Canada Must Stop Paving Its Food Security

By Robert Paterson There is no “fairness” in the way a continent is built. Nature does not negotiate. Ten thousand years ago, the glaciers didn’t care about “equity” when they scraped the granite of the North bare and dumped the lifeblood of our food security into a tiny, southern crescent. They gave us a pedestal of rock in the North and an orchard of soil in the South. Right now, our leadership is trying to rewrite those laws of physics. They are treating the orchard like a parking lot and the rock like a wasteland. It isn’t just a political mistake; it is a defiance of reality that is already showing up in the empty food baskets of ten million Canadians. As we stand in May 2026, it is time to abandon the “fairness” narrative and adopt the rule of survival. Here are four hard realities we must face before the shelves go permanently bare. 1. The Myth of the Infinite Import For decades, we have operated on the arrogant assumption that California and Mexico will always be our garden. That myth is dead. As the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) faces a brutal review and the southern aquifers dry up, our “partners” are rightfully prioritizing their own survival. We can no longer “outsource” our stomach. Every acre of Class 1 soil we pave in Durham or Northumberland is a calorie we will never see again. When the trucks stop coming from the south, you cannot eat a “Strong Chair” provincial mandate. 2. The 319-Acre Daily Liquidation The numbers do not lie. Verified baseline data from Statistics Canada’s Census of Agriculture shows that Ontario lost farmland at an average rate of 319 acres per day between the last two census periods. That is roughly 246 football fields of food-growing potential vanished every 24 hours. Top-tier politicians call this “solving the housing crisis.” It is actually a liquidation sale of our grandchildren’s lives. We are trading a non-renewable biological engine—accounting for a tiny fraction of Canada’s prime agricultural land—for a one-time real estate commission. Once that soil is under a condo or a rail bed, the geological trust fund is closed. Forever. 3. The Madness of the Southern Hallway Project Alto—the massive federal multi-billion-dollar high-speed rail megaproject designed to link the Toronto–Quebec City corridor with 300 km/h passenger trains—is a brilliant machine being driven in the wrong direction. The proposed “Southern Route” corridor directly bisects our most productive fields. Because high-speed trains cannot have traditional road-level crossings, this project acts like a continuous physical “Berlin Wall” for agriculture—shattering subsurface tile drainage systems and blocking farmers from moving machinery across their own lands. This mirrors the painful history of the 1972 Pickering Airport expropriations under Pierre Trudeau, which took 18,600 acres of prime Durham Region farmland—including historic communities like Whitevale—under intense protest, only to leave it frozen in bureaucratic limbo without ever building the airport. Today, the federal High-Speed Rail Act streamlines this asset takeover by bypassing traditional public inquiry hearings under the Expropriation Act, stripping landowners of their legal recourse. Why cut a hallway through the orchard when we have a solid pedestal of granite to the North? Building heavy infrastructure on The Shield is an engineering certainty; building it on our best soil is tactical surrender. 4. The Erasure of Local Reason The “Bus Drivers” at Queen’s Park have decided that local knowledge is an obstacle to “efficiency.” Bill 97 and Bill 100 are the legislative tools of this erasure. Bill 97 rolled back the oversight powers of local conservation authorities, curbing their power to block developments on sensitive lands that conflict with housing targets. More aggressively, Bill 100—the Better Regional Governance Act—centralizes control by granting the provincial Minister the power to directly appoint or remove the regional chairs of Ontario’s largest upper-tier hubs, including Durham, Peel, Niagara, and Simcoe, and bestowing them with “Strong Chair” powers to override elected local council majorities. By replacing elected regional heads with provincial appointees and shielding ministerial records from the public, they ensure that the people who actually know the land are barred from the cockpit. They believe that because they can legislate a zoning change, they can legislate the growing season and the harvest. They ignore the true legal defence of the land: instruments like Bill 21, the Protect Our Food Act, which grassroots advocates champion to mandate a binding “Foodbelt Protection Plan” and require strict Agricultural Impact Assessments before a single shovel hits the dirt. The Lever of Necessity Look at the state of our “food justice.” We have 2.4 million children in this country experiencing food insecurity this month, a reality verified by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and PROOF food policy researchers. Concurrently, data from Second Harvest reveals that “best before” date label confusion causes Canadians to prematurely throw away perfectly safe, shelf-stable food, wasting $12.3 billion annually while lines at the Daily Bread Food Bank hit record highs. The political elite are obsessed with building “energy” and “connectivity,” but a nation that cannot feed itself has no energy; a nation that paves its orchard has nowhere to go. The “grassroots” are often called “primitive” for clinging to the land. But in the history of the world, it is the elite who are always the most primitive—believing they can survive without the earth that sustains them. The rule is simple: Build on the Rock. Grow on the Soil. Stop the Sham. There is no fairness in the coming food shortage. There is only the land we protect today, and the hunger we face tomorrow.