The Current - Why are groceries so expensive?

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

As Prime Minister Mark Carney unveils his much anticipated federal budget, the rising cost of food is top of mind for many Canadians. We'll hear from Canadians struggling to make ends meet and ask a food economist what policy tools the federal government has to control grocery costs.

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Whatever that might look like, a lot of Canadians are hoping for some relief, especially at the grocery store. Canadians paid 4% more for groceries in September compared to the same time last year, and that's almost twice the overall inflation rate. With grocery costs rising, food bank usage has doubled since 2019. In Calgary, the Robert McClure United Church provides a food pantry each week. It's supplied by donations from grocery stores, restaurants, and congregation members. And as our producer, Alison Dempster, found out, it is busy. Hi, my name is Russell, many fingers.

I'm of the Blackfoot people, Kainai Blood Tribe, single father. And I have two in my care, so just rationing everything. My children love eggs, so we're like, you know, it's hitting the pockets pretty much. I started coming here several months ago. This is a really good help here. I'm glad that places like this exist. Everything is just high, high, high, right? Now it's like almost $10 for milk, you know?

You have to go to the cheap places to get stuff. You can't get everything there. You're going to two or three places to kind of get everything. This is nice to have something in the community. How many kids do you have? I have two. What are their ages? 10 and 11.

Sometimes it's a little bit, what would I say? You know, nerve-wracking and everything. I got a package of beef and a loaf of bread, so I got something to suffice anyways. I'm an old buzzard. I'm getting $2,100 a month in pension. And after I get some bills and everything paid, there's next to nothing left, so.

It is rough, but it's just a matter of tightening everything up. When did you start coming here? Oh, about six months ago. It's not an easy task, and it's a little bit embarrassing, to be honest, but not much can be done. My name is Barb Law. I'm the manager of the food pantry ministry here. We're feeding about 500 people a week.

What goes through your mind when you see what's happening with food inflation these days? Well, it's startling. It's absolutely startling. and it's like we get the leftovers this is what we deal with here we get you know sometimes food is a little bit outdated but still good and and you wonder like why when the shelves are full in the grocery store why do people have empty cupboards food bank use this year in Canada is more than 5% higher than it was just last year Lisa Mutra is a writer and a food bank user she's with me here here in our Toronto studio. Lisa, good morning.

Thank you for having me, P. It's nice to have you. When did you first start having to turn to food banks? When my daughter started college, basically, we couldn't afford anything to eat. My husband just passed away. So I was dealing with that and my grandmother, my cat. So we had to, my sister said to me, I know you don't like going to food banks, but this is the best solution because I would starve myself and feed my daughter while she was

going through college. And my sister was like, you have sickle cell anemia. You can't. You have to eat. So therefore, I had to start. That was in 2003. So I've been going since then every Thursday in the month. You're no longer working.

What did you do before? I used to do photos shoots. I was an off-figure stylist for photo shoots. But my illness really took me down. And that's the only reason. I mean, I did everything right. I went to college, university, and did the whole shebang in the fashion industry. And I'm sitting here now trying to figure out, well, I'm writing a book now.

about my journey, but I'm sitting around and I'm like, I don't want to sit around. I don't want to get active and move around, but unfortunately, the illness really took me because I'm deteriorating from it. I'm sorry about that. That's okay. I know it can be hard, all those things you just said. On top of that, you have challenges on the money front. Now that you're on disability support, if you don't mind me asking, how much money do you

get per month and how much of that are you able to spend on food? I only receive. Technically, I receive 900. And then my take home would be 583 because I have survival benefit and ODSP. ODSP, you know, it gives 211. And the rest is survival benefit. I'm living on that for a month due to the fact that there was a situation where I have to pay back some of the money to ODSP because I had survival benefit. I didn't know you couldn't have the two. So that's why my money went down further. And my rent is $900 because I'm on subsidy. So that's the majority of my rent. And then the food price, when I started looking at food price, I never had to do that before because I worked three jobs. I was always wealthy enough to take care of things. And now I'm sitting in the situation like I feel like I'm being attacked by the system

because I don't have anything to eat. And so you use a combination of going to food banks and going to grocery stores. What does a typical grocery store trip look like for you? Well, I'll tell you, we actually do it online since I'm not well, or we go to Food Basics. Food Basics is the only one. Metro sometimes is the only two that we can actually go to in order to shop for food because it's quite expensive. Like I haven't seen this in my lifetime. I mean, I came from the 80s and it wasn't this bad. And the fact that I have to go to a food bank after all the things I did right in the city. And it was embarrassing. for me, but the people are really nice. And I'm not just the only one. Their family's going. There's people like taking their lunches on their break, like a food teller from a bank was

doing that. And I couldn't believe. I was so angry. I was, this is a world-class city. This is my country. I love it so much. And I can't believe that I'm in the situation and so many others. And it wasn't just marginalized and poor.

