Juno News - March 31, 2026


Government-run grocery stores？

Mentioned
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Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

148.94

Word count

254

Sentence count

14


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to Gary Sands, Senior VP of Policy and Advocacy for the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, about grocery stores, government-owned and operated grocery stores in Canada, and why they should be rolled out across the country.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Today is Gary Sands, Senior VP of Policy and Advocacy for the Canadian Federation of Independent
00:00:06.600 Grocers. Welcome, Gary. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, we've heard proposals now,
00:00:12.140 actually more than just proposals. I mean, Toronto City Council has approved a pilot project for
00:00:17.140 grocery stores, government operated, owned and operated. And now we have Abby Lewis, the new
00:00:23.740 leader of the NDP saying this is such a great plan. We should roll it out nationally. What do you
00:00:29.140 thing? I think it's a case of they don't know what they don't know. You know, I think
00:00:36.420 governments should stick to what governments should be doing, what people have voted and
00:00:42.560 elected them to do. But in the grocery industry, I think what they're doing is they're pandering
00:00:52.260 to people who are looking for some sort of magic bullet solution to, you know, the rising price of
00:01:00.660 food, which is a global issue. And there just is no simple magic bullet solution to it. If there was,
00:01:08.540 I'm sure there'd be a host of countries ahead of Canada and the city of Toronto,
00:01:13.900 implementing those magic solutions. But, you know, for independent grocers, we know what's
00:01:20.080 involved in starting up a grocery store and the challenges and let me tell you there's a lot of
00:01:25.680 expertise needed you need to have a very entrenched uh deep relationships uh embedded in the supply
00:01:33.840 chain and uh there's overall for an independent grocery in canada your margin is overall about two