Within the media noise surrounding trade barriers and federal defunding, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) quietly sits, facing its own public backlash, funding cuts, and concern about the future. For the federal government to reach its savings goal, the CFIA will drop tens of thousands of jobs by 2029. While the agriculture community has made sure the Agriculture and Agrifood Canada (AAFC) losses are well-understood, Canadians have been fairly apathetic towards the CFIA. So, this blog is going to dive into what the CFIA does for our food systems and the implications of defunding.
Jack of all Trades
The CFIA is involved in everything Canadians consume, with different roles taking place across the entire supply chain since production. Very broadly, the primary purpose of any inspection is to ensure health, safety, and ethicality, to limit the risk of negative impacts from production mistakes, poor business decisions (including quality sacrifices), and contamination. Our food system is determined by domestic and international food standards, the combination of which maintains Canada’s title as a global food leader. The CFIA controls food licenses and operational certificates, sets ingredient and additive guidelines, upholds plant and animal health and safety standards, traces food and animal movements including in and out of the country, and ensures transparency in all our labels (food and chemical). Its standards, much like the majority of Canadian regulation, are set using evidence-based criteria; this creates objective, measurable targets that keep up with (or should) scientific developments.
Farmers are well-versed in CFIA bureaucracy, having to consult with guidelines when using agricultural inputs and animal biosecurity. Food businesses, too, are constantly monitoring CFIA updates in requirements like Preventative Control Plans, which ensures businesses understand how and why food is produced with the protections it does. Although most inspections are considered routine, the CFIA may also be called in instances of noncompliance. Noncompliance, regardless of intent, signals a decline in food safety, and risks the safety of other products in compliance. Therefore, the CFIA is also responsible for penalties for violators, which may be training courses or operation suspensions for first time or accidental offense, or steep fees and loss of license for nefarious individuals.
Not every violation makes it onto grocery shelves but those that do are issued recalls and repeated, purposeful mislabeling may be investigated for food fraud. At the time of writing, 2026 has already seen 25 food recalls in a variety of products, for issues such as undeclared allergens, bacterial/mold contamination, or plastic traces. Food recalls and food labels are arguably some of the most obvious ways consumers notice the CFIA’s work to keep Canadians safe. It’s important that the food made available to consumers be safe up to the point of purchase given how many foodborne illnesses are the result of improper handling, cooking, or storage at home.
Animal Defense
Animal health and safety as livestock moves from farm to truck to abattoir is a vital component of product safety. There are numerous opportunities for pathogens and bacteria to work into herds, to the point that traceability to ensure biosecurity across the supply chain is mandatory. (There are recent discussions of updating traceability requirements to be even more thorough, to the chagrin of cattle farmers, but that discussion is worth its own blog.)
These protections are in place largely to protect from a few economically detrimental diseases, and any farmer or animal handler is implicitly agreeing to top biosecurity standards when they take on those roles. The absence of biosecurity measures is considered a welfare concern. No disease is acceptable for an animal to move down the supply chain, but those without treatment or with high mortality rates are required to be reported to the CFIA immediately. It is worth noting that for immediately notifiable diseases, a producer is only subject to financial penalty if the positive case is concealed; a positive result, so long as biosecurity measures are properly followed, does not automatically trigger penalty. While, for health and safety reasons, it makes perfect sense that euthanasia be used as a last resort for untreatable diseases, this is a major source of CFIA criticism.
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is an example of where the potential threat from a wildlife disease had severely negative outcomes for deer and elk producers. CWD was first detected in wild populations of deer, elk and moose dating back to the 1960s in the USA. The disease spread so that it was being detected in Canadian wildlife early into the 21st century. The CFIA established mandatory reporting requirements to ensure to ensure livestock and food safety. While there is no confirmed medical evidence of CWD being transmittable from wildlife to humans, the prion causing CWD is similar to the prion that caused mad cow disease in cattle and resulted in Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans. As a result many deer and elk ranchers voluntarily destroyed their herds.
The Case of Universal Ostrich
Let’s use the avian flu as another example. Avian flu is an immediately notifiable disease as it can transfer between species quite easily and there is no treatment.
Biosecurity, therefore, acts as a preventative measure, since a positive test for a single bird requires euthanasia of the entire flock and activates a quarantine zone for all equipment, eggs, and poultry products moving in and out of a given radius. Except having to cull an animal not presenting signs of infection is a major overstep, as loudly protested in Edgewood, British Columbia in November 2025. In this case, ostrich farmers knowingly hid avian flu-related deaths for nearly a year, trusting their own personal biosecurity and quarantine efforts. While 10 months likely reduced the infection rate of the ostriches, the CFIA does not entertain “likely” in their evidence-based foundation, and the farm knowingly sacrificed the quality and safety of neighbouring farms with their choices.
I am by no means trying to spur hate towards these farmers because, while misinformed, they believed that by fighting the CFIA, they were advocating for their birds’ best interests. Unfortunately for those individuals, while fines for disobeying quarantine orders have since been dropped on a technicality, the cull of their entire ostrich flock has been completed. Losing an entire flock as a result of a CFIA-ordered euthanasia would normally begin the compensation process to lessen the financial burden of disposal and starting over, however, by not complying with disease notification laws, the farm sacrificed that privilege. Members of Parliament, without any understanding of animal health, have looked at the $7 million federal price tag associated with Universal Ostrich since late 2024, and declared this avian flu case a waste of resources. The majority of those costs were the result of repeated judicial challenges to the cull and police necessity on site following threats by the general public towards federal employees. This one farm believed their rights were more important than the thousands of other poultry producers, as well as Canada’s poultry export sector, which is valued at nearly $300 million per year. Why this case became the media and protest sensation it did is confounding, especially as hundreds of thousands of birds (often per farm) continue to be affected by avian flu and stamp out policies but without the vitriol. Since 2021, Canadas has lost over 17.2 million birds across 640 farms have been euthanized as a result of on-farm detected avian flu.
Concluding Remarks
The federal government funds the CFIA with about $1 billion annually to protect our $100 billion agriculture industry. A fraction of their importance is encased in their budget. A loss of funding and CFIA employees is a loss in food safety efficiency; it is a failure for inspection hours, for disease responsiveness, for scientific rigor, for risk communication, and for recall speed, among others. The economic costs of a food system without confidence in health and safety measures will far outweigh the poorly justified savings. Mistakes happen, and the CFIA exists to ensure that those mistakes do not destroy food safety and endanger lives. Canada’s reputation as a food leader is at risk if the quality of our safety processes declines and such is certain to occur when you fire the workforce getting it done.
