With recent reports that people are out enjoying the weather, we could assume that everything is back to normal after the pandemic. But that’s not entirely true, especially for the beer industry. Total beer sales have dropped 7.3 per cent from last year, according to Beer Canada.
Total beer sales are up in Newfoundland and Labrador by a whopping 20.1 per cent. But in other provinces, sales for retail and service have dropped significantly.
The largest drop this year has been in Quebec, where beer sales have dropped 13.3 per cent compared to last year. Sales have declined in Saskatchewan by 12.6 per cent and by 10.7 per cent in Alberta. Consumption in all areas of the country has fallen, except for the Territories.
In the beer business, a simple one per cent drop is massive, so declining by 3.3 per cent in Ontario is considered a disaster. These drops are in addition to a disastrous 2021 when lockdowns were the norm to combat COVID-19.
When things started to open earlier this year, this wasn’t the scenario the beer industry expected – far from it.
In volume, beer sales are 8.3 per cent below pre-pandemic levels and have dropped for a variety of reasons.
Labour shortages are clearly contributing. Short-staffed restaurants are closing earlier or not opening some days. Many now open only five days instead of seven days. Many close at 10 p.m. instead of two or four hours later.
Public events are back, but we have had fewer of them across the country. And attendance is often down significantly from pre-COVID standards. It will take a while before people get comfortable with our post-COVID reality.
We’re not sure what to expect this fall, pandemic-wise, but people will likely behave with extreme caution, as they should.
Consumers appear to be in a different place. Sales of beer for home consumption have returned to pre-pandemic levels. But beer consumed at restaurants and events remains 35 to 40 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.
Over the last three years or so, many of us turned instead to wine, spirits and other products. Seltzer and ready-to-drink alternatives are also becoming more popular. And Canada went from being an on-premises beer-drinking country to a more at-home wine-and-spirits-drinking market.
Many of us have tried new products and experimented with new tastes and brands. These experiences have drawn many away from beer.
The other key factor is inflation. Alcohol is discretionary; many consumers are cutting expenses to cope with skyrocketing food prices. Beer prices have also risen by 10 to 15 per cent in the last 12 months and will likely rise more next year.
In 2017, the federal government introduced a formula to raise taxes on beer based on the consumer price index (CPI). With this year’s CPI, the deferral portion of taxes on beer could rise by up to seven per cent in April 2023, which would be a record. Some provinces have expressed sympathy by not raising their tax portion on alcohol products, but not federal government – at least not yet.
Working from home changes our behaviours and food choices. The beer situation is one good example of how the food industry is affected by a more home-based food market.
People will drink beer at home, but going to events and seeing friends at different locations will get people to consume more.
Continuing labour issues and market changes will entice the food industry to adjust and seek new opportunities, for better or worse.
This year was expected to be a comeback year for the beer industry, but it looks like it may need to wait a little longer for that to happen.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.
Canadian brewers having a hard time staying afloat
Indigenous access to capital could be a game changer
Bob Merasty
Troy Media
Most Indigenous peoples and nations are not opposed to resource development. In fact, almost every Indigenous community is involved at some level in forestry, commercial fishing, agriculture, oil and gas or mining already.
What we are opposed to is being left out. For over a century, resources were extracted from our territories without our say and without our benefit. That was never acceptable; now, it’s no longer legal. But we are not looking to grind resource development in Canada to a halt. We are looking for opportunities to get involved: as workers, contractors, partners and owners.
One huge opportunity is to create an Indigenous Loan Guarantee program to address what is identified again and again as a main barrier to our economic development: limited access to capital. Because of Indian Act provisions and other historic challenges, most Indigenous communities lack the ability to get financing so they can get involved in business. You need money to make money.
The federal government has the unique ability to provide guaranteed loans at very low rates that cost the taxpayer nothing – we will pay interest! – but provide our communities with a chance to be involved in resource development and become prosperous.
There are already models we can look to. The Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation has helped spur a number of major projects with Indigenous ownership, including pipelines, power plants and cogeneration facilities. The Ontario Aboriginal Loan Guarantee Program supports Indigenous participation in electricity infrastructure projects. And the new Saskatchewan Indigenous Investment Finance Corporation will provide loan guarantees to support Indigenous-equity ownership of major projects in mining, energy, oil and gas, forestry and value-added agriculture.
South of the border, the United States federal government just announced $20 billion in loan guarantees for tribal energy development in its Inflation Reduction Act.
Now the Canadian federal government needs to get on board. This is a low-cost, high-impact strategy that not onladvancesce economic reconciliation but helps get resource projects derisked, approved, and commercially viable.
