Canada's Carney wins admiration globally but struggles to lower food costs at home (www.reuters.com)

submitted 21 hours ago by xc2215x@lemmy.world to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[-] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 20 hours ago

Just asking, is there anywhere that doesn’t have food cost issues? I hear about it from many countries. Inflation is bad.

[-] MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 14 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Ours is purely caused by abusive greed and supermarket monopoly.

Food prices soared everywhere, but here, it’s downright abusive.

[-] shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 7 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

1000044107

Each monopoly is owned by a billionaire family (Weston, Sobey and Coutu).

It's basically medieval feudalism up here. Price fixing and gouging are out of control. If Carney does anything meaningful to disrupt it he will be lauded for it for decades to come.

[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 8 points 19 hours ago

Compare food prices between Germany and Canada right now...

[-] shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 5 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Carney needs to create favorable conditions for Aldi (a German company) to enter the Canadian market. They already have a strong presence in the north eastern US and they could easily undercut the existing Canadian grocery monopolies. This is a market in desperate need for healthy competition.

Costco already undercuts Canadian grocers. Most Canadians that have one available preferentially go there but it's not enough. If the Canadian grocery market is bloated and inefficient, letting more light and agile (albeit foreign) players in will be a much needed wake up call for domestic corporations.

This is not advocacy to remove all red tape in retail. Target tried to break into the Canadian market and failed miserably because they couldn't adapt to Canada. In my view that's perfectly fine, but Canadians desperately need relief when it comes to cost of food and its unlikely that will come from their grocery oligopoly.

[-] Eczpurt@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

It's probably hard to find somewhere without food cost issues. I'm guessing inflation is being used as an excuse to crank up food prices well beyond the actual inflation value.

If we could lower the rest of the cost of living, food cost would hurt less. Housing is expensive, utilities are unregulated, and gasoline, despite its various subsidies, keeps a relatively high price.

[-] Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago

Where do you live that utilities are not regulated?

[-] Eczpurt@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

Alberta, we are unregulated in the fact we get to choose retailers but that's more of an illusion of choice. I believe the distribution and transmission are regulated.