Jagmeet Singh did his best to look into the TV camera and deliver an ultimatum to grocery-chain companies: “Lower your prices. Or else.”
On Tuesday, the NDP Leader told reporters in the foyer of the House of Commons that something had to be done about high grocery prices – and that his party was going to do it. He mustered something of a fervent expression.
But by now, grocery-chain executives must know he’s a stick-up man with a pop gun.
Mr. Singh is a partner in a supply-and-confidence agreement with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but he’s unlikely to get the Liberals to sign on to a system of price caps on groceries. But he also knows Mr. Trudeau’s government doesn’t want to look soft on the big grocery chains.
This week, Mr. Singh has been ramping up the rhetoric about grocery prices because he knows ordinary folks are burning with anger over the high prices at the supermarket. He wants to propose tough things the Liberals and Conservatives wouldn’t do.
If he could propose a bill to put grocery chain chief executives in stocks on Parliament Hill and have them pelted with overpriced tomatoes, it would probably be popular. That might seem a tad medieval, but the NDP leader still turned to an idea that hasn’t had currency in Canadian politics since the 1970s: price controls.
What Mr. Singh‘s New Democrats Federal NDP want a price cap on grocery store staples, Liberals say it won’t work is, in truth, more of an ultimatum. If grocery chains don’t lower prices, they will be forced to do it, with price caps, and only on a basket of essential goods.
It wasn’t clear from the NDP’s Commons motion for price caps how the ultimatum would work – how prices would be capped and what products would be subject to price controls. And there’s some waffling words in it that suggest grocery chains could be forced to lower prices not by caps but unspecified “other measures.”
As it turns out, Mr. Singh’s proposal is a little late to combat food inflation, anyway. It has already decelerated. Food prices rose 21.4 per cent over the past three years, but only 1.4 per cent in the last year, up to this past April, according to Statistics Canada.
Yet people are still angry about prices that are a lot higher than they used to be, especially at a time when major grocery retailers have earned big profits. Some consumers have organized a boycott of Loblaw Companies Ltd. stores, which NDP MP Blake Desjarlais described as a pursuit of justice.
“This is the kind of justice that these corporations should be subjected to,” he said.
Food driving inflation lower, but groceries much more costly than a few years ago
Even if the NDP’s price-cap gambit probably isn’t going anywhere, there is still a moment in politics where there is an impetus for some kind of comeuppance for the grocery sector. Mr. Singh tabled a bill last September calling for changes to competition law, including tougher penalties, and the Liberals replicated several of its measures in government legislation.
When the social democrats in Canada’s political system are pushing for more lively economic competition between companies, you know it’s a moment of popular sentiment for some change. And the moment is not over yet.
Mr. Singh appeared at a parliamentary committee on Monday to defend his bill, and in particular the elements the Liberal government has not adopted, such as fines for price-fixing that could rise to 10 per cent of a company’s revenues.
He pointed to the biggest fine – $50-million – issued to Canada Bread Co. Ltd., which was implicated in the bread price-fixing scheme involving seven companies accused by the Competition Bureau of Canada of collusion. He called it a “slap on the wrist” for a scheme that he said garnered $5-billion in benefits for the companies.
“In the case of Loblaws, [with] $60-billion in revenues, they should be able to impose a fine of $6-billion,” he said.
The language Mr. Singh used to propose tougher competition law only included references to a grocery-store chain, and it borrowed from the kind of rhetoric that Conservatives use to argue for stiffer sentences for violent criminals.
“If corporations are doing the crime, they have to pay the fine,” he told the committee.
With so much anger aimed at grocery chains, the NDP is keen to look like it’s leading a crackdown.