Doesn't ring true

Grocery stores are some of my favourite stores.  Not only are they great places to visit in your hometown, but they are really wonderful entry points to local culture while travelling.  Grocery stores provide a pretty unvarnished glimpse into what people are consuming and how much they are paying for it.

Given my appreciation of these stores it may not come as a surprise that while visiting such establishments I frequently try to get a sense of some of the prices.  I am particularly interested common foods, like flour and bread, that one can find in a pretty wide range of locales.

Anyway, the reason for this discussion of my love of grocery stores and grocery pricing is because I just read a Globe and Mail article about higher food prices that really didn't ring true to me.

To be a little more precise, aspects of the article didn't ring true to me.  It wasn't really the general thrust of the article with which I had a problem (I agree that food prices do seem to be heading up), but it was a particular sentence that bothered me.

Canadians have had years of access to cheaper food, and on average devoted far less of their household budgets to groceries than people in other countries.

While it may be true that food costs in Canada are lower than in some other countries, they aren't countries I have visited.  When in the two non-Canadian countries with which I am most familiar, the US and the UK, I am always struck by the lower food prices.  More expensive wheat, particularly given Canada's prominence as a wheat producer, always strikes me as a particularly noticeable trend here.

Furthermore, though I didn't follow all imported food prices closely at the time, I don't recall ever seeing a dramatic price drop in Canadian grocery prices when the dollar surged in value a few years ago (a trend which seems to parallel the continuing discrepancy in US/Canada book prices).  For instance, shouldn't oranges, a entirely imported product, have taken something like a 30% price dip to reflect our increasing purchasing power?

For some reason I keep get the sense that in Canada the consumer is frequently not reaping the benefits of changes in global market places (though had the Globe and Mail cited their source it is possible I could follow up and learn that my sense of things is off).