The First Nations Major Projects Coalition, a network that includes over 85 nations in seven provinces and territories and provides support to projects that involve an equity position for the First Nation partner, has even outlined what a Canadian Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program could look like. There are no more excuses.
Here’s an example of how it could help.
The nations along the Coastal Gas Link route were offered the opportunity to buy equity in the pipeline, thus enhancing their influence, involvement and knowledge of the project, but most importantly, getting a share of the stable revenues it will eventually return. This is key for all our nations if we want to reduce our dependence and become self-determining.
The problem was that while the project is expected to provide utility-scale returns in the range of nine per cent, the communities could only get credit at an interest rate of 12 to 15 per cent. This is extortive. (They still succeeded in getting a 10 per cent option in the pipeline set aside and are seeking alternative financing arrangements.)
This is where government needs to come in: to be the bridge that supports Indigenous communities, the resource sector and the economy all in one fell swoop, with the one thing they have ready at their disposal: cheap money. And they shouldn’t attach strings on what kinds of projects they will fund, for example by excluding oil and gas or nuclear or mining: let Indigenous communities decide for themselves what opportunities fit with their values.
The Indigenous Resource Network has launched a campaign to bring awareness to this gap called Ownership Changes Everything. We are looking for solutions for our people, and this one is staring us in the face. We hope other Canadians, both Indigenous and non, can lend their voices to our efforts.
Bob Merasty is the Executive Director of the HYPERLINK “https://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0013x8eZEeciCiUCJ4wcQHrTi7wlVPmr1racY4Ex6h7KsHiZ_RwcJ9anBmMBE_OLCX_t-ruTPeJlKVOaDuw4fXF1IUMwgzE_v1qgCfGnH_dlsdx3V7OVwBwFPwmotl1qsV9iyCCy6CeWjsKiQCWO6gg2QlqPDa3wJD4&c=7s7Ro1yQK3nz9ddMdsdm4jLmb0daO2r0iKN2BLGQs42aXfssOTqH3A==&ch=3z_NqfhB5u9byjV1UEQJHM9xrcSJOVibrUnYjZ-E1kbpIjmGtcDiMQ==” \t “_blank” Indigenous Resource Network and former Chief of Flying Dust First Nation in Treaty 6.
Food inflation eases but some prices keep surging
Statistics Canada is reminding Canadians every month this year how painful their trips to the grocery store are. The retail inflation rate is at an astonishing 9.9 per cent, its highest point since 1981. And food inflation has exceeded the general rate since last December, which is why food prices are on everyone’s mind.
Allegations of “greedflation” are rampant, accusing the industry of gouging consumers stressed by an increasingly higher cost of living.
We’re seeing signs, though, that things are improving. Calmer seas are ahead as we head to autumn.
Food inflation is often about context. In July 1978, while inflation was at 9.4 per cent, food prices were increasing year-to-year by a whopping 20.2 per cent. That’s by far the largest difference we’ve seen in the last 50 years. Things were out of control.
Canada’s situation is nowhere near what it was in 1978 or what it is elsewhere. In the United States, food inflation at grocery stores is above 13 per cent, and the United Kingdom’s food inflation rate in July was 12.7 per cent, again much higher than ours.
The good news is that our food inflation appears to have peaked or is at least under control, for now. Since April, our overall food inflation rate – 9.2 per cent with retail and service combined – hasn’t reached 10 per cent.
The highest month-to-month jump this year was in January, at 1.4 per cent. That was the highest month-to-month jump since 2016. In June, it was 0.1 per cent. July, however, saw another jump at 0.9 per cent. But since 2011, we’ve seen month-to-month increases exceeding 0.9 per cent a total of just 12 times.
The numbers are telling us that extreme volatility affecting food prices may be behind us. The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on commodity prices, which triggered a new inflationary cycle, has been mostly absorbed by food supply chains. Commodity prices peaked on May 17 and have dropped significantly since.
Supply chains are also dealing with more predictable conditions related to COVID-19 protocols. As governments continue to keep people safe, COVID-related rules and conditions are much more foreseeable, which is really helping the food industry, service and retail.
As consumers, we should expect more rebates, discounted products and loss leaders. It’s easier to offer deals when market conditions are more stable.
Consecutive last-minute lockdowns took their toll and made life a nightmare for many in the food industry.
There are, however, some trouble spots at the grocery store. The first is dairy, with the Canadian Dairy Commission recommending a second unprecedented increase of 2.5 per cent to start on Sept. 1.
