Federal Election 2025: Build Canadian Food Sovereignty
The 2025 federal election is highly focused on Canada’s sovereignty in the face of unprecedented changes in our country’s relationship with the USA.
We need a long-term strategy to increase our resilience and reduce our dependence on trade with the USA. Canadian farmers, workers, and consumers will be well served by initiatives that strengthen our food sovereignty and reduce our vulnerability to supply chain disruption, income loss, price increases and food shortages.
Strengthening the democratic control of important decisions about food and agriculture is a key strategy to withstand President Trump’s economic pressure tactics, AND build the resilience needed to better weather any coming storms.
No matter where you live, your vote does matter! Go to the Elections Canada website to find out when and where you vote, who your candidates are, and other election-related information.
TAKE ACTION: Organize or attend an Eat Think Vote event or other all-candidate events in your community to highlight food and agriculture issues with your questions for candidates during the election campaign.
TAKE ACTION: At campaign events or on the door stop, ask candidates how they will:
TAKE ACTION: Print and share this NFU Fact Sheet about building food sovereignty.
TAKE ACTION: Send an email to party leaders calling for their commitment to building food sovereignty.
Defend Supply Management
Supply management ensures that Canadian farmers who produce the high-quality dairy, chicken, eggs and turkey Canadians consume earn enough to cover their production costs and do not have their market flooded by imports. This stable, reliable system is not exposed to tariff threats. Supply Management provides environmental, health, animal welfare and climate benefits as well. Farmers and consumers alike are counting on the federal government to stand firmly in support of supply management.
Diversify export markets
Canada’s export-focused agricultural policy has created a high degree of dependency on the U.S. market. Canadian farmers who are exposed to U.S. tariffs need support during a transition to more diversified markets and/or products. To reduce trade risks, provide economic dignity with greater income security, and promote resilience to climate impacts, we need structural policy changes to diversify both our markets and the crops grown for export. These measures would result in long-term viability of these farms. Single-desk hog marketing and single-desk beef marketing for commodity scale farms; re-establishing and expanding the Canadian Wheat Board to cover all commodity grains; supporting programs to increase the proportion of production using certified organic and other ecologically sound and climate mitigating practices are ways to do this.
Promote & build regional and local markets
Local markets are critical to food sovereignty. Local and direct sales keep dollars in communities and food production where the eaters are. As retailers seek to replace US imports, demand for many Canadian foods will outstrip existing supply. We need to reduce our dependence on imported food by rebuilding our local and regional food production, processing, storage and distribution infrastructure to create reliable, long-term capacity to feed our population.
Protect Agricultural Workers
Building a more resilient and robust Canadian food system means ensuring agriculture workers’ jobs in both fields and food processing plants are good jobs, with fair wages, safe working conditions. For migrant workers, this means full labour rights, open work permits, and a pathway to citizenship. An agricultural labour strategy that recognizes the seasonality of Canadian farming, which provides livable incomes for farm workers year-round, is needed to build a long-term, resident labour force.
Manufacture Farm Equipment
Canada once manufactured a full line of farm machinery. We now have the opportunity to re-tool and expand our capacity to produce equipment designed for Canadian farms of all sizes and production types. A green industrial strategy for Canada that includes farm machinery would have benefits that extend beyond the agriculture sector.
Prevent Corporate Profiteering
During the pandemic and Ukraine war, we saw that large corporations across the supply chain were willing to use their outsized market power to increase their own profits at the expense of farmers, workers, and consumers alike. The federal government must prevent corporations from using the U.S. tariffs as a cover for price gouging, wage suppression and the discounting of farm product prices. Canada also needs to address the excessive concentration of ownership in the agriculture and food sector, where monopolistic behaviour has become the rule rather than the exception. If Canada is unable or unwilling to break up monopolistic companies, other methods of regulating and limiting their market power must be put in place or these corporate giants will continue to be in charge of our food supply.
Canadians’ determination to stand together provides the resolve to not only weather the current storm, but to build a strong foundation of food sovereignty for a more secure, resilient future. We need our government to move swiftly toward this goal.
