Canada's Conservatives can't quit their grocery price politicking

National Observer

4 days ago

For the better part of the last three years, Conservative politicians blamed rising food prices on the federal carbon tax. Elect them, they promised voters, and they'd eliminate the dreaded policy and the pressure it was putting on household budgets. Never mind, for the moment, that all objective assessments of the issue showed that the carbon tax had a negligible impact on food prices — just 0.8 per cent according to a 2024 paper by University of Calgary economists Jennifer Winters and Trevor Tombe. For Conservatives, the lie was just too politically powerful to give up.
They still haven't let it go, even after Mark Carney repealed the consumer carbon tax on the way to winning April's election. Now, their focus is on the federal Clean Fuel Standard, a policy that requires refiners to gradually lower the carbon intensity of gasoline and diesel — and will increase their cost by anywhere from 6 to 17 cents per litre, depending on estimates, by the end of the decade. 'The Liberal government is again burdening farmers and producers with expensive fuel taxes while pretending Canadians won't notice the rising costs at the grocery store,' Conservative agriculture critic John Barlow said recently in a statement.
If federal climate policy was actually driving up grocery prices you'd see a meaningful divergence in food price inflation between Canada and the United States, where there has never been a carbon tax. Instead, American consumers are feeling the same inflationary pressures as we are, ones that helped elect Donald Trump last November. It's the same story in Europe and the United Kingdom, where rising grocery prices are also a problem that Canada's carbon tax — or, sure, Clean Fuel Standard — can't explain.
But, then, it's never actually been about explaining the real root cause of food price inflation for Canada's Conservative politicians and pundits. Instead, it's about keeping their voters angry at the government. In their apparently limitless zeal for falsely correlating food prices and federal policy, Barlow and his Conservative colleagues are ignoring the fact that Clean Fuel Standard creates meaningful economic opportunities for businesses that produce biofuel feedstocks like corn, wheat, barley, and canola — you know, farmers. That's because, more than anything, they need their own voters to ignore what's actually driving up their grocery bills: climate change.
The role of climate change in driving up prices isn't a secret to anyone who actually pays attention to the data, never mind the cost of things like olive oil, chocolate and coffee beans, but it's worth reiterating all the same. A recent study led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center shows that global spikes in the cost of staples like potatoes, rice, onions, lettuce and fruit are linked to rising incidences of extreme heat, drought and rainfall. As the Wall Street Journal 's Joseph Hoppe noted in his story on the report, 'vegetable prices in California and Arizona jumped 80 per cent on year in November, 2022 after extreme drought, while Ethiopian food prices rose 40 per cent in March 2023 following a drought the year prior.'
As lead scientist Maximillian Kotz said during a recent media briefing, 'What we found is very strong evidence that abnormally high temperatures drive increases in the price of food and overall inflation, and that therefore, under future climate change, with heat extremes intensifying, we're going to be expecting to see more and more of these kind of increases in consumer price indexes.'
That's not just bad for household budgets here in Canada. Rising prices and growing scarcity will create opportunities for scapegoating and demagoguery in food-insecure parts of the world, where the impact of climate change is already felt most acutely. As University of Texas research professor Raj Patel told the National Post 's Laura Brehaut, you can draw a straight line between bread riots in Mozambique in 2010 and the wildfires in Russia that decimated its major agricultural regions. 'These are the kinds of arcs that we need to be looking for when we understand climate change,' Patel said. 'Because climate change isn't just, 'Oh, it's hot outside.' Climate change is always freighted with a political valence.'
Climate change is a far bigger contributor to food price inflation than federal climate policies in Canada. At some point, even the most blinkered Conservative partisan is going to have to face up to this politically inconvenient truth.
In some respects, it could probably stand to be freighted with even more political valence in Canada right now. Yes, we have more pressing near-term concerns to deal with, whether it's Donald Trump's repeated threats or the consequences they will have on jobs and investment in our economy. Maslow's hierarchy of needs still abides, and it informs our politics to an extent that is not properly appreciated. But with its growing impact on day-to-day concerns like food prices, extreme weather, and rising insurance costs, climate change is moving down that hierarchy at record speed. At some point, the political cost of ignoring those concerns will become so great that even anti-climate Conservatives will have to start taking them seriously.