CFA’s policy priorities will help to build resilience and unlock the economic potential of Canada’s agriculture sector, helping farmers across Canada.
CFA’s Policy Priorities
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CFA Joint NPF Submission to Government Consultation
On May 29, CFA submitted its response to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s consultation on the Next Policy Framework (NPF).
The submission is a joint industry submission, developed with 26 national agriculture associations representing a broad cross-section of the value chain (Logos can be found below).
This submission calls for a more modern, coordinated policy framework that strengthens Canada’s long-term competitiveness and resilience in a rapidly changing global environment. See industry’s vision for the Next Policy Framework input here.
Priorities
The Next Policy Framework should advance the following interconnected priorities:
Growth & Competitiveness – raising productivity, streamlining regulation, supporting trade and market diversification, and expanding domestic production, including value-added goods.
Research & Innovation – ensuring innovation programming supports the full continuum from research to adoption and advances solutions aligned with industry priorities.
Resilience & Market Diversification – strengthening the sector’s capacity to anticipate, prevent, and manage risks through increased flexibility, market diversification, and reduced reliance on ad hoc or reactive responses to shocks.
Accountability & Impact – improving outcomes by focusing on results rather than activities, enhancing how data is collected, standardized, shared, and used, and delivering programs in more streamlined, client-centric ways.
Recommendation 1 - Increased flexibility and responsiveness in risk management programming
Increase responsiveness and equity in Business Risk Management (BRM) programming to strengthen core programs and disaster frameworks, while enabling alternative service delivery, including through the private sector. A strengthened and responsive BRM suite is essential to enhancing farm-level resilience, and access to these programs should not be conditional upon compliance with environmental performance requirements.
Key actions include:
Maintaining core BRM programming and improving responsiveness, including enhancements to AgriStability coverage and compensation rates, increasing caps, and improving the effectiveness and timeliness of support.
Addressing gaps in existing insurance programming, including forage insurance, national livestock price insurance, and coverage for year-round and controlled environment agriculture.
Introducing greater flexibility in program design and delivery, including enhanced regional flexibility, by expanding the existing suite through additional private, public, and partnership-based tools.
Ensuring risk management programming is calibrated to emerging risks through a more responsive and predictable disaster framework that accommodates geopolitical disruptions and disease events, while supporting both disaster response and proactive resilience-building measures that reduce long-term risk exposure.
Recommendation 2 - A sector development approach to growth
Support sector competitiveness and resilience by focusing investment on high-impact areas and strengthening linkages with policy tools and programs across the Government of Canada, not solely within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Key actions include:
Ensuring funding levels are sufficient to meaningfully advance shared priorities related to growth, competitiveness, and food security.
Focusing federal-only investments across four priority areas: research and innovation; value-added production and processing; market maintenance, development, diversification, and quality assurance; and sector resilience and sustainability for future generations, including risk management extension, emergency planning, industry capacity building, and support for innovation and environmental best management practices.
Ensuring all sectors of agriculture are eligible for Strategic Initiatives programming, including non-food agriculture and aquaculture.
Ensuring AgriMarketing supports both market diversification and market maintenance, while addressing non-tariff barriers and enabling timely responses to emerging trade opportunities and disruptions.
Ensuring industry priorities drive research and innovation programming through further investment and reduced prescriptive spending requirements.
Supplementing NPF funding by establishing dedicated agriculture streams and targeting agri-food outcomes across key federal departments and initiatives, including infrastructure programming, value-added processing (e.g., biofuels), tax policy, labour supports, and regulatory modernization through enhanced cross-government coordination.
Recommendation 3 - Simplified administration and increased efficiency
Streamline federal strategic initiatives program administration through a single portal and shift toward outcomes-based performance measurement that prioritizes productivity, resilience, and competitiveness over administrative activity metrics.
Key actions include:
Supporting outcomes-based performance measurement through clearly established targets developed collaboratively with industry and focused on measurable results rather than prescriptive activities or internal program metrics.
Enhancing data sharing and transparency by improving how program data is collected, standardized, shared across governments and industry, and made accessible to the public.
Improving administrative efficiency by developing a single portal for all federal only strategic initiatives programs and undertaking a review of those programs to identify cost savings, reduce administrative burden, and secure efficiencies through alternative service delivery models.
Expected Outcomes
Under this direction, the Next Policy Framework will be better positioned to support:
Improved sector-wide resilience and risk management capacity.
Increased productivity and innovation adoption across the sector.
Stronger global competitiveness and expanded market opportunities.
More efficient and effective use of public investments.
Reduced reliance on reactive, ad hoc disaster response measures.
