The $32 Steak Problem: What’s Really Behind the Beef Prices Everyone’s Sharing

By Christopher M. Michaud, The Canadianist

Two pictures have been making the rounds this week. In one, a Real Canadian Superstore flyer shows Australian striploin at $10.88 a pound next to Canadian striploin at $32.88 — nearly triple. In the other, a shelf photo from an Edmonton Superstore shows the same gap on rib steak: $28.64/kg for Australian, $72.73/kg for Canadian.

People are angry. My own brother sent me these photos. The instinct is to assume someone’s getting ripped off — grocers padding margins, or worse. That instinct is understandable. It’s also missing the real story.

## It’s not a pricing scheme. It’s a cattle shortage.

Canada’s cattle herd is at its lowest level in decades. This isn’t new — it’s been a slow decline for years — but recent drought across Western Canada made it much worse. Drought means less pasture and higher feed costs, and when feed gets expensive, ranchers don’t expand their herds. They shrink them. Fewer cattle today means less beef on shelves now, and it takes years to rebuild a herd — you can’t just flip a switch and grow more cows.

At the same time, Canada’s beef processing industry is highly concentrated in the hands of a small number of major players, which means there’s less competitive pressure pushing prices back down when supply tightens.

## Why is Australian beef so much cheaper?

Australia has a much larger cattle herd, so their beef costs less to produce and sell. And under CPTPP — the trade agreement Canada signed with Australia and other Pacific nations — a set quota of Australian beef enters Canada duty-free every year, with the tariff on beef above that quota being phased out entirely over five years. That’s not a loophole. It’s a commitment Canada made, and tearing it up would risk retaliation against Canadian exports like canola and pork.

## So what do we do about it?

The honest answer is: not tariff our way out of it. Slapping a new tariff on Australian beef wouldn’t put a single new cow in an Alberta pasture. It would just take away the one thing currently keeping some beef affordable for Canadian families, while doing nothing to fix the actual shortage.

The real fix is rebuilding Canadian production capacity — the same story we’ve been telling on housing and trades. We stopped investing in the people and capacity to build and produce what we need ourselves, and now we’re paying the price at the register. A serious plan means supporting ranchers to rebuild herds, looking hard at processing concentration, and being honest with Canadians about the fact that this problem took years to create and will take years to fix — not pretending a tariff or a slogan solves it overnight.

That’s not a satisfying answer for people who just want someone to blame. But it’s the true one. And Canadians deserve the truth over the outrage.