Dairy farmers are getting 11 per cent more for their milk and butterfat than in February. It’s great for our farmers, but retail dairy prices have skyrocketed. Since February, according to BetterCart Analytics, fluid milk prices have increased by about 25 per cent. Yogurt, cheese, sour cream and ice cream are all much higher since February, and we expect another jump in the weeks to come as kids go back to school. It couldn’t happen at a worse time.
With record-breaking increases this year, dairy is pricing itself out of the market, and some processors are adjusting. Lactalis Canada, the largest milk buyer in the country, recently converted its Sudbury, Ont., plant and will now solely manufacture plant-based products. This points to where the market is going.
While dairy farmers want more money, what seems to be underappreciated is that we will lose more farms due to an anemic demand for more expensive dairy products.
We’ve also seen higher prices for bakery goods. For many years, bakery goods were a non-story. This year, with more consolidation in processing, it was expected we would see higher prices. Typically, the correlation between commodity and retail prices is weak, but this year’s market conditions with grain scarcity have made access to some ingredients challenging.
Canada’s Food Price Report released in December predicted higher bakery and dairy prices, so it’s not necessarily a surprise.
If you compare this inflationary cycle to a baseball game, we’re in the seventh-inning stretch.
Last week, we learned from Statistics Canada that grocery store sales have dropped three per cent since January, so the market is tightening. More consumers are visiting non-traditional grocers like Walmart, Costco, or even dollar stores to make ends meet.
The days when people flocked to grocery stores at the beginning of the pandemic are long gone. Food sales are earned more than ever. It’s a sign of the times.
Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.
Canada’s peak government is leading to reckless spending
The rapid expansion of government in Canada over the past decade produced an unintended experiment in the role of the state in our lives. The pandemic in particular liberated governments to expand programs, spending and interventions in a manner unprecedented outside of wartime.
As Canadians get a front-row look at life in a society defined by bureaucracy and “peak government,” many don’t like it. But the governing Liberal-NDP non-coalition is talking about even more national programs, including childcare, pharmacare, and dental care. While some people favour more “free stuff” from government, the reality is governments need to get the financial and administrative basics right before unwrapping shiny new programs.
Promoting expensive initiatives while health care is in crisis, the housing market is in disarray, and climate change initiatives stifle the economy without reducing emissions is more upsetting than encouraging. Spending more when our country faces massively increased government debt and rising interest rates seems increasingly reckless.
Canada’s welfare state expanded slowly after the Second World War, except for Indigenous peoples, who faced a massive increase in state intervention. Government policies induced welfare dependency among First Nations and Inuit, disrupting Indigenous communities and undermining their autonomy. For other Canadians, the advance of the state was much slower, and government officials inflicted much less control on people’s daily lives. The country slowly adapted to the slow expanding government programs.
Today that has changed. From vaccine mandates and the ArriveCan app to CERB payments, proposed oversight of Internet content, state-funded journalists, and myriad other policies and programs, the state is ever more present. Interventions like vaccine mandates were dictated by a health care emergency and supported by most Canadians. Others, including mandatory mask requirements in airports and airplanes, mark the country as a regulatory outsider.
Canada’s 2021 federal election campaign epitomized the pursuit of peak government. All three major parties competed to offer more programs, more money, more policies, more debt. This unseemly bribery attempt was matched only by the electorate’s willingness to accept government munificence as their due. After Erin O’Toole helped host the grand government buffet, producing an electoral result that mirrored the campaign’s reckless spending promises, he was removed as Conservative leader.
There have certainly been times – think of the 1970s and ’80s Liberal governments of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau – when government spending became substantially disengaged from government revenues. Generally, however, financially prudent Canadians have supported administrations like those of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, which approached government spending more cautiously or even sought a balance between revenue and expenditures.
Like many countries, Canada takes inspiration from the Scandinavian welfare model. Those who desire a comprehensive Norwegian, Swedish or Danish nanny state conveniently overlook those countries’ high levels of taxation and long-term careful fiscal management. Norway, justifiably lauded for its combination of long-term saving and comprehensive social programming, still benefits from decisions in the 1960s not to spend its rapidly increasing North Sea oil revenues.
Canada, instead, holds a misplaced belief that deficit spending can continue unchecked, with a fiscally uninformed “tax the rich” mantra passing for astute political policy. But instead of being on a path to becoming the new Norway, we seem bent on being New Zealand of the 1980s, when out-of-control spending drove it to the verge of bankruptcy and political calamity.
