At a sprawling 9,984,670 km2 of land and almost 900,000 km2 of water area, Canada is the second largest country in the world, trailing only Russia in size.

The sheer scale of Canada’s landmass allows a breathtaking array of ecozones like the tall trees and fjords of the Pacific Maritime, the sweeping prairies and plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the rich waters of Nova Scotia, teeming with sea life, and the frozen expanses of the Arctic Archipelago.

The people who populate the territories and provinces are no less diverse: along with English and French, Canada’s two official languages, over 200 languages are used throughout the country. Its population is a mosaic of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity. With so much environmental and cultural variety, Canada’s food industry thrives, providing the country and the world with seafood, agricultural products, and – of course – that most iconic of Canadian exports: maple syrup.

Traditional Food Systems

Prior to the arrival of Europeans on their shores, Canada’s Indigenous peoples – the Inuit, Métis, and First Nations – practiced crop cultivation to ensure survival and to feed their population. Tribes in southern areas of the country used sustainable agricultural practices like companion planting, most famously with the ‘Three Sisters’ – corn, beans, and squash. The corn provides a trellis for beanstalks, the beans provide nitrogen at the roots of the corn and stabilize the plant, and the wide, spreading squash leaves provide shade to keep the ground moist and weed-free.

In addition to harvesting and cultivating over five hundred species of wild plants, tribes relied on large land mammals like caribou and moose as well as marine resources like fish, shellfish, seals, and whales. Fishing and hunting were especially important to those, like the Inuit, living in the far North where fresh vegetables are in short supply and plant cultivation all but impossible. Now, the modern Inuit diet is supplemented by storebought foods, flown into the North often at an enormous mark-up. For centuries, harvesting, traditional hunting, fishing, and foraging grounds supplied First Nations peoples with food throughout the year and assisted in maintaining wildlife populations. Now, hunting practices continue, but at a declining rate.

European Colonization of Canada

Although 11th century Vikings were the first to explore and settle around Newfoundland and Labrador, it was John Cabot’s 1497 expedition commissioned by King Henry VII that laid the foundation for British claims to Canada and marked the true beginning of European exploration. By the 1600s, fur trappers arrived, taking advantage of the country’s vast numbers of beavers, seals, and other furred mammals. To fuel them on their hunts, they traded with local tribes for pemmican, a mixture of dried and powdered meat, fat, and sometimes berries. Calorie-dense, high energy, and shelf-stable, pemmican was such a useful food item to the trappers and Arctic explorers – and then to the Hudson Bay Company, which set up outposts throughout the northwest – that demand quickly outstripped supply.

Bison was a popular meat for pemmican; each animal provided hundreds of pounds of meat, along with hides for leather and other resources. In the early 19th century, the northwest plains hosted an estimated five to six million bison. Within decades, two thirds were gone, hunted for their pelts and to feed the trappers and other employees of the Hudson Bay Company.

But by the time the bison herds collapsed, the economic opportunities created by the wildly successful fur trade and the influx of settlers had already brought other changes to food production across the country. As early as 1674, Europeans brought seeds for grain and vegetable crops, clearing forested areas to grow wheat, oats, cabbages, potatoes, and other European staples in gardens around forts and outposts. Transportation routes developed by the trappers and traders led settlers further into the Canadian interior, allowing them to access and cultivate new pieces of land.

Changes came, too, to the average Canadian meal. Cereal grains, dairy products, and meat – all cornerstones of the Scottish, English, and French diets that greatly influenced Canadian cuisine – became far more prevalent. Still, many settlers benefited and thrived by adapting Indigenous strategies like harvesting wild rice, boiling maple syrup, and fishing for cod and salmon.

The Wheat Boom

In 1867, the Canadian Confederation united three British North American provinces into the new Dominion of Canada, which continued to expand with the inclusion of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories three years later. After government negotiations and the relocation of Indigenous peoples from these territories, settlers began moving west, incentivized by homesteading initiatives like the Dominion Lands Act, which offered 160 acres of free land for a mere $10 administration fee.

The wide, sweeping prairie lands with their sunny climate were a perfect place to cultivate field after field of wheat. The introduction of technological advances like steel plows, mechanized equipment, and a railway to transport the product all contributed to several decades of aggressive expansion and economic growth in what is now referred to as the ‘wheat boom.’

Wheat is still a primary crop in Canada’s agricultural sector, with almost 34 million metric tons produced in 2022, although rising temperatures and drought conditions are matters of increasing concern for producers.

Stabilizing with Supply Management

After technological advancements led to flooded markets and dropping prices in the 1960s, farmers began asking for government-managed marketing boards, leading to the current practice of supply management for dairy, eggs, and chicken and turkey products. Supply management involves regulating production through a quota system for participating farms, setting prices, and controlling imports. Higher prices for supply managed goods ensure a stable income for farmers, and production control avoids a saturated market. Although controversial, there’s no doubt the supply management system has played a crucial role in shaping the structure of Canada’s food industry.

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Canada’s Iconic Exports

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The Maple Monopoly

Maple Syrup.

