Canada’s grocery business is controlled by large players and needs government assistance to encourage new entrants to bring down prices, a report from Canada’s Competition Bureau says.
In other news, water is wet!
We used to have laws and regulations in place for stuff like this, same with the USA. As years passed they lost their teeth
You don’t get to have teeth when you’re sucking at the teets.
You lose all your teeth if all you’re eating is cookies, candy and Coca Cola everyday. Our economy is basically a toothless overweight diabetic
Except it’s not even as diverse as cookies, candy and cola. It’s just real estate all the way down.
This was very snappily phrased and made me snort my drink, well done my friend.
Canada’s regulatory agencies feel so incredibly spineless. So many industries here are unchecked oligopolies with skyrocketing prices.
My American friends are jawdropped when I tell them how much food, internet, and cell plans cost here.
The people in charge… They’re all bought and paid for. That’s why.
Regulatory capture is a common theme regardless of industry here
Right???
The Weston’s own most of the pharmacy, the grocery, food supply chain, and are moving into healthcare at breakneck pace. No shit it’s too concentrated. We need actual antitrust laws.
Sadly it doesn’t matter if we have antitrust laws or not when no one is willing to enforce them.
It does matter, we just need to put more public pressure on them.
I hope “public pressure” is euphemistic for things a little more, erm, firm than “write angry articles on cbc”
There was so much pressure on the Shawgers buyout, the Competition Bureau was overwhelmed. Yet, here we are.
They also own real estate under Choice Properties.
Much cheaper to break up the monopolies and change the system to prevent them forming in the first place. Subsidizing new entrants without changing the environment that creates monopolies will just feed the beasts with fresh meat.
Basically what happened in the mobile space. I’m 2008 CRTC had an AWS spectrum auction for new entrants in the wireless industry, namely Mobilicity, Public Mobile, and WIND Mobile. Public was bought out by Telus. Mobilicity was bought by Rogers and merged with Chatr. WIND hung out longer and became Freedom under Shaw, but of course Shawgers happened, so we’re back to square one.
Freedom is under Quebecor now. Not great not terrible. Quebecor is much smaller outside of QC so they keep competing for now.
Don’t forget that these telecom companies are also media companies, owning channels like CityTV, Global, CTV, Corus. They also control the news grandma and grandpa see on the 6pm news.
Break up the Weston vertical monopoly and watch how fast the rest starts evening out.
Exactly. The big corps will just buy the new players and everything will go back to the way it was.
This government has no vision.
“Yeah, no shit” every Canadian says.
5 companies for food is not enough competition but somehow 3 telecom providers is 🤔
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Lol exactly! One gives a $3 discount, they all do. One give $10 raise, they all follow. Great competition 👏
We just let Roger’s buy Shaw, I doubt anything will change.
Don’t see how this will work? Walmart entered Canada many years ago and does groceries yet pricing all settled out. If Walmart isn’t driving competition and pricing down what will?
I’ve seen a couple of (very limited) examples of restaurants using their contracts with suppliers to open small local grocery stores near their restaurants, that undercut the big grocery chains. If anything was possible, I’d prefer more local neighbourhood stores for packaged foods and community garden co-ops combined with farmer’s markets for fresh foods.
The Lufa model needs to spread across the country
I dont know, more competitors would still be better.
Ive see my low no frills lower prices to match Walmart sales.
There aren’t that many Wallmarts relative to grocery stores and they also aren’t usually in the same areas that people do grocery shopping, so I don’t think they are a significant competition.
No crap! Duhhh. Finally competition bureau is doing some of their home work. And new entrant encouragement isn’t the only action that’s available. And that’s not the only sector that’s been consolidated either. Someone needs to kick the behind of these bureaucrats.
Are there any trackers on what they or the CRTC have done? It’d be nice to hold them accountable for not just saying things but actually doing things.
I tried to see if Open Media has something, but looks like it’s just the campaigns: https://openmedia.org/campaigns
There was a campaign a year ago about telecom monopoly practices, but it’s now closed: https://openmedia.org/press/item/over-28000-petition-signers-call-for-end-to-canadas-telecom-monopoly
No way! People should go shop at ethnic grocers, if only to break up the monopoly.
So many small store are close becuase don’t want to take the covid fund because language barrer, store rent are go to sky because the building owner think the store can earn 70% like 17 years ago. The item get from the distubutor is already x3 the price sold on big store and the customer complain is too expensive, look at those big store, they are only $ and you sell $$.
oh! And sometime the item is distrubute by those big store, because sometime they will telephone the store, do you want to sell fruit… so nothing can do at the small store part.
> sees lack of competition due to restrictive gov regulations
> proposes more gov regulations to “fix” the problem
