January 28, 2026
“What we’re doing is working. High fives all around. But let’s keep fighting to make sure these policies are done right.” -Marissa Alexander, Executive Director of Food Secure Canada.
This week’s announcement of the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit and National Food Security Strategy is a serious win for Canada’s food sovereignty movement. It has taken much hard work to get here.
Congratulations to our partners at Right to Food for leading the charge on the Groceries and Essentials Benefit, which will improve the lives of 12 million Canadians. See their statement on where we can go from here.
We’re looking forward to working with the government and our partners to create a National Food Security Strategy—we hope it will be informed by evidence and that its mandate cuts across government departments.
We welcome the $150 million Food Security Fund and $20 million for the Local Food Infrastructure Fund as important steps, though substantially more investment is needed. Commitments to strengthen the Competition Bureau and implement unit price labelling are also promising.
During the last federal election, our Eat Think Vote campaign gave 10 policy recommendations to the incoming government. Now, with Carney’s announcement, 5 of them are seeing significant progress.
Food Secure Canada has 5 more policies to go. Following up from our 2026 budget submission signed by over 80 partners, we’re going to keep pushing for:
- Strengthening the Canada Child Benefit with a supplement for Northern families
- A Local Food Procurement Action Plan
- Supporting farmers’ land access and migrant workers’ rights
- Alternatives to the grocery oligopoly, such as public grocery stores
- Targeted food security policies for racialized communities, as about 40% of Black and Indigenous households are food insecure
And despite the good news, we are deeply concerned about cuts to the public sector, especially in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. These are our colleagues. We know that without them, farmers and consumers will ultimately see the impacts, and progress will be much harder to achieve.
While we agree with reducing our dependency on the United States, we also need to fix our export-based model. More than half of the food we eat is imported, and more than half of it is exported. Rather than change who we export it to, we need to flip the script: connect Canadian farms to Canadian consumers. To do that, we badly need more infrastructure, distribution, and retail alternatives. We also urge the government to continue to safeguard supply management.
Finally, we’d like to see a commitment to a joined-up National Food Strategy, not siloed in one department. In doing so, the government must re-activate the National Food Policy Advisory Council and meaningfully include Canada’s leading civil society voices.
We know there’s no shortcuts. Food sovereignty means tackling poverty, broken supply chains, and corporate concentration. We’re happy the government is taking a multi-faceted approach. But, in the coming years, we will need your help to win bigger change.