The U.S. mediates our access to most of the produce we bring into the country, write Sarah Elton and Aden Fisher.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Sarah Elton is an assistant professor and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Aden Fisher is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump mused about blocking the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge – built to ease the movement of products, including food, into our country. It highlighted an existential problem: Canada is dependent on the United States for access to nutritious foods, like fruits and vegetables.
Our research team has been tracking the global flows of fresh fruits and vegetables into Canada to assess our country’s food security, and we now have the numbers that should sound the alarm, and inspire the country to take action. The United States potentially controls as much as 82.9 per cent of all fruits and vegetables that enter into Canada. Not only do we import much of our fruits and vegetables from the U.S. – a whopping 98 per cent of our imported lettuce is grown there – but even produce from other countries largely travels here via American highways and shipping ports.
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The federal government collates data that track what food arrives in the country and where it comes from, showing us how food moves to Canada from other countries via the United States. Even when we import fruits and vegetables from other countries, the U.S. acts as an intermediary, with the food sent to American ports and warehouses before it is shipped to us. This means that of the more than 80 per cent of the fruits and vegetables that we import from the U.S., in addition to the food that travels through our southern neighbour to get here, only 54.7 per cent of that produce (by weight) is actually grown in the U.S. We don’t have full control of the supply chains for the fruits and vegetables that we import from around the world.
This is how the United States ends up mediating our access to most of the produce we bring into our country. For a people who import 50 per cent of our vegetables (not including potatoes) and 75 per cent of our fruit, as recent research from our colleagues at the University of British Columbia found, this is bad news.
Mr. Trump’s bridge threat shows how easy it would be for an American policy to halt supply chains headed for Canada. If food imports that come through the U.S. are slowed, tariffed or stopped, our food security is at risk. Grocery prices would rise and produce aisles would go empty, making the early COVID-era toilet paper shortages look quaint in comparison.
Canadians grow lots of fruits and vegetables during the growing season. Also, the greenhouse vegetable and mushroom industry in Canada generated $3.4-billion in farmgate sales in 2024, with more than half exported to the United States. But at this time of year, much of the country’s field agriculture sector is not producing. As Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Davos, Canada must develop strategic autonomy, including in food.
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This means protecting our agricultural land from development. Municipalities of all sizes must limit turning agricultural lands into new housing developments. Governments must protect and expand their existing food-system infrastructure, such as the Ontario Food Terminal, which supports food access in the province. Other provinces would benefit from similar infrastructure to better connect farmers with a diversity of buyers beyond the major-chain supermarkets. This would be part of connecting farmers and rural communities with urban markets.
Supply management, such as in the dairy sector, must be protected from American pressure. We need to scale up the Canadian produce industry and increase capacity for growing food in spring and fall, processing, and year-round storage. We must invest in transportation infrastructure and skills development, including at ports, to ensure that skilled workers can keep imported produce moving. Logistics industry insiders who work with produce have told us they could direct freight through Canadian ports that are expanding. All this must be done sustainably, including by limiting associated climate emissions.
It’s easy to mistake our supermarkets’ well-stocked shelves for food security. But those bunches of broccoli and pints of strawberries hide the tenuous reality of our food system. We need to act now before those shelves are bare – or a mercurial president throws a spanner in the works.