Canada is stretching the limits of peak government, expanding both programming and spending close to the edge of public tolerance and national finances. The government believes Canada can keep spending whatever money we can borrow, following the logic of unfettered credit card financing or extravagant lifestyles.
It is important to determine the line where citizens are both well served and well protected by their government. Many Canadians appreciate government generosity, as the enthusiastic embrace of CERB demonstrated. New programs, especially childcare and pharmacare, have vocal constituencies, but the electorate must accept the need to connect expanded programming to enhanced economic activity and reliable revenues. A nation can only have the policies and programs that it actually needs and can afford.
The Freedom Convoy, reviled by most but lauded by many, reacted to what they saw as government overreach. Anti-vaxxers reject government vaccine mandates. Other Canadians worry about deficit financing, expanded federal programs in childcare and pharmaceuticals, federal funding for journalism and other examples of a rapidly morphing state. The reality of peak government sits uneasily with many Canadians.
The condition of peak government is not inherently partisan; the Conservative Party has favoured new spending, albeit on a lesser level than the expansionary NDP and free-spending Liberals. The combination of rising interest rates and the frightening size of the federal deficit is forcing the government to show some restraint, but a temporary spending slowdown (if it comes) is not the same as right-sizing government. Canada needs strategies that build and maintain a strong enough economy to match the politicians’ appetites and provide Canadians with the necessary services for 21st-century success.
Peak government, as Norway has discovered, can be a remarkable and stabilizing achievement. Many countries have discovered that government overreach, both fiscal and programmatic, can send a nation into a deep spiral. Canada’s unbalanced approach, combined with the license to spend granted to government by a terrible pandemic, is far removed from a Norwegian trajectory.
Canadians must rediscover the need to link government spending with revenues. To do otherwise, and accept the buck-passing addiction of deficit financing that impoverishes future generations, is to abandon our responsibility for balancing our appetite for government services with our willingness to pay taxes and, even more importantly, produce and sustain economic growth.
Ken Coates is a Distinguished Fellow and Director of the Indigenous Affairs Program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan.
Tone-deaf politicians ignore the realities of health care
Canada’s health-care system continues to implode and fail Canadian patients at a catastrophic level.
Systemic problems and staffing issues are overwhelming health care delivery, and people are dying from a lack of proper care. Daily news reports now relate the most egregious dysfunctions as patients sought help and instead found themselves in a chaotic system that can no longer guarantee basic medical care.
Patients, doctors, nurses and health-care workers all recognize that universal health care is failing. Frankly, the only people who don’t see a system in crisis are the tone-deaf politicians who control Canadian health care and how it is delivered.
How bad is it?
In British Columbia, one million people cannot find a family doctor. A desperate woman took out an ad in the Victoria newspaper offering to pay “any reasonable fee” to a physician who would “renew my 82-year-old husband’s prescriptions.” Six months after his family doctor retired, he could no longer renew his prescriptions and no family doctor could be found.
In Alberta, a man had to stay by his dying father’s side for three days in a High River Emergency Department because there were no beds. His father was in the final stages of esophageal cancer and required constant monitoring to keep his airway clear, but the hospital and its staff were overwhelmed. He told a reporter, “We’re here for three days, and there’s no bed available, and there’s no one to watch him, there’s no one to be there … I’m by myself.”
How tone deaf are our politicians to these events?
BC Premier John Horgan made a joke about the advertisement for a doctor placed by the desperate woman, stating that perhaps he should follow suit and “take out an ad in the paper” to get the federal government’s attention to fix health care. Most notably, he didn’t take any responsibility for the acute physician shortage that has plagued BC health care for several years under his leadership or make any offer of assistance to the couple in need.
An equally tone-deaf Alberta government thumbs its nose at frustrated patients and overworked health-care workers by giving the province’s chief medical officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, a massive $228,000 bonus on top of her $363,000 annual salary.
To put that into proper perspective, $228,000 could have provided 5,000 hours of nursing care at a mid-range cost of $45 per hour. It could also have covered 19 joint replacement surgeries at the going rate of $12,000 per operation. Meanwhile, Alberta’s physicians have been without a contract since 2020, and the provinces’ nurses were asked to take a three per cent wage cut during pandemic negotiations.
On the federal front, irony reigns supreme: Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP and supposed cheerleader for universal health care, may be the most tone-deaf politician of all. Even as daily news stories reveal a system in need of reorganization and change, he has demanded that the Liberal government set aside $5.3 billion to clean children’s teeth every six months (even though Stats Canada says two-thirds of Canadians already have private dental insurance).
