There are many ways that governments can be defeated, from self-inflicted scandals and political corruption to their failure to respond to broader global trends and events. But few things will bring a government to its knees faster than unchecked food price inflation. 

The surge of post-COVID inflation and the impact it had on grocery bills transformed the politics in most Western countries and helped bring down or significantly weaken incumbent governments in the UK, United States, Japan, France and India — not to mention its contribution to shortening Justin Trudeau’s time in office. 

Now, thanks to US President Donald Trump’s increasingly catastrophic decision to attack Iran, another surge of food price inflation is coming. So too are the attempts to draw spurious correlations with federal climate policy in Canada, which will see the industrial carbon tax inevitably being blamed for rising grocery bills. Not surprisingly, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, the self-appointed “food professor,” is determined to lead the charge there. 

He was a leading proponent of the idea, widely amplified by Conservative politicians and pundits, that the consumer carbon tax was driving food price inflation. Never mind that said inflation was essentially identical to what American consumers were experiencing (in a country with no carbon price), or that his theory was rebuked by economists such as the University of Calgary’s Jen Winter and Trevor Tombe, who found that the carbon tax increased the cost of domestically produced food by 0.8 per cent. 

Even Charlebois appeared to acknowledge the limited impact of carbon pricing on food prices, at least in the pages of the academic literature. According to a November 2024 paper he co-authored, “the impact of carbon pricing on food prices is generally modest.” This was a rather striking contrast to the interventions he’d made on the subject in the past, ones well-covered by Marc Fawcett-Atkinson in an October 2024 profile for Canada’s National Observer. 

You might think that this consensus, combined with the elimination of the consumer carbon tax, would be the end of this particular conversation. If only. 

In a March column for the Toronto Sun, Charlebois shifted his focus to the industrial carbon tax — a tax that the vast, vast majority of farmers don’t pay — and argued that its April 1 increase to $110 per tonne “risks amplifying the pressures already building within Canada’s food supply chain.” The column included a chart that seemed to show a curiously linear relationship between the carbon price and trucking costs, even though the diesel portion of the consumer carbon tax, which cost truckers 21.39 cents per litre in 2024, was eliminated last year. “At a carbon price of $110 per tonne,” he wrote, “the diesel tax component alone represents approximately $34 million to $52 million per year in additional costs across those shipments.”One small problem: There is no diesel tax component in the industrial carbon price. Over on X, Charlebois tried to salvage his argument by suggesting that “food prices are not determined by what a truck pays at the pump alone. They reflect cumulative costs across the entire supply chain: refining, fertilizer, processing, refrigeration, logistics — all of which remain exposed to carbon pricing mechanisms.” 

None of this explains the chart in his column, much less the idea that there’s still a “diesel tax component” associated with the industrial carbon tax. It certainly won’t stop the usual band of pundits and politicians from amplifying his argument and trying to blame the federal government for the imminent increase in food prices (diesel has already spiked 30 per cent higher to levels not seen since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine). 

This time, at least, the fact-checkers are ready. In a piece for National Newswatch, Ross Linden-Fraser — research lead at the Canadian Climate Institute’s 440 Megatonnes project — went to work debunking the idea that Canada’s industrial carbon price is meaningfully impacting food prices. “Our analysis at the Canadian Climate Institute shows that its effect on food prices would be, at most, a minuscule 0.1 per cent,” he wrote. “That’s 1/48th of the current rate of food inflation. It’s like adding a penny to the price of two cartons of eggs.”

That’s because, as Linden-Fraser notes, industrial carbon pricing only applies to a small handful of large industrial emitters — and even then, only to a small fraction of their emissions. The CCI’s research shows that it adds a grand total of nine cents to a barrel of oil right now and would cost 50 cents if the Canada-Alberta MOU actually results in an effective carbon price of $130 per tonne. When oil prices are jumping by as much as five dollars in a single day, as they have recently, it seems pretty silly to worry about the potential impact of a 50-cent increase. 

Ah, but what about fertilizer? Farmers obviously need that to grow their crops, and if industrial carbon pricing raises their costs then it could theoretically be passed on through higher food prices. One small problem: analysis done by Clean Prosperity last July found that industrial carbon prices as high as $170 per tonne would add zero dollars — zero — to the cost of fertilizer in Canada. 

That’s because while some fertilizer firms will pay the industrial carbon tax, others will generate carbon credits that they can trade or sell — and because the sector has done a good job of reducing emissions relative to the benchmarks set for it. Fertilizer costs are rising right now, but that has everything to do with the war in Iran, which has blocked a major source of fertilizer supply, and nothing to do with Canadian climate policy. 

It’s the same story with steel, which ends up in the equipment that farmers rely on to do their jobs. “The cost of steel is a fraction of the total price of the final product — for example, a $170 carbon price (much higher than today’s price) on steel would add less than $16 to the cost of a Chevy Silverado,” Linden-Fraser writes. “That’s around 0.03 per cent of the price of the base model truck.”

As a recent report by Desjardins economist LJ Valencia noted, the real sources of food price inflation are beyond the control of any prime minister or politician in Canada: climate change, supply chain disruptions and US trade policy. Beef, for example, isn’t expensive because of climate policy. If anything, it’s expensive in large part because of the absence of climate policy and the resulting droughts that have shrunk herds across North America. It’s a similar story across a bunch of different categories, from olive oil and coffee to rice and pasta. In time — and not very much of it — blaming climate policy for rising food prices is going to look painfully absurd, like blaming a reduction in speed limits for pedestrian deaths. 

That doesn’t mean that the federal government can afford to dismiss or ignore the attempt to link climate policy and food prices in Canada. As University of Alberta economics professor Chetan Dave told the CBC last month, “governments are going to rise and fall, within the next five to eight years, based on how they address food scarcity in general.”

Voters will be looking for someone (or something) to blame for the inevitable surge in food prices that’s headed our way. As we’ve already learned with the consumer carbon tax, a simple scapegoat — even a demonstrably innocent one — is often preferable to a more complex explanation. Ottawa needs to get ahead of this before yet another piece of climate policy in Canada gets vandalized beyond political repair. 

© National Observer