Right now Canadians are being gouged at the supermarket cash register by a small group of corporations that act like a cartel – jacking up prices, and deploying “shrinkflation” to sell us less for more. They’ve also been caught in a series of scandals - from “Tatergate", a class action lawsuit in the US against Canadian potato corporations price-fixing Tater Tots (is nothing sacred?) to Loblaws and others charging us for the packaging on meat. For years.
The simple answer is price caps for food, an NDP policy that was successfully implemented in France just last year. With the cost of living about to shoot up again, we must prevent price gouging by Canada’s corporate grocery magnates.
We also need windfall profit taxes for corporations that are price-fixing in the midst of a cost-of-living emergency.
And ultimately, we need to break up these virtual monopolies - either by giving the Competition Bureau the tools to actually rein in greedy corporations, or by introducing a public option for groceries - a public, non-profit supermarket model. Nothing would get prices down faster than some real competition in the public interest!