His demand doesn’t necessarily mean that Singh is particularly concerned about helping children, improving health care or doing what is best for Canadians. After all, the federal government doesn’t have the money to implement a dental plan, and it makes no sense to add another layer of government bureaucracy to an already failed health-care bureaucracy. Instead, he is putting politics first by forcing Trudeau to toss another $5.3 billion on the health-care dumpster fire to live up to their Faustian bargain whereby the NDP would prop up the minority Liberal government in exchange for legislative favours such as dental care.
Emergency departments are closing, we don’t have enough hospital beds, staffing shortages are rampant, health-care workers are burnt out, and patients are dying from a lack of basic medical care. Yet political expediency once again trumps the realities of fixing health care.
Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the author of Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-Care Crisis.
Expensive housing here to stay unless governments change policies
The recent rise in interest rates has dampened demand for home sales in Canada.
The hike, inevitable given how historically low rates have been, has taken some of the froth off housing prices. However, given how high home prices still are in Canada, a useful question to ask is what governments can do to reverse previous poor policy and permanently increase supply, which has been part of the core problem.
Recent price declines in some markets seem significant. Composite prices in greater Toronto have already dropped by 13 per cent since March, and prices in Vancouver are down by 4.5 per cent. However, before millennials or anyone else in the market for a detached home, townhouse or condominium get too excited about a deal, consider that the composite price in Metro Vancouver is still over $1.2 million while, in Toronto, it remains over $1.1 million. Those are far from bargain prices.
Those figures did not arrive at such elevated heights overnight. The long-term trend has been heading to unaffordable prices for decades. Demographia International has calculated the rise in Canadian housing costs back to the 1980s by dividing the median house price by gross median household income. The resulting number is then tagged as affordable (3.0 and under), moderately unaffordable (3.1 to 4.0), seriously unaffordable (4.1 to 5.0), and severely unaffordable (5.1 and above).
To grasp just how expensive Canada has become for housing, in 1987 the house-price-to-income ratio for the entire country was just 3.0, i.e., affordable. By 2020, the median market score for Canada as a whole was double that, or 6.0 – severely unaffordable. Some markets, such as Vancouver and Toronto, are in the double digits of “severely unaffordable” when median prices are compared with incomes.
It’s clear that Canada has a housing affordability problem and likely will indefinitely, even with slightly higher interest rates. That is unless governments begin to address their own roles in making and keeping housing prices high.
On the demand side, immigration levels also contribute to higher prices. But immigration deserves a complete analysis on its own, given that the “right” immigration levels address labour supply needs and other issues.
In a report for SecondStreet.org, I looked at just the supply side of the problem, as provincial and local governments across the country and the ideological spectrum could take action without waiting for measures from the federal government.
The problem of constrained supply is severe. Scotiabank noted last year that Canada needs 1.8 million housing units to reach a balanced market. Now consider how government policy is preventing such a balance and moderate prices.
The first problem on the supply side is regulation and bureaucracy, including how quickly housing developments are approved. The second factor is escalating fees and taxes.
For example, in 2020, the Canadian Home Builders Association (CHBA) noted that development approvals in Canada take an average of 1.5 to two years to obtain (and more in some cases) – an average of over 20 months for multiple applications and an average of nearly 12 months for single applications.
As the CHBA also noted, for every extra month the builder waits for approval for multiple-unit buildings, the average additional monthly cost is $351,500 for a low-rise project and $216,300 for a high-rise project.
Beyond the industry analysis, British Columbia’s NDP government’s 2021 report on housing, chaired by former party leader Joy MacPhail, also noted that there was indeed a problem with regulation and delays. The report urged governments to “clarify and speed up approval processes for the planning and construction of homes,” noting that “The time needed to steer new housing projects from concept through to ground-breaking can take years” and that this delay “can cost tens of thousands of dollars per new unit … .”
The other issue making housing pricier than it ought to be is taxes and fees. The B.C. report found that “some of these fees – notably community amenity contributions – can be unpredictable or inconsistent, causing significant uncertainty, raising costs and compromising supply.”
For its part, the federal government could raise the maximum allowable price for a GST rebate on a new home to $750,000 from the current $450,000 and provide a full rebate of the tax rather than a partial one. That policy change, in combination with the “tens of thousands” of dollars that the MacPhail report said could be saved by speedier approvals, would start to make housing at least slightly more affordable in Canada.
There’s no perfect, magic-bullet remedy to high housing prices. But reduced taxes and fees, plus long-term increased supply due to speedier approvals, would contribute to moderating prices.
Mark Milke is the Executive Director of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.
