Three Regulators at the Meat Counter: Who Governs Weight Accuracy in Canadian Food Retail
On April 14, CBC News published the second instalment of an investigation familiar to anyone following Canadian food retail. Reporters visited seventeen stores in three cities, weighed packaged meat on a kitchen scale, and documented thirty-two underweight products across seven locations of national grocers. Overcharges ran from 2% to 16.7%. The mechanism, consistent with CBC's 2025 investigation on the same subject, was that meat had been weighed and priced with its packaging included: the tray, the absorbent pad, the wrap.
Sylvain Charlebois followed up four days later in his Agri-Food Analytics Lab newsletter, asking "where are the inspectors? Where are the regulators?"
That is both a fair question and an incomplete one. Three federal regulators have a piece of what happens at a meat counter. Each owns a different part of the problem. Which one was supposed to catch what CBC found is a more interesting question than any single answer suggests, and the gap the CBC findings sit in is structural, not only a resourcing shortfall.
I generally write for compliance and in-house counsel along the food value chain. But, after talking to some non-sector friends and colleagues about this, I have tried to keep it usable for a consumer who is deciding what to make of this issue.
What CBC actually found
CBC's reporters compared the declared net weight on the package against what the package actually weighed, packaging included. The mechanism matters because it determines which regulator has the first call on it.
When the package in its wrap weighed the same as or less than the net quantity on the label, the most plausible explanation - acknowledging the limits of a kitchen-scale methodology - was that the retailer had weighed the product with its packaging and labelled the combined weight as net quantity.
If borne out, that is not a calibration error. A scale can be perfectly accurate against a known mass and still produce an overstated net weight if it has been told the tare - the packaging - weighs zero, or weighs less than it actually does. The fix is not to recalibrate the scale. The fix is to enter the correct tare for each product. On the CBC methodology, the finding looks like a use-of-device problem and a labelling problem at the same time, not simply a broken scale.
Three regulators with three related mandates
We’ll call Measurement Canada the device regulator. Its authority comes from the Weights and Measures Act. Section 8 prohibits a trader from using, or possessing for use, any device in trade unless the device has been approved and certified to meet the requirements of the Act. Section 9 requires the quantity of a commodity sold by number or measure to be stated accurately, within prescribed limits of error, and Section 33 separately makes short measure on sale an offence. Those provisions are subject to statutory carve-outs where commodities are packaged or labelled under another Act of Parliament, which is part of why consumer prepackaged food sits so awkwardly at the MC/CFIA boundary. In-store price-computing scales are the device. MC also receives short-measure complaints and verifies net quantity in certain commodity contexts.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is the label regulator. For consumer prepackaged food, net quantity is a mandatory element of the label. Safe Food for Canadians Regulations s. 221 requires the net quantity declaration; ss. 229-237 set out how it must be shown: distinct contrast, boldface numerical quantity, metric units by default, and consistent with the Units of Measurement for the Net Quantity Declaration of Certain Foods document published by the Agency. CFIA's Industry Labelling Tool states plainly that net weight or net count does not include packaging material. The Agency verifies compliance using an Average System of Net Quantity Determination under prescribed tolerances.
And let’s call the Competition Bureau the representation regulator. Section 52 of the Competition Act is the criminal provision: no person shall, for the purpose of promoting, directly or indirectly, the supply or use of a product or any business interest, by any means whatever, knowingly or recklessly make a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect. Section 74.01 is the civil analogue, reviewable by the Competition Tribunal. Both provisions focus on the representation: what a member of the public can fairly take from it - rather than on the instrument or the label.
How each agency actually enforces
An agency’s statutory mandate sets out what it may do; its enforcement posture is what it actually does. Each of these three enforces differently, and those differences matter for anyone trying to predict who moves first (if at all) on the CBC findings.
Measurement Canada’s published compliance policy (April 2025) sets out a progressive enforcement toolkit, from education through warning letter, corrective action request, notice of non-compliance, seizure, AMP, prosecution and, for accredited inspection contractors, suspension or revocation. Resource allocation is risk-based, weighing compliance rates, transaction value, examination frequency, and MC's own level of intervention in each sector.
There are two features of that regime that matter here. Retail food scales are subject to a mandatory examination every five years - the longest interval on MC's eight-sector frequency schedule. And those examinations are usually performed by private Authorized Service Providers under MC oversight, not by federal inspectors. So, ASPs do the work; MC certifies the ASPs, audits their performance, and retains investigative / enforcement authority.
MC's 2025 Annual Report (published March 2026) reports roughly 200,000 device inspections, a 96% overall accuracy-compliance rate, over 500 short-measure complaint investigations - in 65% of which the device was operating correctly - and two compliance sprints during the year: independent gas stations, and small-to-medium capacity scales in the transportation sector. The 2025 stated compliance-improvement focus: fertilizer, chemical (diesel exhaust fluid), forestry, fishing, precious metals and shipping and transportation. Retail food is not on that list. The 2026 planned priorities (which are valid: risk-based frameworks, a remote virtual-inspection pilot, ASP program expansion for EV and thermal-energy meters, really interesting work) do not list retail food either. What we’re describing here is a risk-based regime that has allocated limited resources and attention elsewhere.
The CFIA, on the other hand, enforces through prosecutions, AMPs, and licence actions. We constantly check for new CFIA prosecution bulletins and licence suspensions, and CFIA also publishes a searchable AMP table that names corporate respondents and identifies individual notices. I spend a lot of time thinking about this regulator.