Rich are suffering from it, too. They're saying, wow, this is really getting expensive. Everybody's suffering. So it's like the grocery store has got a stock. got to stop price gouging. They need to stop. They made 3% extra over their profit range. I looked at it the other day. And I'm like, why are you still charging COVID prices? Because that's what I call it. What are the food items that you've had to say to yourself, I just can't afford that. Meat. Fish. Fish is what I need for my illness. I can't eat

beef. I can't buy beef. We lived on chicken. And chicken Eve is so expensive. I couldn't believe the price. Like, I never paid attention to this stuff before. And now I really have to focus. So we try and spend at least $80 at the most with the food bank. I try to combine it and make sure that she's fed, I'm fed, we're taking care of. And my health is still. I mean, you can't just eat anything when you're in this situation. You have to eat proper food, special diets.

How often do you rely on food banks? Every month. Yeah. At one point I went two weeks, two times in every month. This time I'm slowly, because I've built up. things over the years. And I'm Caribbean, so I know how to stretch food. Right? You know how it works. We heard in those clips from the Calgary Food Bank, and you use this word as well. One of the people there used the word you did too. This word embarrassment or I'm embarrassed. We know that

people from all kinds of demographics are relying increasingly on food banks. So talk to me about that part of it. What is the feeling of having to rely on food banks? Because I worked hard, got to that point, I was in a high-end capacity in my career. I was in a high-end world-class city, and then I feel like I failed because now I have to depend on a food bank to feed me and not just shop regularly at a grocery store. And the embarrassment is the fact that I went to school, I did it all right, and now I'm sitting here having to depend on a food bank to feed me. Like somewhere along the line, something went wrong because I'm not, I'm not saying I don't want to work. I love working. I want to work 14 hours a day, 18 hours a day if I could. But my body

has, you know, lesson. I am applying to the library. We'll see how that works out. You wrote in the Globe and Mail, and I just want to quote what you said. These were your words, quote, I feel like the system turned on me, like Canada turned on me, but I love this country. This is my country. What were you saying in that? Well, what I was saying is, I, did everything right because I'm a Canadian and I'm very proud to be a Canadian. I still am and I love my system and but the system is not working it. They need to change it. The government system is not working. Nothing is working properly. We need to get rid of Ford because he's making a mess of the city. I just saw homeless people on the bridge just the other day, just now and I was

just horrified. Like I love Canada and I worked hard because of that, that I'm proud Canadian. And the horrifying fact is that I can't believe I'm in this situation. and I just didn't understand. The federal budget, of course, is being delivered today. It will have big spending on those sort of macro things, defense, rearranging our trade entities and so on and so forth. The government is also saying, and we don't know the details, that there will be some relief on affordability.

What would you like to see from this budget and the federal government? You mentioned the provincial government, but from the federal level, to make things easier for people like you, Lisa. I think the government needs to talk to the, grocery stores and lower some of these prices, they've made their profit. Now, stop gouging on Canadians. It's not fair. We need to eat.

This is not like, you know, prodig shoes. This is necessity to live and, you know, focus on life. You need the food for fuel to keep going. And I can't understand why the government doesn't talk to the, lower the tax to 10% for now until we can figure out our situation, talk to the grocery stores and say, lower it. It's enough now. The CEO is making 11.8 or something like that, ridiculous amount of money.

You can afford to help us all out because it's time, not just me, marginalized poor, rich people too are suffering. Everybody is. You know, it's not right. Lisa, it's been good to meet you, and thank you for coming and we appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Pia. Lisa Moutra is a writer, and she was here in our Toronto

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For my wife and I, despite our children moving out, our weekly grocery budget seems to be going up. And just about everything we regularly purchase has increased in price. Perhaps a little bit more conscious of not wasting things and being a bit more careful about timing of when we purchase things. We've had to get creative. There's food plans, like good food, and Hello Fresh, like, you know, those ready-made food options. I remember last year when they did the, I think there was like a month or two where they did the no-h-stead on all food.

That was a big help, I think. The prices of everything are quite staggering, especially trying to eat whole foods and nutritionally dense. That adds up so very quickly, the cost of proteins. And it was very clear to me at raising just before COVID. And ever since it's never been the same. So as we watch for the liberal government's budget this afternoon, what tools does the federal government actually have to control rising grocery costs? Joining me now as Kaleen Wiseman, she's a food and resource economist at the University of British Columbia.

Good morning. Good morning. We have been hearing from people around the country about how tough it is out there, how tough it is to afford groceries. Can we just start with why food inflation is so much higher than the annual inflation rate right now? Yeah, the annual inflation rate, is around that 2.4. Whereas, of course, food, as you said, this is a year-over-year average for September, the last 12-month average. In other words, point-to-point is 4%. So that's quite a bit of

difference. I mean, the one good news is that the gap is closing. Over the last four years, that gap was much higher. We would see that, you know, CPI was maybe four to six and food was, you know, 10 to 12. But the why is a really good question. You know, I mean, we have to go to the fundamental supply and demand. And we know people are not demanding more food. So it's on that supply side. So basic costs, is it labor, ingredients, transport, fuel, market those a little bit.

