Ottawa is fighting a climate apocalypse that isn’t coming

Experts warn that outdated climate policies are making food unaffordable for Canadians

For years, Canada built climate policy around worst-case warming scenarios that drove up the cost of energy, transportation and food production. Now, some of the scientists behind the world’s leading climate models are quietly backing away from those catastrophic assumptions.

But Ottawa continues imposing rising costs on farmers, processors and consumers based on climate assumptions scientists themselves are now questioning.

A recent paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, tied directly to the next generation of UN-backed climate modelling for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that some of the most extreme warming scenarios used for years are no longer considered plausible. The infamous SSP5-8.5 pathway, a high-emissions climate scenario often used in long-term warming projections, assumed an explosion in coal consumption, extraordinarily high fossil fuel dependence, and emissions trajectories that increasingly diverged from economic and technological realities.

In plain English, some of the world’s leading climate scientists are now acknowledging that humanity is unlikely to follow the catastrophic path that dominated climate communication for much of the last decade.

Yet Canadian policy, especially in agri-food, still behaves as though we are one harvest away from Mad Max.

The irony is that climate science itself is becoming more nuanced while public policy remains rigid.

This matters because few sectors absorb policy costs more directly than food. Products perish. Refrigeration cannot stop. Trucks must move. Grain must dry. Livestock must eat.

Even after Ottawa effectively zeroed out the consumer carbon levy on fuels in 2025, the industrial carbon pricing regime, which applies to large industrial emitters and affects sectors tied to food production and transportation, remains firmly in place and continues to rise, reaching $110 per tonne this year.

These costs ripple through virtually every segment of the food economy: fertilizer production, trucking, warehousing, refrigeration, food processing, packaging, greenhouse operations, grain drying and cold-chain logistics.

And while government officials often insist the carbon price has only a ‘minimal’ effect on grocery bills, that argument misses the broader economic picture entirely. The real issue is not simply what appears immediately on grocery bills. It is competitiveness.

Canada’s agri-food sector competes globally. When domestic costs rise faster than those faced by competitors in the United States or elsewhere, investment shifts. Processing capacity weakens. Domestic production becomes less attractive. Imports increase.

Over time, consumers pay the price through greater dependence on imports and higher structural costs.

This is not theoretical anymore.

Canadians are already visiting grocery stores more frequently in search of deals. Restaurant bankruptcies are accelerating. Food affordability remains the number one concern for households, according to repeated national surveys conducted by Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab. Families are adapting, trading down and increasingly prioritizing price over virtually every other food value.

Meanwhile, policymakers continue layering costs onto the supply chain as though affordability were a secondary concern.

To be clear, none of this means climate change is fake, harmless or irrelevant to agriculture. Canadian farmers still face drought risks, floods, extreme weather volatility and shifting growing conditions. Agriculture has always been vulnerable to nature. It always will be.

But policy should be proportional to realistic risks, not permanently anchored to worst-case scenarios that scientists themselves are now reassessing.

Instead of obsessing over punitive cost mechanisms, Ottawa should focus on resilience and productivity: modernizing transportation infrastructure, investing in irrigation and water systems, accelerating precision agriculture, supporting genetics research, strengthening domestic processing capacity, improving trade logistics and encouraging technological innovation throughout the food chain.

Innovation reduces emissions. Efficiency reduces waste. Productivity strengthens food security. Punishing domestic production does not.

The danger now is not climate denial. It is policy inertia.

Governments built much of today’s climate framework around assumptions that are quietly being revised by the scientific community itself.

Yet admitting that some assumptions may have been overstated has become politically difficult because too many institutions, activists and even media organizations spent years presenting worst-case scenarios as inevitabilities rather than possibilities.

The result is a dangerous disconnect between economic reality and policy ambition.

Canada needs a climate policy rooted in pragmatism, not ideology, especially in food.

Because in the end, no country can claim to care about sustainability while simultaneously making food less affordable, weakening domestic production and eroding its own supply chains.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University.