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.
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.
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.
5 companies for food is not enough competition but somehow 3 telecom providers is 🤔
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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 dont know, more competitors would still be better.
Ive seen my local no frills lower prices to match Walmart sales.
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.
“Yeah, no shit” every Canadian says.
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.
They also own real estate under Choice Properties.
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.
We just let Roger’s buy Shaw, I doubt anything will change.
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
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???
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