Our agri-food world is about to get a whole lot smaller
Sylvain Charlebois
Troy Media
It’s tomato season, and Canadians love their tomatoes. It is by far the most popular vegetable at the grocery store. According to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the average Canadian consumes at least six to seven kilos of tomatoes per year. More than 12 kilos per capita of fresh and processed tomatoes are made available to Canadians every year. We do waste a lot but have plenty to go around.
Tomatoes are the fifth largest vegetable crop in Canada, after corn, beans, peas, and carrots. For greenhouse-grown vegetables, though, tomatoes are the top crop in Canada. After peppers, tomatoes are the leading vegetable exported by our own growers here in Canada.
But we also import a lot of tomatoes, mainly from Mexico and the United States. Surprisingly, import and export rates are very similar across Canada. Many provinces have made efforts to increase the number of controlled-environment agriculture projects to grow more food domestically.
California provides a lot of processed tomatoes to Canada, as it is the largest producer in the world. Sauces, salsa, soups, you name it – many products with tomatoes end up on our Canadian grocery shelves. But California is in trouble with its water supply. It’s running out of water, and we are now constantly hearing more about farmers having difficulty growing anything in these drought conditions.
Recent reports suggest California is experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years, impacting many crops, including tomatoes. Some are even speculating that we could run out of spaghetti sauce. Prices may rise, but it is highly unlikely that Canada will run out of spaghetti sauce. For one, we have many great local products often overlooked by consumers only looking for certain brands. Also, we produce a lot of tomatoes here in Canada, and sauces are easy to make. We should be concerned about many things, but not about running out of spaghetti sauce.
That said, the troubles in California will lead to massive changes in how we grow, import, and export commodities – the way farmers’ fields connect with what we consume every day. And the change is happening very quickly.
For growers and producers, coupled with mother nature’s wrath is carbon energy, once invisible and now significantly affecting costs. Spending energy to produce, process, and transport food is about to get more expensive. Putting a price on carbon will get companies to strategize differently. Producers and processors are now compelled to think differently about how they service markets, including Canada. In other words, our agri-food world is about to get much smaller.
Case in point: this summer, we learned that California giant Driscoll’s signed a partnership with farmers to grow berries right here in Canada. Driscoll’s is one of the largest fruit growers in the world and has had to face water scarcity issues. In the deal, while Canadian farmers in British Columbia and Quebec are taking on the task of growing for Driscoll’s, they’ve also received Driscoll’s know-how, including genetics and growing expertise. This is worth a lot of money and time. Driscoll’s smart move will actually allow both Canadian growers and consumers to gain.
Essentially, the business fundamentals are changing for companies like Driscoll’s. It not only needs to get closer to markets it wants to service, but it also needs precious resources that were once abundant in California. Climate change is undoubtedly changing tomato-growing economics. Such a partnership between our farmers and the California giant is a perfect example of onshoring business, and you can expect to hear about more such moves in years to come.
Global agricultural trading in the future won’t necessarily just be about trading bananas, beef, wheat, and apples; it will be about intellectual property, genetics, and branding. Since trade is ultimately about sharing, what we share will change. While it will get less tangible, the focus will be more on finding the most economically sustainable method to supply a market. Exporting actual food products may no longer be the best option moving forward.
This is the one type of globalization we will continue to see in years to come.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.
Canada has a robust history of freedom
Earlier this year, I stumbled across a framed copy of the Canadian Bill of Rights, the liberty-expanding law promulgated by then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and passed by Parliament in 1960.
I read the document years ago but seeing it up close reminded me of Canada’s long tradition of freedom, ranging from anti-slavery efforts in the late 18th century to Pierre Trudeau’s defence of individual rights. These realities of Canadian history are too often forgotten today.
One reason Diefenbaker pushed for the Bill of Rights, even though it was only an act of Parliament and lacked constitutional grounding, is that although ideals of liberty had existed for centuries in both English- and French-speaking countries, their application had been narrow. Many individuals, if they belonged to the ‘wrong’ group – women, for instance, or Chinese immigrants – were mostly denied equality or even standing before the law.
My find was timely. I bought the framed copy shortly before the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa to protest restrictions on their freedoms. While I sympathized with their general preference for a free Canada, two points about freedom should always be kept in mind.
The first is that no freedom is absolute though infringement should be rare. John Stuart Mill made this point in On Liberty over 150 years ago in his famous harm principle: that the state should only use force to prevent harm to others.
