I keep seeing this cited, even after many months. The "Canada's food inflation is the worst in the G7" claim Pierre Poilievre keeps making:
The Conservative website still has this petition up:
If the "worst in the G7" claim true? Probably, but only if you select the right start and end dates—but I'm going to leave that there, and just assume there's a span of time when this is true.
This claim is only relevant if you ignore the false equivalence in comparing Canada to the rest of the G7.
Lets look at this odd language.
The worst food inflation in the G7 isn't a global phenomenon.
Is this saying that food inflation in Canada is not due to any global influence?🙄 Or that the "worst" aspect of food inflation isn't caused by forces outside of Canada? The first meaning isn't defensible. The second is plausible—though not a clear meaning—even if it represents a small fraction of the total inflation.
Rhetorically, this sentence, and what follows, pushes the reader toward an indefensible meaning:
Canada’s food inflation is not really global in origin. It is caused by Canadian government policy.
That does not follow.
A global phenomenon can still produce uneven national outcomes.
The sentence is oddly phrased because it conflates those two different claims.
A cleaner version would be:
“Global pressures contributed to food inflation, but Canada’s especially poor G7 ranking suggests domestic factors also played a role.”
That would be fair. But politics doesn't play fair. Remember:
"It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be plausible..." —Tom Flanagan, former Harper advisor.
It's not fair to compare Canada to the rest of the G7. Even a brief look at our G7 peers (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) shows it is obvious that Canada is structurally weird inside the G7.
Canada is geographically enormous, thinly populated, cold, and highly urbanized along a narrow southern band. That means long transport chains, seasonal dependence on imports, high cold-chain costs, and large regional differences. Canada is also both a major food exporter and a major food importer. Agriculture Canada says Canada exported about $100.3 billion in agriculture and food products in 2024, while also emphasizing that the sector depends heavily on international trade. Farm Credit Canada also describes Canada as both a major exporter and importer of agriculture and food products.
That matters because Canada does not simply “grow lots of food, therefore groceries should be cheap.” Canada exports a lot of grains, oilseeds, pulses, meat, fish, and processed products. But Canadians consume a lot of products that are seasonal, imported, greenhouse-grown, highly processed, or dependent on U.S./global supply chains: fresh fruit, leafy greens, coffee, cocoa, citrus, spices, and many packaged foods. Statistics Canada’s food inflation analysis has repeatedly pointed to weather, commodity shocks, reduced crop yields, cattle inventories, disease, tariffs, and imported-food pressures as causes of grocery inflation.
It's a made-in-Canada crisis driven by Liberal inflation and hidden taxes on groceries.
When you tax those who grow, ship, and store food, you tax everyone who buys the food.
"Liberal inflation" is obvious rhetoric. Suffice to say that the pandemic, Russia-Ukraine war, lasting global supply and labour disruptions, and the incredibly stupid USA-Israel-Iran war were certainly not caused by Canada.
But that second sentence concerning taxation is true, to an extent. It is also why Canada already zero-rates most basic groceries for GST/HST. The problem is that Poilievre is extending the argument from direct taxes on groceries to any upstream tax or regulatory cost affecting food production, transport, storage, packaging, or retail.
The logical conclusion here is that anything vital should not be taxed. That is not impossible as a philosophy, but it is a huge tax-policy claim. Governments would either need to raise other taxes, cut spending, or accept larger deficits. And every exemption creates boundary fights: what counts as “food”? What counts as “essential”? Is a greenhouse tomato essential? Coffee? Candy? Restaurant food? Organic strawberries flown in during winter? Delivery apps? Refrigerated warehouse electricity keeping life-giving ice cream frozen?
Poilievre is treating food as if it can be surgically isolated from the general economy. But food production uses fuel, roads, electricity, buildings, land, labour, packaging, finance, insurance, and imports. If every input touching food is treated as tax-exempt because food is essential, then the exemption expands very quickly from groceries to much of the economy.
But, all that aside, are these "whereas" statements even true?
The Liberal industrial carbon tax on fertilizer and farm equipment makes producing food more expensive…
This is worded to mislead.
There is an industrial carbon-pricing system, and it can affect high-emitting industrial producers, including parts of the fertilizer supply chain.
But the phrase “on fertilizer and farm equipment” is sloppy. Canada does not have a simple retail “carbon tax on fertilizer” or “carbon tax on farm equipment” in the way that sentence suggests. Canada has a fertilizer emissions reduction target, but Agriculture Canada says that target is not a mandatory reduction in fertilizer use and is aimed at reducing fertilizer emissions while maintaining or improving yields.
On farm equipment, the old federal fuel charge had specific farm exemptions. The government’s own 2018 backgrounder said the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act provided farmers relief from the fuel charge for fuels used in tractors, trucks, and other farm machinery, using exemption certificates. Senate debate material also stated that gasoline and diesel used by farmers in eligible farming machinery, such as trucks and tractors, was already exempt under the GGPPA.
And the consumer fuel charge itself was set to zero effective April 1, 2025. The federal government said it ceased application of the federal fuel charge and removed requirements for provinces and territories to have a consumer-facing carbon price as of that date.
