To say Canadian agriculture faces unprecedented challenges is an understatement.
Major markets are disrupted or lost, competitiveness is at risk, innovation is slowing and supply chains are becoming increasingly unreliable. It’s all combining to push the sector toward a potential crisis.
While the old way of doing business used to be enough to get by, the onslaught of U.S. tariffs has underscored the need for generational change in Canadian ag policy.
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That needs to start with leadership and immediate action to respond to the trade war.
The election campaign will push “immediate” off until May. Maybe some of the tariffs will be avoided by then, but maybe not. When the federal government finally gets past caretaker mode, it needs to be prepared to act fast.
Action must go beyond offering farmers and businesses more financing. The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute offered a list of actions governments could take a month ago. Governments should feel free to steal these ideas, or do something else. They just need to do more than what they have done over the last several months.
However, that list was developed a month ago. Since then, the situation with the United States has gotten worse, and China has entered the tariff game.
Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will impact food processors and consumers. And there is the increasing threat of significant disruption to supply management.
However, the tariffs exacerbate an already challenging situation and underscores the need for more than short-term action. For too long we have taken the pressure off the gas pedal of innovation and market development. The need is for generational change in ag policy.
The good news is that a new prime minister and minister of agriculture will step into their roles just as planning starts for the next five-year policy framework. Reinvigorating the FPT agreement is the best chance to take the long-term action needed to put the pedal back to the metal.
Keep in mind that when you add in business risk management, the five-year agreement effectively invests $15 billion in the sector. That funding will be essential to facilitating the change the sector needs.
However, there are two big questions that need to be answered first:
- Change to what?
- How do we get there?
Governments should not answer the first question on their own. They must meaningfully engage, and ministers need to show a political commitment to working more closely with the sector.
So, what does that leadership look like?
In July, ministers should kick start that process by creating several federal-provincial-territorial sector working groups. These groups, co-chaired by ministers and supported by senior bureaucrats, would work to define the “what” on critical topics including trade, value-added, innovation and sustainability.
They would be tasked with producing a substantive consultation document that would be released for broader feedback in early 2026. After considering the feedback, they will prepare a final report to the FPT table.
Ministers would then consider all the input and release a new destination for the ag policy framework in July 2026. They would then have a year to negotiate how to implement that agenda in the next policy framework.
Then it is time to answer how we get to that destination.
The first step is to turn the FPT agreement into a policy agreement again. It has to do more than set the terms for how money is spent. Ministers should be committing to regulatory harmonization, greater policy coherence and co-ordinated approaches to trade.
Second, there is much that should change within the program framework. Twenty-five years ago, agreeing to the 60:40 cost share formula and the program mix was a major accomplishment. However, the world has changed since then and the framework needs to change, too.
That change should involve a new approach to the roles of each level of government and the sector.
As an example:
The federal government should take the lead on innovation. Investing more is an important step, but investing differently will likely have a greater impact. Too often the FPT framework divides funding and programming between provinces, making it hard to deliver the scale needed to deliver real change.
The provinces should then take the lead on on-farm sustainability and the federal government should do less. Provinces can focus on the unique environmental needs of their region. It would also allow for more flexibility and experimentation in programming across the country.
Change is hard. Governments have been too comfortable with the status quo and have lacked the motivation to deliver change for 25 years. Unfortunately, the world has not waited to change, so the question is whether Canadian ag can change too?
Tyler McCann is managing director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute.