Thus, people have the right to associate and protest but not deprive others of their freedom by interfering with trade at the border, pipeline construction or commuting in Vancouver, to cite a few contemporary examples. I also believe in property rights, but my neighbour has no right to poison her land lest she poison mine. This reminder of the limits on freedom annoyed some readers who liked the rhetoric of freedom but may have forgotten its necessary twin – responsibility.
My second point – that Canada has a long history of freedom – provoked just as strong a reaction among those who dismiss all ‘freedom talk’ as un-Canadian, or ‘extreme.’ In fact, this country has a long history of both rhetoric about and commitment to freedom, including a clear grasp of where rights originate – with individuals, not governments.
Inspired by the British parliamentarian and abolitionist William Wilberforce, John Graves Simcoe, governor of Upper Canada between 1791 and 1796, pledged from the start of his governorship that any laws or policies that provided a framework for or supported slavery would henceforth be under attack. His first action was to make the importation of more slaves illegal, a common first step by abolitionists in their crusade against the trade in human flesh.
As for the rhetoric of freedom, consider what one parliamentarian told a crowd in Winnipeg in 1894: “The good Saxon word, freedom; freedom in every sense of the term, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom in religious life and civil life and last but not least, freedom in commercial life.”
Today, those words sound almost American, only because many Canadians have lost the language of liberty. But the speaker was Liberal Leader Wilfrid Laurier, who would become prime minister in 1896. The spur for Laurier’s freedom speech was the Conservative government’s protectionism, which he relentlessly attacked. Laurier emphasized freedom precisely because it resonated with Canadians, and he used it to counter the unjust repression of “commercial life,” i.e. free trade.
Another proponent and rhetorical publicist for freedom?
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the prime architect of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Though a default collectivist on economic matters, Trudeau well understood that individuals must have their civil rights protected vis-à-vis those who pushed what he called the “theory of collective rights.” That’s why Trudeau consistently opposed Quebec nationalists who discriminated against English speakers, an attack on individual rights that continues today.
Why does individual freedom matter, and where does it originate? In a 1992 speech to a Cité Libre dinner in Montreal, Trudeau explained that “Larger and smaller collectives confront each other in the heart of one and the same country, and that can eventually lead to civil war. And that’s why the French Revolution established liberty as a fundamental right.”
He then made clear that although collectives – nation-states – obviously exist, it was critical to grasp that citizens and their rights precede the state and that the state must always justify infringements of liberty. “(C)itizens, you are all first of all equal among yourselves, and … your rights take priority over those of the state. … The collectivity is not the bearer of rights: it receives the rights it exercises from the citizens.”
This brings us to Trudeau’s son, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and his government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act, which allowed for the arbitrary shutdown of bank accounts among other severe and unnecessary injuries to freedom. That was a stark reminder of why our default principle should always be that governments must justify infringements on citizens’ freedom – it’s not for citizens to justify their preference for a free society.
Freedom is as Canadian as maple syrup and the Canadian Rockies. Don’t let collectivists tell you otherwise.
Mark Milke is executive director of The Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. His latest book is The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilization.
Hospital woes continue to mount – nothing new here
Hospital staffing in Ontario is in crisis – as it is in Alberta, British Columbia, and the rest of Canada. Provinces are responding with what they perceive as solutions: Ontario is fast-tracking foreign-trained nurses, and Alberta has made the interprovincial movement of professionals easier. But while these moves will help reduce the red tape surrounding the practice of health professionals, there are also other solutions to consider. For starters, capacity issues in Canadian health care aren’t new nor entirely attributable to COVID-19. Canada has had a deficiency for years compared to other OECD countries. For instance, in 2019, the number of doctors in Canada was 2.8 per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to 4.3 in Sweden. With below-OECD average numbers and increasing proportions of Canadians scrambling to find a family doctor, ending medical school quotas is a must. Next, we should make more efficient use of other existing health care resources, like permitting the participation of private facilities in the provision of care, and also allowing other medical professionals to exercise their full scope of practice. Delegating certain procedures to nurse practitioners or pharmacists will free doctors to treat more complex cases and take on new patients. While this doesn’t necessarily help when provinces are experiencing a simultaneous nursing shortage, there is an ample supply of pharmacists who can take on tasks like prescribing certain medications, ordering and interpreting lab tests, and administering vaccinations. Canada actually has more licensed pharmacists per capita than most OECD countries. More broadly, additional structural changes are needed to increase the health care system’s capacity. Sweden and the U.K. both underwent liberalization to mixed systems that embrace the value of parallel resources, notably private ones, while also maintaining universality. While not perfect, these two systems experienced improved access and quality of care for patients, and both outperformed Canada’s system with a similar price tag. Take, for instance, the management of hospitals. Does this really need to be a responsibility of the public sector? The expansion of the bureaucratic and administrative components of health care has undoubtedly led to a deterioration in outcomes. Sweden, on the other hand, allows private entrepreneurs to run hospitals financed by the public health care system that cost the public system less and are more efficient. In addition, a 2021 IPSOS poll showed that 59 per cent of Canadians would be in favour of following this model. And contrary to popular belief, this isn’t outlawed by the Canada Health Act, so provincial governments have the latitude to act. Canadian hospitals should also transition away from global budgets. Most high-performing universal health care systems utilize some sort of activity-based funding model to remunerate hospitals. Countries that make widespread use of activity-based financing tend to see an increased number of services performed and reduced wait times. In the U.K., transitioning to activity-based funding resulted in competition between institutions as the money now follows the patient. This increased efficiency and performance and led to cost savings for hospitals.
