The federal NDP used a Northwest B.C. trip to talk about groceries and how they say they will mitigate ever-increasing prices on Canada’s shelves.
Party leader Jagmeet Singh and Skeena-Bulkley Valley MP Taylor Bachrach held a press conference behind the Safeway in Terrace on Oct. 1 following a trip on Sept. 29 to the Nass Valley for the return of a Nisga’a totem pole that spent nearly a century in a Scottish museum.
Singh criticized the Conservative and Liberal parties, claiming they have done little to decrease exploding grocery prices.
“Justin Trudeau just says it’s good enough to stabilize the already incredibly high prices. That is the wrong approach,” he said.
Singh introduced the Lowering Prices for Canadians Act in the House of Commons on Sept. 18, which he says would challenge the high market shares only a handful of companies hold.
He claims the Liberals will merely give large grocers a “slap on the wrist” for what Singh called continuous anti-competition behaviour by the three major Canadian grocers. According to statistics from the magazine Canadian Grocer, Sobeys, Metro and Loblaws owned 59 per cent of the grocery market share in 2021.
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CEOs of the three companies have previously said recent profits have been from other sectors of their businesses — such as pharmacy, clothing and financial services.
However, Singh claims the large grocers do not publicly show the breakdown of their profits, meaning Canadians are left in the dark. He asserted the NDP’s bill would allow the Federal Competition Bureau to see exactly where the companies are making their profits.
“By and large, if you look at the profit margins that these companies are making higher profits while Canadians are struggling and that is wrong,” he said.
Singh highlighted apparent successes with excess profit taxes in European nations recently, though when pressed on what excessive profits would specifically entail in Canada, Singh did not give exact numbers.
“Anything that’s well in excess of the normal range of profit would be seen as excess profit,” he said. “If companies are making profits that are in excess of their regular range over the past five years, even factoring in what their normal increase has been, that would be excess and that would be abusing their market share.”
”We have to step up and say people need us to protect them,” he said. “Rich CEOs and wealthy corporations aren’t going to do it out of the goodness of their heart.”
As many unionized Safeway workers have been mulling over a strike in the past months, Singh said the complaints from workers — which include being unable to shop at their own workplaces — indicate the need for change in the industry.
“We support workers demanding fairness and these companies are making record profits,” he said. “They should be ensuring that the workers that make up those profits are being compensated fairly. That is a very reasonable and very rightful demand.”
Singh said many farmers are being exploited in their relationships with big grocers, while more local produce should be incentivized.
“One of the things that we learned in this whole investigation into the food crisis is that a lot of the food producers were not seeing any increase in their profits but the retailers, the corporate retailers, were making big profits,” he said.