Choosing to feed his pets over feeding himself is a decision that James, a resident of a small rural town in Manitoba, has had to make more than a few times.
“They’ll always eat before me, but I just worry that it’s going to become even more difficult if prices continue on this trend,” he said.
James has noticed not only higher grocery prices across the board but also that food costs more in his rural community than in the nearest city.
“I’ve gone weeks with just eating rice or beans, and my social life has gone away because I can’t afford to leave town, much less spend critical money on non-essential things,” he said.
On Halloween this year, despite wishing he could hand out candy to neighbourhood kids, James had to turn off his house lights and not answer the door.
Canadian grocery bills have skyrocketed, rising by roughly 27 per cent over the past five years. It’s an increase roughly in line with most of Canada’s G7 peers, according to a new data analysis from the IJF.
While many voters and opposition politicians have pointed fingers at the federal government, economists interviewed by the IJF said factors like the pandemic, more extreme weather events and the war in Ukraine are mainly to blame for rising food costs.
“Almost none of it’s domestic in the food basket. Almost nothing,” said Ellen Goddard, an agricultural economist at the University of Alberta.
“Government policy has had the least impact on food prices of any of the inflationary pressure we felt,” agreed Mike von Massow, a professor of food economics at the University of Guelph.
The cost of bringing home the bacon
While a small rate of inflation is normal — and even considered desirable — inflation on food items has regularly outstripped overall inflation levels in Canada over the last five years.
Numbers from September show that, while overall inflation has cooled, food price rises show no signs of slowing down. Beef as well as fats and oils saw the sharpest price hikes.
For the average Canadian, $100 worth of groceries bought in September 2019 could cost as much as $127.38 today.
This places Canada third-worst, behind the U.K. and Germany, and ahead of the U.S., Italy and France for food affordability.
Between 2021 and 2023, food prices shot up dramatically worldwide. During this period, Canada fared comparatively better against its G7 peers.
However, in the past twelve months, Canada has ranked the highest for food price rises among the six countries analyzed, the IJF found.
Canadians, especially those on low or fixed incomes, have felt the bite of these higher food prices.
The IJF spoke with several food banks across the country who all confirmed a sharp uptake in the use of their services in the past few years.
“Food banks are supposed to be a stopgap in case of emergencies — a sudden job loss, housing change, or other short-term situation,” said Corrina Parent, a spokesperson for food security organization Feed Nova Scotia. But, according to their data, “only 2.1% of people indicated they are using food banks for those reasons.”
“This tells us that people are relying on food banks to regularly meet their most basic needs.”
Food banks in Alberta have seen their usage more than double in the past five years, said Shawna Bissell, executive director of Food Banks Alberta.
“We are very concerned that the usage increase is going to become unsustainable very quickly, if not already,” said Bissell, who added she has also noticed a rise in people with jobs.
This “indicates to us that we’re in an affordability crisis,” she said, adding that other growing demographics they’ve noticed are seniors on fixed incomes and families with young children.
Food Banks Alberta has also seen a fall in donations from both individuals as well as local corporations. And where Food Banks Alberta has had to purchase food themselves to supplement donations, “our dollars aren’t able to stretch like they used to,” added Bissell.
Global not domestic issues to blame, say economists
So who — or what — is to blame for rising grocery bills?
Federal Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has pointed to the government’s carbon tax as the main culprit.
In a video posted earlier this year to Poilievre’s YouTube channel titled “How Trudeau’s carbon tax makes your food more expensive,” the Conservative leader levelled blame at the Liberal government.
“You wonder why we’ve had the worst food inflation in 40 years after eight years of this prime minister,” Poilievre said. “The answer is this prime minister is taxing the farmer that makes the food, the trucker that ships the food and every other person that works hard to bring that food to our table.”
Von Massow, citing reports by the Bank of Canada, disagreed. “Things like the carbon tax have had a very small impact, point one, [point] two per cent, on food price inflation and on inflation generally,” said von Massow.
This percentage “is not insignificant, but it's not big in the context of the changes we've seen,” he added.
On the other hand, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has pushed blame onto grocery store chains. Speaking outside a Loblaw-owned Real Canadian Superstore in July, Singh said food inflation has happened “because the Liberals and Conservatives have let the CEOs have all the power, all the wealth to rip you off and you end up paying the price.”
The lack of grocery store chains has garnered greater scrutiny after the Competition Bureau released a report in late June 2023 calling for greater competition within the grocery industry.
“Most Canadians buy groceries in stores owned by a handful of grocery giants,” the report read. “In our view, Canada needs more grocery competition. Governments at all levels need to take steps to encourage and support more grocery competition in Canada.”
The bureau noted that three chains in Canada — Loblaws, Sobeys and Metro — reported more than $100 billion in sales in 2022 and own an overwhelming share of the grocery stores from which most Canadians purchase their food.
Amid talk of a lack of industry competition, the federal government in July managed to get all major retailers in Canada to sign onto a grocery code of conduct. It’s unclear, however, how much the code will impact food prices.
Von Massow also dismissed a lack of grocery store competition as a key factor in driving up food prices. Loblaws, Canada’s largest grocer, holds a smaller share of the market than Walmart does in the U.S., he said.
And, according to some experts, domestic factors like a lack of grocery store competition or the carbon tax have had a minor influence on prices compared to global ones.
Goddard pointed to the pandemic as the main driver of recent food price increases.
As pandemic restrictions lifted, most people had more savings than usual, having deferred purchases, explained Goddard. This pushed up the demand for goods. However, said Goddard, it was difficult for economies around the world to immediately bounce back to their usual supply levels, let alone respond to this greater demand.
“All of those bottlenecks meant that the demand kept increasing and increasing for these products, and the first thing that happens when demand increases, if you can’t adjust supply, is the price goes up,” said Goddard.
While this helps explain overall inflationary trends, international conditions, like the conflict in Ukraine, have also contributed to sky-high prices of food specifically.
Von Massow pointed to the cost of items like pasta and bread as being inflated due to the conflict’s effects on Ukraine’s wheat supply. Restricted trade with Russia limiting the supply of fertilizer and fuel also impacted food prices.
The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events has also driven up food costs, according to von Massow and Goddard. A drought in the Mediterranean last year pushed up olive oil prices, for example. Extreme rains, heat waves and drought in several countries across West Africa have recently driven up cocoa prices.
Looming Trump tariffs
Even if economists are unconvinced that the federal government bears the most responsibility for higher food prices, there’s a good chance the Liberal Party might suffer the consequences of high inflation whenever the next general election is called.
In the U.S., the economy was the most-cited reason among Republican voters for voting Donald Trump back into the Oval Office, according to an NBC exit poll.
Rising prices, including for food, appear to also be top of mind for voters in Canada. An Ipsos poll from September found the top issues Canadians want parliamentarians to tackle are “reducing the cost of everyday items such as groceries” (47 per cent) and “inflation and interest rates” (36 per cent).
Trump’s sweep back to power south of the border could also mean even higher inflation for Canada in the coming years, including on food, experts say.
“Given what Canada imports, especially in the winter, a weaker Canadian dollar increases food price inflation in Canada because, even if we're buying it from Central America or other places, we're paying for it in U.S. dollars,” said von Massow.
“If Trump is elected and puts in some of the tariffs that he's talking about, I'd think we'd see a Canadian dollar weakening.”
James, too, is worried about prices with Trump now newly the president-elect. “With Trump’s tariffs I fully expect grocery prices to get significantly worse here in Canada.”
“Honestly I’m worried about basic survival now.”