Canada is finally having a serious conversation about food affordability. That is overdue and welcome. But if we stop there, we will miss the harder question now facing the country.

We are asking our food system to deliver everything at once. We want it to be affordable, sustainable, resilient, locally rooted, globally integrated, highly regulated, and risk free. We want speed and precaution, flexibility and certainty, innovation and stability, often layered onto the same system without acknowledging the trade-offs involved.

That is not how complex systems remain strong.

Canada’s food, health and consumer products sector operates at the intersection of global trade, domestic regulation, climate pressure, labour constraints, and consumer expectations. It manages perishable supply chains with tight margins and little room for error. In that environment, no single policy decision breaks the system. The real risk is accumulation.

Over time, we have added requirements and policy objectives one by one, rarely stepping back to assess how they interact or compound. New rules are easier to introduce than old ones are to align, modernize, or retire. Accountability is spread across departments, even though the impacts land in one place, on supply chains and, ultimately, on Canadian families.

This is not an argument against sustainability, consumer protection, or public trust. Those objectives matter deeply. But they come with real economic implications. Pretending otherwise does not make the system safer or fairer. It makes it more fragile.

A resilient food system is not one that tries to eliminate all risk. It is one that makes deliberate choices about which risks to manage and which trade-offs to accept. Resilience comes from clarity and coordination, not from endless accumulation.

A more mature approach to food policy starts with treating it as economic infrastructure. That means applying a competitiveness lens to new rules, coordinating decisions across governments, and being transparent about the impacts of policy choices on prices, investment, and system resilience.

Food policy is no longer a technical exercise. It is economic policy. It is affordability policy. And it is trust policy.

If Canada wants a food system that holds up not just in ideal conditions but in moments of disruption, it must move beyond the idea that it can have everything at once. The real choice is whether we manage trade-offs thoughtfully now, or allow pressure to force decisions later.

This op-ed was originally published on LinkedIn.