Supply chains deliver everything from food and household goods to the raw materials for factories, but until COVID-19 few of us realized how fragile they are.

In this six-part series, The Logic examines the weaknesses in Canada’s supply chains, the solutions some companies are trying to apply, and how a shift from “just in time” to “just in case” thinking brings challenges of its own.

VANCOUVER — Jared Girman stands in a dimly lit industrial building on Vancouver’s waterfront where one fight over the future of Canadian trade is being waged.

At the north end of Commercial Drive, a few bus stops from touristy Gastown and the luxury hotel district, Girman regards a metal-lined pit about two metres deep and filled to the brim with poultry parts. Mostly leg bones stripped of meat, from many hundreds of birds. Some whole carcasses, rejected for some reason by the processing plant.