The other day on my drive home, Angela Kokott (CHQR 770 drive home show host) interviewed Calgary alderman Giancarlo Carra (Ward 9) about the City of Calgary’s efforts to consider the “Sustainability of the Food Supply”. Carra droned on about the need for the City to have a food plan to make sure that all Calgarians have access to nutritious food that is “sustainable” and that more “locally grown” food be available.
My question is why is this the City of Calgary’s problem? Why do we need to waste tax money on people discussing this, let alone actually creating a bureaucracy. Look at countries that tried to plan food production and distribution. When I was a teen and the Soviet union was in it’s early death throes, there were many news stories about people lining up for food in Soviet cities…
The free market does an exceptional job of putting food in the stores and giving people lots of options at many price points. I knew a single mother with five children who had found a way to feed them healthily on a very low income. Was it easy? No. Did she work very hard to do it? Yes. But it can be done.
The city (or any level of government) cannot mandate what people choose to eat, nor should they mandate where our food comes from. If I want to spend my money on grapes from Chile or South Africa, or potatoes from Idaho – I should be free to do so without interference from the state. And I don’t see the value in a City of Calgary committee wasting my tax money talking about what they think the City should be doing with regard to our food supply.
2 comments
Ira
20 January 2012 at 15:37 (UTC -7)
I work with a guy from the Soviet Union. He’s in his 60s now, and he’s been in Canada for 10 years, but he maintains that the most important freedom we have is the freedom of food.
While Soviet stores offered food at reasonable prices, they never had any in stock. It’s directly analogous to how the Canadian healthcare system works now. There was a single supplier, and the prices were fixed, and rationing was done with wait times.
Here, he can go into a store and buy whatever food he can afford, but that food is only there for him to buy because there’s an incentive for the growers to get it there, and there exists a demand for it.
Cynical Bard
21 January 2012 at 17:46 (UTC -7)
Boy are you two guys ever smart!
There was relatively recent news story about Venezuela, where out good buddy Hugo took control of the food distribution business. Withing acouple of months there were reports of warehouses full of food rotting.
Sort of like the guy from Edmonton, who went to Vancouver for surgery, and got the same surgeon who was not allowed to do it in Edmonton. Maybe it’s a program to help out Westjet .