Golden, delicious, great on pancakes… and worth approximately 18 times the price of crude oil, handily earning itself the moniker ‘liquid gold.’

Discovered by Native Americans thousands of years before European settlers set foot on the East Coast of North America, maple syrup has been a staple of the northeast diet and economy for hundreds of years. Northern abolitionists used it in place of plantation-produced cane sugar and molasses; wartime cooks used it to stretch out sugar rations. “Sugaring” conjures up images of aluminum buckets hanging from slow-dripping taps drilled or hammered into sugar maple trunks, a nostalgic picture of old-fashioned harvesting methods.

These days, the pails have been replaced with webbing of plastic tubing strung through stands of maple trees from Kentucky out to Minnesota and up through Canada’s eastern provinces. Gone are the clouds of steam once ubiquitous to northeast sugarhouses, now replaced with reverse osmosis technology and commercial evaporators. In the twenty-first century, maple syrup is big business. In 2019, just one barrel containing 45 gallons of this sweet stuff was worth $1,200. In 2022, Canadian maple farmers produced 17.4 million gallons of syrup, cinching Canada’s position as the number one producer of maple syrup in the world and raking in more than 473 million Canadian dollars.

Over 91% of Canada’s syrup comes from a single province: Quebec, home to thousands of maple syrup farmers and producers, over thirteen thousand of whom are overseen and centralized by the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (QMSP, Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec). Founded in 1966 as the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, the fledgling federation meant protection against fickle market prices and bad harvests due to weather. In February 1990, the QMSP transformed from a collection of maple syrup producers to the preeminent maple syrup power in the world. This shift was driven by a provincial statute defining marketing rules for farm, forestry, and fishing products, allowing the federation to launch a joint plan for the collective marketing of maple syrup. This single decision brought a sea change to maple syrup production. On paper, the joint plan stabilized an infamously fickle industry with a hectic harvesting season. In practice, it gave the federation control over the pricing, terms of sale, marketing, and supply of Quebec’s maple syrup. The joint marketing plan put wheels on Quebec’s maple syrup production; regulating sales and moving to a quota system in the early 2000s strapped a jet engine to it. Put simply, the QMSP is a government-sanctioned cartel, one wielding control over 70% of the global maple syrup supply.

Currently, in Quebec, sales of maple syrup over 5-litre or 5-kilogram containers to consumers must go through the QMSP. Once the syrup sells, producers are paid portions of the net sales three times a year, providing more financial stability rather than relying on seasonal income. The produced syrup is closely regulated and inspected, ensuring quality.

If supply happens to outstrip demand, surplus syrup is pasteurized and tucked away into QMSP’s gold mine: the Strategic Reserve. The reserve is spread throughout three sites with a combined capacity of 216,000 barrels, each containing 45 gallons (205 litres). That’s up to 133 million pounds of maple syrup, enough to fill 53 Olympic-sized swimming pools. With a hefty volume of syrup in reserve, QMSP can control the supply of syrup year-round, rather than relying on a single season’s production, and stabilize prices. However, this comes with its own issues: as mentioned earlier, producers are paid only when their syrup sells. If it goes into the Reserve, that could mean years of waiting for a payday.

Québécois producers unwilling to turn their syrup over to the QMSP face hefty fines, legal costs, and aggressive lawsuits. The QMSP might send agents to watch over a syrup farm or even confiscate a farm’s yield. Still, most producers are happy to work through the federation, with dissenters in the minority.

More concerning than QMSP market control is the effect of climate change on maple syrup production. With winter temperatures rising, other tree species can germinate in the same locations as maples, bringing competition for resources. Snowpack reduction means less insulation for delicate, shallow maple roots, and flooding threatens them with oversaturation. And with changing temperatures, the brief sugaring season is starting earlier and ending earlier.

The Great Maple Syrup Heist

Is there a more Canadian crime than a maple syrup heist? Over several months in 2011-12, thieves gradually siphoned some 3,000 tons of maple syrup from the Strategic Reserve, worth around C$18 million. With only an annual inspection to worry about, the thieves replaced some syrup with water and left other barrels empty. The loss was only noticed when an inspector nearly knocked over an empty barrel meant to weigh approximately 270 kg. Police eventually caught almost thirty conspirators and recovered about three-quarters of the stolen syrup, while the ringleader was offered a choice of paying C$9 million or six years in jail.

A Nation Built on Fish

The squiggled line of Canada’s coastline winds 202,080 kilometers along the borders of three oceans. It’s the longest seafront of any country in the world, offering unparalleled access to the waters of the Northern Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic oceans, each teeming with fish and other marine life.

With direct access to some of the richest fishing grounds in the world, the fishing industry has always been a cornerstone of Canada’s economy and national heritage. For example, in British Columbia and along the Pacific coast, the annual salmon run represents not just a boon for fishermen but the renewal of an entire ecosystem.

