Ontario to limit foreign ownership of farmland in bid to boost food sovereignty

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Ontario wants to limit foreign ownership of farmland and is planning to unlock arable northern soil for food production in a two-punch bid to boost provincial food sovereignty.

The proposed limits on foreign buyers – announced at a news conference Tuesday morning – are a marked departure for Ontario, which has no current restrictions in place for non-Canadian ownership, despite other provinces taking measures decades ago.

The province also plans to make it easier for farmers to lease Crown land long-term in the 180,000-square-kilometre Clay Belt, a northern region that covers Cochrane and Timiskaming in Ontario, and Abitibi County in Quebec.

Both measures are aimed at ensuring people in Ontario have enough food, Trevor Jones, the province’s Minister of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail Tuesday afternoon.

“To me, it’s about food independence,” he said.

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But critics say Premier Doug Ford’s government is not focused on the most acute issues threatening Ontario food production.

Little data are available to support arguments that foreign buyers are snapping up Canadian farmland, said Martin Straathof, executive director of Ontario Farmland Trust. But there is ample evidence that high-value, arable soil in Southern Ontario is being lost to housing development, he said, and the province is refusing to address that threat.

A mandatory 10-year review that would protect large stretches of farmland in the province’s protected Greenbelt area was put indefinitely on hold in January of 2025 when Mr. Ford called a snap election.

While developing a more robust agricultural economy in northern latitudes is a worthwhile pursuit, Mr. Straathof said, the region cannot replace the farmland in Southern Ontario. Northern lands are difficult to farm: The key seasons are short, the distance to infrastructure great, and the soil needs underground drainage. Southern Ontario, in comparison, is home to 51 per cent of the Class 1 soils in Canada.

“This is part of the province’s plan to protect Ontario and build a more competitive, resilient and self-reliant agri-food sector,” Mr. Straathof said. “But that’s a lot harder to do when the farmers aren’t the ones owning the land themselves.”

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Ontario, British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces (excluding Prince Edward Island) currently have no restrictions on foreign ownership of farmland.

The rules in the remaining provinces vary. Saskatchewan’s are the most stringent: An entity with any non-Canadian ownership cannot own more than 10 acres of farmland.

Ontario’s proposed regulations would mirror those in Alberta and Quebec, a government press release said. In Alberta, foreign entities cannot own more than 20 acres of agricultural land. In Quebec, foreign entities must be authorized by a regulatory authority to purchase farmland.

Mr. Jones said these changes are coming about based on “anecdotal” evidence. The minister said farmers in rural communities have told him about neighbours selling land to entities based overseas.

“The world has changed,” he said, adding that he will spend this summer consulting with farmers about this question on ownership and land use.

But whether foreign ownership is a genuine threat is dubious, said Glenn Fox, a retired professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Guelph.

The concept of foreign buyers driving land speculation has been “floating around” in some form since at least the 1970s, he said. It is usually tied to fears of absentee landlords driving unproductive farmland.

Based on jurisdictions that do collect such data, such as U.S. states, about 3 per cent of North American farmland is under foreign ownership, said Brady Deaton Jr., a professor of resource economics at the University of Guelph.

The amount of farmland being given over to non-farming enterprise, such as housing, is a major concern, Mr. Straathof said. In the past 35 years, Ontario has lost 2.8 million acres, equal to 18 per cent of its farmland, to non-agricultural land uses, according to the Ontario Farmland Trust.

The province should therefore be principally focused on keeping farmland in the hands of farmers, he said, which means addressing rising land values.

Ontario’s farmland has substantially increased in value in recent years. An acre of farmland in Southern Ontario that cost $8,482 in 2015 sold for $23,400 in 2025, according to a report from Farm Credit Canada.

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Mike Schreiner, leader of the Ontario Green Party, said developing agriculture in Northern Ontario’s Clay Belt is a great step, but it cannot be a “distraction” from what he calls the real problem of “low-density sprawl” in Southern Ontario.

In 2022, Mr. Ford’s Progressive Conservative government announced it would allow development of 3,000 hectares protected by the Greenbelt, a 800,000-hectare tract of ecologically sensitive land that includes farmland, forests and wetlands.

An investigation from The Globe and other media outlets showed that key parcels of affected land were owned by developers who donated large sums to the PCs. The government restored the Greenbelt’s original boundaries in 2023.

The deadline for a mandatory review of the plan that protects and regulates the removal of land within the Greenbelt came and went last year. Mr. Jones could not say Tuesday when this review would begin.

Mr. Schreiner said the government must move to “halt the loss” of a daily average of 319 acres of farmland, adding, “That’s primarily driven by the Ford government’s policies to support wealthy, well-connected land speculators.”