Politics & Power Quote by Ann Veneman

Veneman’s sentence is a master class in bureaucratic reassurance dressed up as market analysis. She starts with a claim that sounds empirical - “demand... remains strong” - then immediately slides into a hedge: “because I think.” That pivot matters. It’s not a statistic; it’s a confidence campaign. The syntax performs steadiness even as it quietly admits uncertainty, a familiar move in public communication when you need the public to feel certainty more than you can honestly provide it.

The context is a North American food system where trust is the real currency, especially in moments when that trust is under strain - disease outbreaks, cross-border trade disputes, or heightened scrutiny of inspections. By invoking “Canada” and then broadening to “America, in North America,” she’s stitching a shared consumer identity across borders, implying that skepticism is localized but confidence is continental. It’s a rhetorical NAFTA: integrated markets, integrated beliefs.

The subtext is defensive. “Food safety system” doesn’t just describe regulation; it signals institutional competence, the idea that modern governance can manage invisible risks. Repeating “safe” twice isn’t redundancy, it’s inoculation against doubt. And notice the subtle displacement of agency: people “know” the system is strong. The public becomes the validator, not the government. That’s strategic, because it turns a potentially contentious policy question into a story about common sense. If demand is strong, the reasoning goes, the debate is already settled - by consumers, by the market, by “North America” itself.