In terms of its attention and resources, CFIA's manufactured-foods action plan commits to risk-based inspections of more than 2,400 manufactured food establishments by fall 2026. That volume sits in the action plan generally and not on the specific topic of meat-weighing specifically. The Agency's 2026-27 Departmental Plan reaffirms a returned post-covid emphasis on labelling integrity, and CFIA reported this spring that its Made-in-Canada mislabelling enforcement yielded significant enforcement activity in 2025.
Back to meat weights: CFIA has scaled up unannounced spot checks substantially - from six in 2023-24 to 236 since January 2025 - and it has publicly acknowledged issuing warnings (no fines) to seven retailers since the 2025 investigation. Whether that escalates depends on the next round of spot checks (who they visit and with what focus); CBC reported that CFIA says the federal government is reviewing AMP fine limits, with an outcome expected in the 2026 federal budget this fall (the April 28 Spring Economic Update did not address AMP maximums).
And the Competition Bureau is our third regulator, which enforces slowly and visibly. The Bureau’s 2026-2027 Annual Plan, Advancing Competition to Improve Affordability and Choice, prioritizes investigations affecting essential household sectors (food was specifically named) and a continued crackdown on deceptive marketing practices. The prior year's plan named drip pricing and greenwashing directly. When the Bureau moves, the move tends to be with a consistent and substantial push; something that separates it from CFIA, where enforcement feels more reactive to the market, changing on an enforcement-by-enforcement basis.
The seams
To head back to Sylvain Charlebois’s question, I think the more interesting question might be: “Where do these three mandates meet and where do they not?”
Looking at CBC’s facts, the tare-entry error described sits at the Measurement Canada / CFIA seam: a scale can pass every MC examination - it measures accurately against a known mass - and still generate an overstated net quantity label if it has been programmed with the wrong tare for a given product. So, the gap in the seams is not that Measurement Canada lacks any interest in short measure. The W&M Act gives it explicit authority over both the device and the quantity. It is that the routine device-examination model is built to confirm performance, not to continuously police product-specific tare entries at a meat counter. That question sits closer to CFIA's label-integrity jurisdiction in practice, even though MC is certainly the complaint-driven authority over short measure issues.
If you think about the five-year cycle and the ASP model, we see how this works. A grocery scale is examined once in five years by a private contractor against a known mass that confirms that the device measures what is on it. We’re not confirming that staff have entered the correct tare for the organic chicken breast or the beef brisket or the containers they go in on any given day.
I think this is the structural gap. Charlebois is right that regulator visibility matters, and right that resourcing matters. But a better-resourced Measurement Canada inspecting more devices more often probably does not catch a tare-entry error on Tuesday afternoon in North Vancouver or Halifax at the meat counter. The way this plays out is with a Measurement Canada short-measure investigation triggered by complaint, with CFIA auditing printed labels against the actual weighed product, or with Competition Bureau attention to a systemic overstatement pattern across stores and time. The question the CBC findings raise is whether the gap in the seam is being inspected.
CFIA made its enforcement posture public: they’re inspecting more and they’re issuing warnings, which escalates store risk profiles. After the first round of short-weight findings, CFIA put out some well-intentioned guidance for Canadians and businesses to try and promote compliance.
For the other two regulators, Measurement Canada and the Competition Bureau have not issued statements on the findings as of writing. Enforcement happens in its own time, and not always in public. It would not surprise me if the Competition Bureau is half-way through a market analysis of scale-tare compliance triggered after the original 2025 reporting by CBC. But, we’ll have to wait and see if that is borne out.
What to do with this
For a consumer who believes they have been charged for packaging: Measurement Canada accepts complaints of suspected inaccurate measurement. CFIA accepts complaints about misleading food labels through its complaint portal. The Competition Bureau accepts complaints under the Competition Act. A persistently underweight product at one store is closer to Measurement Canada's lane; a consistently overstated net quantity across a brand or chain is closer to CFIA's and the Bureau's.
For businesses, the working assumption should be simple. Meat-counter operations carry three-way regulatory exposure: W&M Act on the device, SFCR and FDR on the label, Competition Act on the representation. Any one of them is enough to generate a consequential file. The compliance audit points that follow from this:
Verify scale examinations are current under the five-year retail-food frequency, and that ASP examination records are retrievable on demand.
Confirm tare entries are documented, product-specific, and periodically reconciled against actual packaging weights. This is the control point the CBC-reported mechanism turns on, and a routine five-year MC device examination is unlikely to catch a product-specific tare-entry error.
Run internal net-quantity audits by sampling finished packages against their declared weight on a defined schedule. CFIA's spot checks are a backstop, not a primary control.
Track complaints and reweigh events at the store level. Patterns in complaint data are the earliest indicator of the systemic issue Competition Bureau attention would be built on.
And for both, class-action risk is live. These are Canadian class actions with Canadian-sized damages, keep in mind. But, a proposed national class action was filed in Federal Court on January, 2025, against the affected grocers after the first go around; a separate proposed class action was filed in July 2025.
The grocers’ responses to the CBC piece ("a small number of stores," “protocols reviewed”) provide a good communications response for entities managing a customer-facing problem. The Weights and Measures Act, the SFCR and the Competition Act frame the same facts as something else. Ultimately, any company selling food by weight should assume all three framings will be applied to any future finding. The question is who gets there first.