Here in Quebec the shelves are mostly intact for now. Bacon has gone up 25%. I used to buy organic mushrooms pre-covid and they are gone and afaik, no more organic mushrooms has been put on the shelves since.
Looking at the map about imports per states/province, Canada seems better fitted to withstand the backlash and unsurprisingly, Quebec has the most outside imports while Ontario has all of it coming from Canada. I would not be surprised if this was staged from the start to make life more miserable for Quebec for the coming shortage.
I've worked in trucking and manufacturing in Manitoba for 20+ years, and what Esprit is saying for Quebec is accurate from what I hear and see coming. Much of eastern Canada (despite being the majority of the Canadian population) is more reliant on importing food and goods from the U.S. and through the St. Lawrence Seaway than the prairies are. The immense backlog of ships in L.A. and Vancouver from Asia is now re-routing some ships to go through the Panama Canal and unload in Montreal.
Although this sounds like a positive development, it's actually very concerning. The products coming from Asia on container ships aren't food. And they probably are mostly Dollar Store items of little use. What the ships are re-loading with is raw materials for Asian manufacturing. Canada would export those anyway, but the problem lies in that there is now a bigger demand for truck capacity out of Montreal (to move the Asian goods that would have come out of L.A. or Vancouver) so that none of us out west (or even on Toronto) can get any capacity. Trucks leaving here and heading to Montreal are all being automatically "Roundtripped". What this means is that the transportation equipment balance for inbound and outbound goods in Montreal is very out of whack. Less of the essential cross-Canada goods are leaving Montreal and less will be returning because the warehoused Asian container goods are taking road truck capacity. Think of Dollar Store tea towels and dog toys taking up truck after truck to leave Montreal heading for Chicago, St Louis and Minneapolis by the droves (an exaggeration, but even 10 trucks a day can throw the balance out in a big Canadian city going in a different direction - not crushing - but disruptive)
As Christian in Ice-Age farmer mentioned, global supply chain is like a cardiovascular system. But unlike it, there is no single heart, there are many. Before the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the super-ships of very extended supply chains didn't exist due to both geopolitics and technology. I got to meet a number of people from the big shipping companies in Germany and Denmark that were spearheading this in the late-90's. They believed it was panacea. But it's too extended and does not take extreme weather into account.
I think Christian's right in pointing out that port cities of large populations can be held hostage for food and supplies. Although these new cross-border vax passes coming in this month will be a big problem - at least in the short-term. This will effect Canada much more than the United States - Canada exports raw materials much more to the U.S. that aren't as reliant on trucking as finished goods are. The much larger problem is how the trans-national shipping companies have set the globalist system up. Whether they intended disaster, I don't know. It looks more like insane greed to me at this point, but it's a completely opaque industry and always has been.
In terms of Canada - our infrastructure is essentially Victorian. And that's been allowed to happen because we're a ribbon along the U.S. border that can easily rail and road goods a few hundred Km's from another country cheaply. The central U.S. and Southeast are relatively self-sufficient - a brilliant grid of rails and interstate highways, but the coasts are dependent on ocean moved goods.
But the U.S. has fallen behind with its ocean port upgrades and especially its ending of dominant ship building.
As Michael B-C mentioned above, the supply chain disruptions will play into the climate change, fake food push. I think all of us here know that glyphosate soaked, fractionated pea protein, soylent green is going to be the new cause de celeb once the virus is played out.
Carry on…
