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........

© National Observer