Greater coherence and alignment across agricultural policy and broader government levers.
Canadian agriculture is not facing a single disruption, but a sustained shift in operating conditions. The Next Policy Framework represents an opportunity to modernize core policy tools so they reflect today’s realities and position the sector for long-term resilience, growth, and competitiveness through 2033 and beyond.
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National Food Security Strategy
Canada’s National Food Security Strategy includes a $3.2 billion investment over 10 years aimed at strengthening domestic food production, expanding processing capacity, improving supply chains, increasing competition within the food system, and modernizing regulatory frameworks. The strategy reflects many priorities long advocated by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
As the federal government moves from strategy development into implementation, the CFA is focused on how these programs will be delivered to help Canadian farmers and agri-food businesses capture more value at home while strengthening Canada’s long-term food security.
CUSMA
The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) remains the cornerstone of Canada’s agricultural trade, providing stable access to North American markets and supporting integrated cross-border supply chains. Throughout the 2026 review process, the CFA has been recommending the government to reduce trade frictions, maintain certainty for exporters, and build momentum ahead of future negotiations.
While the agreement was not formally extended during the July 2026 review, it remains fully in force and will continue to undergo annual reviews leading up to its 2036 expiry date. For Canadian agriculture, preserving predictable, rules-based trade and protecting market access to the United States and Mexico remain key priorities.
The CFA continues to maintain open lines of communication with U.S. and Mexican industry counterparts, working collaboratively to exchange information, identify emerging issues, and advocate for a stable, predictable North American trading environment that supports farmers across the continent.
Trade Diversification
Trade diversification remains essential to ensuring Canadian farmers have access to growing global markets and are less reliant on any single trading partner. In 2026, Canada concluded negotiations toward a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the United Arab Emirates and formally signed a Free Trade Agreement with Ecuador, creating new opportunities for Canadian agricultural exports.
Canada also continues negotiations with ASEAN, India, and Thailand, while beginning engagement with Turkey. Although discussions with Mercosur remain stalled due in part to agricultural market access challenges, expanding and strengthening Canada’s network of trade agreements remains critical to supporting long-term growth and competitiveness in the agriculture sector.
The CFA continues to work closely with industry partners and government officials to ensure that negotiators have a clear understanding of both the opportunities created through trade diversification and the potential risks, challenges, and sensitivities facing Canadian agriculture as new market access agreements are pursued.
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Tax Competitiveness Coalition
CFA sits on the Steering Committee for the Chamber of Commerce’s Tax Competitiveness Coalition alongside stakeholders in the finance, energy, insurance, hotel and forestry sectors.
The coalition seeks to create a report that analyzes and compares Canada’s tax environment with its international competitors, delivering a report with recommendations on how to increase competitiveness through changes to the Canadian tax environment.
Keep Grain Moving Coalition
CFA joined the Keep Grain Moving Coalition, which focused on how supply chain disruptions were negatively impacting grain farmers and impacting Canada’s reputation as a trading partner.
The coalition developed a report outlining the economic impacts of labour disruptions on grain farmers, as well as a letter-writing campaign with recommendations on how to reduce the frequency and severity of labour disruptions.
Moving Economies Coalition
As part of the Moving Economies Coalition, CFA signed onto a joint submission which focused on practical reforms to make Canada’s supply chains more resilient, competitive, and durable.
The submission outlined the negative impacts that supply chain disruptions have had on various sectors such as agriculture, forestry, minerals, automotives, fertilizer and more.
Joint Industry Input on the National Food Security Strategy
Throughout 2026, CFA worked with several national industry and commodity associations to actively engage with government officials as the National Food Security Strategy was being developed, advocating for measures to improve competitiveness, strengthen domestic processing capacity, and accelerate access to innovation and productivity-enhancing tools.
Joint Letter from Agriculture and Agri-Food Sector on Supporting the Renewal of CUSMA
On December 8th 2025, a joint letter was sent to the Prime Minister, as well as to the Ministers of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Foreign Affairs, International Trade as well as the Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade, Intergovernmental Affairs, Internal Trade and One Canadian Economy.
This joint letter included 98 signatories from organizations across Canada, and expressed unanimous support for the full 16-year renewal of CUSMA.
Open Letter: Let’s Grow Canada: Staking a Claim for Agriculture in the Government Mandate
On July 21st, 2025, CFA, along with stakeholders throughout the food supply chain, sent out a joint open letter to the Federal Government spotlighting the importance of agriculture as a crucial economic sector, with recommendations to tap into its potential to boost economic growth, drive innovation, support sustainability and productivity objectives and improve the standard of living of all Canadians.