Salmon are a keystone species, critical for the wildlife and environment around them to thrive. The brown bears often photographed making spectacular catches at the top of salmon runs rely on them as a food source and so do over a hundred other wildlife species. Even at the end of their life cycle, salmon carcasses are crucial sources of nutrients to the freshwater ecosystem.

But it isn’t only for environmental implications that the threat of overfishing wild salmon has become a major source of concern for Canadian fisheries. The industry already had a somber lesson in what happens when a keystone species is devastated by overfishing. They need to look no further than Canada’s east coast and the catastrophic collapse of the cod population.

For five hundred years, cod wasn’t only a staple source of food and income for fishermen in Newfoundland and along the coast of Nova Scotia, it was a way of life. Towns rose up along the edges of bays and harbors, offering shelter to fleets of small fishing boats and the people who worked aboard them. Cod was king. Massive Atlantic Ocean cod stocks put food on the table and money in pockets. Cod created jobs for whole towns, from fishers to ship builders to cannery workers. And it seemed like those enormous schools would never run out.

The 1950s and 60s brought fresh opportunities to the fishing industry; with larger, technologically advanced boats and trawling nets, you could fish further out, deeper, and on larger scale than ever before. Newfoundland’s catch peaked in 1968 at a whopping 810,000 tons of codfish. Offshore trawlers began bringing up fish by the netful. And suddenly, catastrophically, the cod began to disappear.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans banned foreign fishing boats and set quotas which turned out to have assumed a higher number of cod than existed in the stock. The cod didn’t bounce back. In 1992, DFO issued a two-year moratorium on cod fishing, to allow stocks time to repopulate. As a result, almost 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador lost their jobs overnight. Despite even these drastic measures, six of the seven major cod stocks had fully collapsed by 1993, including a 99% decrease in what had previously been the largest cod fishery in the world, northern cod.

It has now been over thirty years since that ‘two-year’ moratorium was issued. Not only have the cod stocks not recovered, but cod caught since the collapse tend to be smaller, suggesting lingering effects from decades of size-selective fishing. Full recovery could take up to 12 generations of the fish life cycle, or 84 years. Only recently have signs of repopulation been observed in some Atlantic cod stocks.

With the specter of the collapsed cod industry and the economic devastation brought in its wake hanging over the head of the Canadian salmon industry, perhaps it’s no surprise that farmed salmon have become a major alternative to wild-caught.

These farmed salmon are typically raised in coastal open-net pens, offering easy access to natural resources like seawater and plankton. However, concerns have been raised about the environmental impact of salmon aquaculture, including the spread of diseases and pollution, and fish farms have faced opposition from environmental activists and First Nations tribes.

To address these challenges, Canada’s farmed salmon industry has implemented various sustainable practices and regulatory measures, including stringent water quality monitoring, disease prevention strategies, and the development of eco-certification programs to ensure responsible aquaculture practices. Additionally, ongoing research and innovation aim to improve farming techniques, enhance fish welfare, and minimize environmental impacts. And in 2018, the government of British Colombia struck a landmark agreement with the ‘Namgis, the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis and Mamalilikulla First Nations requiring Indigenous consent for fish farms to operate in their territories. Still, controversies surrounding farmed salmon persist, as does the need for continued dialogue and collaboration among industry stake[1]holders, government regulators, Indigenous communities, and envi[1]ronmental advocates. As Canada’s aquaculture industry continues to evolve, balancing economic oppor[1]tunities with environmental sustain[1]ability remains paramount to ensure long-term viability.

Looking Ahead

Throughout its history, Canada’s food producers have struggled with the seemingly inexhaustible abundance of natural resources creating periods of glut followed by market instability and collapse. Now, production trends are swinging back towards sustainable methods, some of which look to the future, and others to the past.

An agricultural powerhouse as productive as Canada is a major emitter of greenhouse gasses, and with a global focus on mitigating climate change, Canada’s farms look to increase the carbon sink of their soil, regenerative crops, and green technologies. The government is supporting these efforts, investing in programs like Canadian Agricultural Partnership’s AgriScience Program and in research to develop innovative solutions to help farmers reduce waste, conserve resources, and improve efficiency.

Most recently, the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a $3.5-billion, 5-year agreement between the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, looks to pave the way to Canada’s sustainable future. The program takes a holistic view of necessary steps, from funding research and market development to investing in the wellness and mental health of the farmers it supports. As aquaculture changed the fishing industry, the future may see a very different kind of agrifood sector in Canada.

Lab-grown meat, vertical farming, and AI-powered anti-food waste technologies might be ripped straight from a science fiction novel, but thoughtful soil management and crop rotation are techniques that were practiced by farmers hundreds of years ago. And in keeping with looking to the past to preserve the future, Indigenous harvesting has returned to some national parks, like Jasper, as a part of park management. Further North, First Nations members are reviving the art of tracking and hunting and teaching those skills to others to supplement the modern diet of processed foods. This revival underscores the idea that the path forward may look like modern innovations deeply intertwined with traditional methods. With so much variety and so many resources available, we’re looking forward to seeing the next ways the Canadian food production landscape shifts and evolves.