Considering the Code was conceived in the glare of political klieg lights, its arrival will be less a premiere than a matinee no one cares about.

To understand the contrast, you have to cast your mind back to 2021, when food prices were surging and consumer anger was boiling over. Grocery chain CEOs were hauled before parliamentary committees for a public grilling, and the idea of a voluntary Grocery Code of Conduct was floated as an answer to high prices, greedy retailers, and whatever else might be on people’s minds at the checkout.

The problem is not that a Code was proposed -- other countries had tried them too. It’s that its proponents chose to ignore lessons learned elsewhere and adopted the same voluntary model others had already abandoned.

With hindsight, it’s clear the Code was never designed to deliver what many Canadians were encouraged to expect. Introduced amid political and consumer anger over spiralling grocery prices, it was primarily designed to quiet public outrage by punting a political and reputational problem down the road.

To be fair, the Code was never meant to directly drive down food prices. But it was supposed to address the market inequalities that contribute to price inflation and had consumers clamouring for government action. On that front, it fails.

That failure was predictable. The Code is the product of more than two years of negotiations involving retailers, suppliers, and other food-chain stakeholders. In a voluntary process dependent on retailer buy-in, the outcome was wholly predictable: the commercial interests of large grocery chains carried the day.

Properly designed, the Code could address the economic power imbalance between dominant retailers and the growers who supply them. That would have required a dispute-resolution system capable of tackling systemic behaviour. Instead, the Code relies almost entirely on individual suppliers bringing individual complaints and does nothing to rebalance the playing field.

Let’s not kid ourselves, this is not a glitch in the Code; it’s a feature -- likely the price of keeping large retailers at the table.

Consider the value proposition from a vegetable grower’s perspective. Simply accessing the dispute-resolution process requires joining the Office, learning its rules, paying dues, and navigating an unfamiliar system. Filing a complaint demands time and legal resources, all to challenge a buyer that may represent a vital market outlet.

Under the current system, the upside is uncertain, the remedies are limited, and the commercial risks,  including delisting, are real. For growers operating on tight margins in a hypercompetitive environment, the calculation is straightforward: the costs are immediate, the benefits hypothetical. The rational response is to opt out.

Public policy is generally built on the assumption that people and institutions behave rationally. Unfortunately, in the case of the Code, it appears to have been replaced by magical thinking.

That matters because the most serious problems in the grocery supply chain are not isolated disputes. They are patterns of behaviour affecting dozens or hundreds of suppliers at once — problems the Code is structurally ill-equipped to address.

Other countries have already learned this lesson. The United Kingdom and Australia both began with voluntary grocery codes built on individual complaints and soft enforcement. In both cases, those regimes delivered limited change and were strengthened only after experience showed that goodwill alone does not alter behaviour in highly concentrated markets.

During hearings before the House Agriculture Committee last October, defenders of the Canadian model urged everyone to “give it a chance,” suggesting things would work out differently here. 

That belief rests on the assumption that Canadian companies will behave in ways their U.K. or Australian counterparts did not.

With apologies to Joan Didion, 2026 does not have to be a year of magical thinking when it comes to grocery retailer practices.

With grocery costs again top of mind for Canadians, governments face a choice: fix the Grocery Code’s structural flaws now or wait years for reports to confirm what international experience already makes clear -- voluntary codes that bake in market imbalances do not work.

Massimo Bergamini is an Ottawa-based consultant and writer, and the former Executive Director of the Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada (FVGC)