Diesel prices across Canada have reached record highs, and the consequences are landing hardest on the industries that keep the country’s economy moving: farming, mining, and long-haul trucking. The national average now sits at $2.75 per litre — more than a dollar above where it stood at the same point last year, according to Natural Resources Canada.
The timing could hardly be worse for agricultural producers in northern Ontario, with the fall harvest season fast approaching. Here are the key takeaways from how this price surge is reshaping operations across the region.
For farmers like Bonnett, the arithmetic is unforgiving. The harvest must come in regardless of what diesel costs, and producers in the grain sector have little leverage beyond trying to time their grain sales to capture favourable price swings. Locking in fuel contracts, a tool available to large mining corporations, remains largely out of reach for family-scale operations.
What connects these two very different industries — a multinational gold miner and a single-family grain farm — is a shared vulnerability to input costs they cannot control, in a region where distance from southern markets already compresses margins. Northern Ontario is not an afterthought in this story; it is the centre of it.
