OFA President Drew Spoelstra speakers during the TV Ontario event at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre.
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
OTTAWA — Supply management shielded consumers from worst-case food inflation, according to producers at a recent Ontario agricultural town hall. The assertion comes at a time of spiking input costs and trade disruptions tied to the Trump White House.
“Because of supply management, we’ve been able to stay below the food inflation increases for dairy products,” Dairy Farmers of Ontario chair Mark Hamel told TVO Today host Steve Paikin during the session recorded April 17 at the Vineland Research & Innovation Centre. Hamel asserted that the 60-year-old system continues to provide stability and predictability for the domestic market while delivering nutritious products at a fair price.
StatCan figures show that between 2020 and 2025, retail food prices in Canada surged 27 % compared to the increase in dairy-product prices of about 23 %.
While Paikin described Canadian dairy as being in “probably the number one spot of the crosshairs” during trade talks with the Americans, Hamel confidently told the host that he believed his sector would survive the upcoming Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement on trade (CUSMA) review that is supposed to conclude on July 1.
“You talk about food sovereignty, food security, food independence. Our consumers are looking for that, and one way to ensure that is making sure it’s processed here, produced here, and sold here,” the DFO chair added.
But the broadcast also highlighted the additional pressures on free-market, non-supply-managed farmers who can’t rely on the domestic market alone. Those producers depend heavily on export sales, even if Canadians are making more of an effort nowadays to buy their products.
Hamilton greenhouse cucumber grower and Ontario Greenhouse Alliance chair Jan VanderHout observed that his industry exports 85 percent of its output to the United States, equivalent to to 300 tractor-trailer loads of greenhouse vegetables daily. While the buy-Canadian trend has been a general help, he explained that Canadian consumers can’t displace American ones. “Three hundred tractor-trailer loads a day isn’t just something that can be absorbed in Canada or through east-to-west trade,” he said.
Those vegetables continue to move across the border tariff-free under CUSMA, but that beneficial arrangement was briefly disrupted last year. Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers executive director Richard Lee recalled the chaos of March 2025 when a broad 25 % U.S. tariff cost Canadian greenhouse growers nearly $7 million before the White House withdrew the levy after three days. Though a recent ruling ensures growers will eventually recover those specific funds, the “shocking” incident exposed the structural vulnerability of Canada’s export pipeline.
Lee noted that the Canada-U.S. trading relationship otherwise proved resilient even during the COVID-19 pandemic. “That border stayed open, and we were able to feed North America without any issues,” he said, while expressing some optimism about avoiding new tariffs to everyone’s benefit. “So when you think about now, at probably the peak … time where Canadians are facing an affordability crisis (and) the U.S. in a similar situation, you have these additional costs that, ultimately, consumers are paying. And I think they’re (the Americans) finally seeing that, and you’re seeing a little bit of movement, especially with this … trade renewal and review.”
Beyond trade, the town hall also delved into the loss of arable land as another challenge for Ontario agriculture. Indoor growing technologies like warehouse and vertical farming and laboratory-based cellular agriculture, dispersed around the province, were posited as alternatives to farming the land. Jon Lomow, managing partner of consulting firm ‘Catalyze4,’ insisted that Canada could deploy such systems to produce 95 % of domestic food requirements within 20 years.
But University of Guelph environmental sciences master’s student Luca Galler urged a realistic perspective. Galler pointed out that hydroponic veggie setups require energy and clean water and only produce a limited variety of crops. “At the end of the day, we’re not going to feed communities just on lettuce,” she said.
Watch the broadcast below:
