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I am deeply grateful for the recognition I received this past week as an honouree at the Public Policy Forum Testimonial Dinner. Along with five other Canadians who care deeply about our country, and work hard to make it better, we were given the opportunity to speak to the gathering of policy makers and business leaders. I thought I’d share here, with you, the speech I gave on a subject that matters deeply to me, and I know to many other Canadians.

Thanks for taking the time to read it.
. . .

Before I start I want to thank Inez and the PPF for your work bringing Canada's leaders together every year. To my fellow recipients Kirsten, John, Christiane, Bryan and Robert, it's an honour to share this evening with you. Congratulations to each of you

I've learned something about rooms like this one. The listening is never the problem. It's always been the doing. So I'm going to skip the part where I'm careful, and ask you to skip the part where you're polite. Because what I really want, what this country really needs, is for both of us to walk out of here differently than we walked in.

I was 3 years old when our family of five arrived in Canada from South Africa. We had fifty dollars, three suitcases, and a father who looked at this country like it was a miracle.

He was right.

I grew up poor. I know what food insecurity feels like not as a statistic, but as a feeling in my stomach at the beginning and end of each day. We relied on church programs to keep food on the table. We went to the Salvation Army for clothes. And every month, a life-saving family allowance cheque arrived from the federal government because Canada had decided that a family who showed up with nothing was worth helping find its way.

That's what it means when a country catches you before you fall.

I'm genuinely grateful for this recognition. And I want to use my few minutes not just to accept an award that young Arlene didn't think was possible but to ask for something. Because that's what grateful people do. They pay it forward.

For twenty years I've had the honour of having a front row seat as food entrepreneurs walked through the doors of Dragons' Den. Brilliant, hopeful people, many of them immigrants just like me, betting everything on an idea born from creativity and necessity. I was moved enough by what I kept seeing that I put $170 million to work in Canadian agrifood, built a not for profit accelerator, and have now spent over a decade close enough to this sector to feel the dreams and see the brick walls. I've watched as far too many food entrepreneurs have had to shutter their doors, and seen their dreams shattered after investing literally everything they had.

Here is what I need to say to this room.

There's no shortage of analysis that’s been done on agrifood. The ideas aren't missing. The case has been made repeatedly, exhaustively, expensively. And yet this sector remains structurally underinvested and chronically undervalued. Entrepreneurs who could be building global brands continue to struggle to scale. Meanwhile, other nations are quietly and deliberately doing exactly that and are eating our lunch while we commission yet another study.

The honest answer for why is this: we have a blindspot. When most people in power hear "Canadian food" they picture grain elevators. Wheat fields. Rail cars heading to port. That image is a hundred years old and it's costing us. Agrifood today is innovation. Food as medicine. Export brands. Processed and manufactured food commanding premium margins in global markets. It spans so many ministries though that it ends up fully owned by none of them. It falls into the cracks. And as long as the mental model in policy rooms stays fixed on commodities, we will keep making commodity-level decisions.

Canada is rightly having a sovereignty conversation. Defence. Aerospace. AI. And we should be. But I want to ask this room to add one more word to that list and I'd argue it's the most fundamental one of all.

FOOD.

Food fuels everything else. Every soldier. Every worker. Every family. Every economy. It is the original sovereignty - the one that predates every other. And yet our beautiful country, one of the most food-capable nations on earth, is currently sitting out the greatest food opportunity in generations.

Canadians are already there. They're in grocery aisles right now turning over packages, looking for the maple leaf, looking for Canadian made. The demand exists. The pride exists. We just haven't built enough supply to meet it, and, the world market is waiting for the same thing from us. Canada has all the ingredients, the reputation, the land. We just haven't finished the job.

That is the sovereignty gap no one in this room is yet excited enough about or acting ambitiously enough on.

So I'm asking this room to find the same spine on processed and manufactured food that we've found on defence. Not to commission another report. Not to study what we already know. But to finally build the structure that matches the massive scale of this opportunity with the investment, the infrastructure, the commercialization focus, and the Canadian agrifood brand that this country has earned and never fully claimed.

The roadmaps are written. The entrepreneurs are ready - right now. They're not waiting for more analysis. They're waiting for you to see this sector the way they do.

My dad looked at Canada and saw a miracle. He showed me what's possible when you believe in yourself, respect the incredible land you are lucky enough to stand upon, and cherish the diverse people you stand with. He didn't wait to be asked. He just built. With fifty dollars and three suitcases and an absolute refusal to let the size of what he had, limit the size of what he believed was possible.

I listened to him. I believed him. And then I went and built too.

This wonderful country gave my family everything when we had absolutely nothing. I will never stop being grateful for that. And I believe - I genuinely believe - that if we add food to Canada's sovereignty agenda, the next generations will still be able to look at this country and call it a miracle.

That's worth building for. Together.

❤️🇨🇦

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