I mean, all of those have gone up in terms of, you know, wages have gone up a little bit, transport down. But, you know, fundamental ingredients with it. So it's partially there. macro, you know, type of elements such as, let's say, geopolitical. Those are things that shock the system. The tariffs is often a question, Pia, that people will say, is that kicked in? Are we feeling that impact right now? But in food processing, things are not sort of real time.

We might feel some of the tariff impact of products are coming from other countries and then through the U.S. as such like that. Food processors have bought their stuff a long time ago, and of course, we don't have that much in terms of tariffs for fresh foods. One of the things, I guess, would be climate change, for sure. These are impacts that we are feeling, whether they be on, you know, yield and supply production, so affecting supply that rise, and maybe things like supply chain, you know, water pricing. We feel those impacts most definitely associated with it. I think one of the things that your other person that was just on mentioned was this idea of what we in economics called sort of the market structure, the competition, the grocery stores, and thinking about opportunistic pricing as such in those areas. Yeah, Lisa mentioned that.

And, you know, the liberals under Justin Trudeau hauled in the big grocery chains in front of the Parliamentary Committee in 2023 to talk about grocery prices. There's this voluntary grocery code of conduct signed by the big. grocery chains, and yet food prices keep going up. What kind of policy tools does the federal government actually have to try to lower food costs? Yeah, that's a very good question. So, you know, yes, they did haul them in, but basically what they found is that the margins were not that much in terms of sort of differences over the years. And I think the one thing we have to keep in mind with is competition, or, you know, people call it opportunistic pricing or collusion, is that this is a lot of products, and they tend to be generic products.

You know, Pia, when you and I go into store A and Widebix's, you know, increased by, you know, 15% or 5%. We don't just say, oh, I'm going to buy it there. We go to the next store because there's highly substitutable products or something similar to Widivix. So the ability of these grocery stores to actually price gouge when there's substitutes or another store could come in and just cut it a little bit by 10. percent, it makes it less possible associated with that.

So what does that mean for governments? Well, you know, they can't do things like price controls or price freezing. We know that, you know, historically, those don't have good results. Price controls do things such as it basically means empty shelf shortages because the demand is greater than supply. We don't have enough associated with it. And so when you're going to say something, go ahead. When you watch the federal budget later today or listen to,

it. What are you going to be listening for in terms of what a government might do to offer some reprieve? I think the way to think about it is connected to disposable income because we're talking about people's entire income and where does that go. You know, goes, of course, to food, what, 20% shelter, you know, 30% all of these things. So anything that can be done to connect people's disposable income more closely to this world of sort of changing prices, in particular food prices. So maybe ideas associated with our social assistance, like our old age pension or child tax credits or social assistance, all of those, ensuring that those are indexed strongly to not just sort of 2 or 2%, but thinking about that food part of it, because that's what can happen,

right? I mean, if those go up, they're indexed by 2%, and groceries are going up by 4 to 5 percent, well, then that's where some of the problem is. One of the things that the official opposition leader, Pierre Pauliev, is suggesting and calling on the government to do is to scrap the industrial carbon tax, which he says drives up the cost of producing food by taxing fertilizer and farm equipment. Is that enough? How could that help? Yeah, I mean, the Bank of Canada has done their original, you know, in terms of sort of the carbon taxing. And I guess we, you know, in terms of their report showed that there was very little effect, you know, like a small percentage associated with that carbon tax. I think it's

really important to remember is that our food prices that we see here in Canada, these are global food prices because this is a global market connected to it. And in fact, if you look to the U.S., the UK, the EU, our food price changes are very similar to the food price inflation. that these, you know, countries are experiencing. So it doesn't make it easier, but it does make it realistic to say, no, this is not a Canadian problem and the way that we're doing things. This has to do with, you know, overall in terms of sort of food production and some of those elements that, you know, in terms of whether they be, you know,

geopolitics, climate, those different. Killeen, I just have about 30 seconds left. I have a very direct question to ask you. Do Canadians just have to resign themselves to high food prices for the foreseeable future? I think they do have to do that, but I think that government policies connected to targeted social assistance, child care, pharmacare, dental care, social assistance being indexed, you know, affordable housing. Things that help the entire disposable income are the way to counter these in terms of make it more realistic for people like your last guest to be having their actual disposable income more closely tied to the things that are important, which are these food prices going up. by 4%. Kaleen, thank you very much.

Appreciate your time as well. Thank you, Biel. Kaleen Wiseman is a food and resource economist at the University of British Columbia. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway.

Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.