To what extent any regulation adds to food prices, what does it come to, if anything? A quarter penny per potato? More? Less? We don't know. We are left to conveniently assume it is something present and substantial.
The Liberal plastics ban makes packaging food more expensive and causes food to spoil faster…
The actual single-use plastics ban mostly targets bags, cutlery, straws, stir sticks, ring carriers, and certain takeout-style foodservice ware. That is not the same as a broad ban on grocery-store food packaging. I work in that industry. Plastic remains everywhere. Check out meat trays, frozen foods, bags of apples...
Meanwhile, based on this position, we may have to assume that the CPC is not concerned with plastics in our environment. Or in our brains.
The second hidden Liberal carbon tax on gas and diesel makes food transportation more expensive.
This is almost certainly referring to the Clean Fuel Regulations. The government says the Clean Fuel Regulations do not set a fuel price but require fuel suppliers to reduce the lifecycle carbon intensity of gasoline and diesel produced or imported for use in Canada.
Supporters call it a regulation, not a tax. Critics call it a hidden carbon tax because compliance costs can show up in pump prices. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that, by 2030, the Clean Fuel Regulations would impose household costs ranging from $231 for lower-income households to $1,008 for higher-income households, measured as annual cost impacts.
What portion of that would go toward food prices is unclear.
The implication is that the cost of cleaner fuels aren't worth it. I partially agree. Let's ditch using fuel altogether—but I digress.
As for the Weakest and Most Loaded Claim...
And whereas Mark Carney’s inflation tax, resulting from higher deficits and money printing, has pushed food inflation to the highest in the G7.
This sentence is a political blender. It takes a real outcome — high food inflation — adds a real but broad concern — deficits can be inflationary — then throws in “money printing” and assigns the whole thing to Mark Carney. It sounds causal, but it does not prove causation. It is designed to make a complex food-price problem feel like one man’s tax.
There is a serious debate over how much of Canada’s pandemic inflation came from fiscal stimulus. But credible sources, including the Bank of Canada and IMF, do not describe it as simply a made-in-Canada policy error. They point to the interaction between stimulus-driven demand and worldwide supply shocks: energy, food, shipping, commodities, labour disruption, and the Ukraine war. “Government policy mattered” is fair. “Mostly Liberal inflation and money printing” is rhetoric.
But current food inflation in 2025–26 is tied to supply-chain shocks, tariffs, weather, import dependence, the Canadian dollar, high transportation costs, short growing seasons, and grocery-sector structure—standard Canadian stuff for years plus a large pinch of recent USA tariff policy.
Absent here is any "government deficit = high food prices" evidence.
The "money printing" claim is oft-cited by Poilievre, and has me wondering if he knows anything about modern economics. He at least seems unconcerned to appear lost in, at best, the mid-20th century of that dismal science.
I assume it is populist shorthand. It certainly plays to the "take us back to the gold standard" types that support him.
News flash: The Bank of Canada doesn't turn on the presses when the government borrows money.
“Money printing” is a lazy phrase. In a modern economy, most money is created through bank lending, and most borrowing is private. Inflation usually comes from demand, credit, supply shocks, energy costs, wages, profits, imports, and policy all colliding. Reducing that to “the government printed money” is politics, not analysis.
Finally, I wanted to address this:
Whereas Mark Carney and this Liberal government have driven food prices up by 40% since taking power.
Did you catch it?
“Mark Carney and this Liberal government” puts Carney first, making him the face of the accusation. A casual reader hears: Carney took power, and food went up 40%. But the 40% number only works if the timeline reaches back to the Liberals taking office in 2015, not Carney personally, who has only been PM since 2025.
“Have driven” is also doing heavy lifting. It does not say “food prices have risen.” It says Carney and the Liberals caused the increase. That converts a price statistic into a blame claim without proving causation.
“Food prices” is broad enough to sound like groceries, restaurants, and general household pain all at once. It avoids the more precise categories: food purchased from stores, restaurant food, meat, produce, dairy, etc. That vagueness helps the claim feel larger.
“40%” gives the sentence numerical authority. A specific number makes the sentence feel factual and measured, even though the key dispute is not only the number but the attribution and timeline.
(The 40% figure seem plausible, even likely.)
The Real Cause of Grocery Inflation
We need more competition in Canada’s grocery oligopoly. Poilievre’s claim that cutting Liberal taxes and regulations will solve the problem skips the obvious question: why would dominant grocers pass those savings on? Without real competitive pressure, cost cuts can just become corporate margin.
Long before COVID and long before Carney, credible global food-security researchers were warning that climate change, population growth, dietary shifts, and fragile supply chains would put upward pressure on food costs and increase price volatility. That does not absolve Canadian governments of responsibility for domestic policy choices, but it does make “made-in-Canada food inflation” a very selective story. Ten years ago FAO warned us. As did the IPCC.
Poilievre is using food inflation as a populist entry point for a familiar anti-tax, anti-regulation message. The grievance is real. His proposed cure is not demonstrated. Cutting costs for producers, shippers, or grocers does not guarantee lower prices for consumers, especially in an oligopoly. Without competition, savings can and would disappear into corporate margins.
Poilievre doesn't care about the price of eggs. He cares that he can leverage the grievance for political gain.
It certainly worked for Trump.