We are now at a point where dumping more money into the system is like bailing out a yacht with a bucket with a hole in the bottom. More money won’t solve the systemic, pervasive, and structural issues that plague Canadian health care.
For instance, Ontario has increased health spending by nearly 23 per cent since 2018, and Alberta in 2018 spent more per capita than Sweden or the U.K on health care. In 2021, a majority of Canadians agreed that the rate of increase in health care spending is unsustainable.
While hospital closures and staffing crises are alarming, they are not new and are not entirely COVID-related. If our decision-makers don’t start to think bigger and bolder when it comes to reform, we will still be having this same conversation years down the road.
Krystle Wittevrongel is a Senior Policy Analyst and Alberta Project Lead at the Montreal Economic Institute.
Does good industrial policy make good neighbors?
Stuart Trew
Troy Media
Canada’s auto sector got a boost this week – from U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration. Will we be good neighbours and return the favour?
After a marathon voting session, the U.S. Senate finally passed a slimmed-down version of Biden’s landmark climate and economic renewal legislation. The U.S. House of Representatives is set to okay the bill on Friday.
The Inflation Reduction Act, as it’s now known, pumps billions of dollars into renewable energy and ‘clean’ technology manufacturing to help the U.S. catch up with global competition while lowering carbon emissions. Any uptick in these sectors south of the border will naturally benefit the highly-integrated Canadian economy.
In one critical area – electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing – Biden’s new law will have significant spinoff benefits for Canada and Mexico. Could we be seeing the dawn of a buy-North-American mentality in Washington?
You might remember that an earlier version of Biden’s industrial strategy would have given consumers several new tax credits, on top of a base US$7,500, if their newly-purchased EV was assembled in the U.S., had a U.S.-built battery and was made in a union factory.
Using tax credits to favour domestic manufacturing and unionized auto jobs was courageous, but the idea drew pushback from Democrats representing non-union automakers like Toyota and Tesla.
Canadians panicked when they noticed that, starting in 2026, the total US$12,500 credit would be available exclusively for EVs assembled in the U.S.
Why would anyone build new electric cars and trucks in Canada if it meant those vehicles would be US$12,500 more expensive than American-made cars sold on the U.S. market?
So it was a huge relief when these buy-American conditions were stripped from a compromise bill pitched by Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer in late July. The policy now requires qualifying EVs to be assembled anywhere in North America, and with substantial North American content in components and critical minerals.
Canadian government officials and auto sector leaders claimed victory for their months of lobbying against the earlier EV credit. Instead of patting ourselves on the back, Canada should get to work synchronizing its various EV credits with those in the U.S. – just as the prime minister promised we would do in December.
“There are a number of solutions we’ve put forward,” said Justin Trudeau. “One of them would be to align our incentives in Canada and in the United States, to make sure that there is no slippage or no unfair advantages on one side or the other. We are happy to do that.”
Currently, federal credits of up to $5,000 are available to consumers purchasing a long list of qualifying EVs. These are topped up in several provinces by additional credits of $1,000 to $5,000. The goal of these credits, which can be claimed to purchase popular European, Korean and Japanese EVs, is simply to speed up the adoption of electric cars and trucks to help lower carbon emissions.
A buy-North-American condition on Canadian EV credits would reinforce the U.S. incentive for firms to invest in domestic technology, manufacturing and jobs. The emissions reduction benefits would be the same as they are under Canada’s non-discriminating credit, but the benefits to workers would be much greater – which will increase public support for decarbonization.
The Biden administration has done Canada a solid with its buy-North-American awakening. We would help ourselves by reciprocating that policy here.
Stuart Trew is director of the Trade and Investment Research Project at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.