 300 remain.
The legal dimension of such cases, according to civil litigation lawyer Lee Turner, offers little comfort. He testified that authorities need only “a suspicion” of disease to act, and that the courts have historically extended considerable deference to those decisions. More troubling, he explained, is that even when a farmer could demonstrate the original suspicion was wrong, it changes very little. By the time the legal process runs its course, the animals are gone, the operation is disrupted, and the practical remedy has expired. His conclusion was direct: meaningful change, for those in this situation, requires going after the legislation itself.
Beyond the legal limits, witnesses raised concerns about the sequence in which decisions are made and challenged. Connie Shields, who reviewed the regulatory handling of one case, testified that enforcement action moved forward months before the legal review was finished. The outcome, in other words, preceded the ruling meant to evaluate it.
Veterinarian Ted Dupmeier raised a different but related concern. Disease-control measures, he argued, when applied broadly and without adequate distinction between actual risk and precautionary assumption, can carry their own unintended consequences. The very systems those measures are meant to protect can, over time, be weakened by them.
Saskatchewan farmer and livestock nutrition consultant John Graff offered a wider view. Food production, he explained, does not exist in isolation. It sits inside layers of policy, regulation, and economic pressure that interact in ways that are not always immediately apparent. The effects of those pressures are rarely sudden. They accumulate until the room to adapt has shrunk considerably.
That picture was echoed by several farmers who testified about the daily reality of operating in this environment. Dawn Buschert spoke about the mounting weight of regulatory demands layered onto already rising input costs. Teresa Walker described the difficulty of planning ahead in a system that can shift with little warning. Angel Godsoe put it in more personal terms the stress, the uncertainty, and the slow erosion of a livelihood that had once felt stable.
Food researcher Sylvain Charlebois of Dalhousie University, who studies food distribution and policy, has pointed to global supply chain pressure and rising input costs as central drivers of price increases at the consumer level. Alberta grain farmer Jim Ness spoke to the lasting influence of long-standing policy frameworks on the conditions farmers face right now. These are not temporary disruptions. They form the ground on which Canadian agriculture currently stands.
Among the more striking observations at the Kelowna hearings was this: several witnesses mentioned that others had planned to testify but stepped back. The reason, in most cases, was concern about consequences potential effects on compensation claims or regulatory standing.
That silence is difficult to measure, but it is not irrelevant. It suggests the testimony heard may reflect only part of what those inside the system have experienced.
None of this is legible at the grocery store. What shoppers see is the price. The chain of decisions, constraints, and pressures that contributes to that price is far less visible but the connection is real.
Canada has not stopped producing food. By the standard measures, its agricultural sector remains formidable. But resilience is not the same thing as output. A system can continue to produce while the conditions sustaining it quietly deteriorate. The question being raised carefully, through public testimony is whether that is what is happening now.
The National Citizens Inquiry has additional hearings scheduled for June. The testimony from Kelowna is available on the public record for those who wish to examine it directly.
What those hearings ultimately produce remains to be seen. What they have already done is put a set of specific, sourced experiences in front of the public at a moment when the cost of food is something virtually every Canadian household is living with, whether or not they know the reasons behind it.
