Mark Slapinski - February 28, 2026


Why Are Groceries So Expensive In Canada？

Topics
higher prices in groceries
Hosted by
Mark Slapinski
Poilievre SLAMS Trump Over Tariffs Canadian Grocery Prices

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

168.06

Word count

329

Sentence count

20


Summary

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

Grocery prices have gone up 30% since 2019, according to a report by TD Economics. Today, I'm going to explain why prices are so darn expensive, and why we need more competition in the grocery market.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Now, if you're one of the many Canadians that buys groceries for either themselves or their families,
00:00:05.580 you've probably noticed that the prices have gone out of control lately.
00:00:08.780 Grocery prices are up 30% since 2019, according to a report by TD Economics.
00:00:14.220 So no, it's not just you. This isn't just something in your head.
00:00:17.540 This is a very real concern, and a lot of Canadians are complaining about this.
00:00:21.940 Today I'm going to explain why groceries are so darn expensive.
00:00:24.940 Now, we've been told the reason groceries are so expensive is because of inflation.
00:00:29.260 During the pandemic, factories closed down, and a lot of people were forced to stay home.
00:00:33.960 Other factors like the war in Ukraine also contributed to inflation
00:00:37.020 by causing a reduction in the supply of energy products, fertilizers, and grains.
00:00:42.040 Now, inflation explains why prices went up in the first place,
00:00:45.060 but it doesn't explain why prices are still high.
00:00:47.700 There's actually another reason for that.
00:00:49.880 One of the reasons prices have remained so high is simply because people continue to pay them.
00:00:54.960 Food is obviously not a luxury.
00:00:57.000 It's something people need to survive, and people continue to buy food even though it's more expensive.
00:01:02.860 And you may not know this, but there's not a lot of competition in the Canadian grocery market.
00:01:07.700 Five companies completely dominate the grocery market in Canada.
00:01:11.220 Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, Walmart, and Costco dominate the grocery market in this country,
00:01:16.140 responsible for 75 of all food sales in Canada.
00:01:18.920 So due to the lack of competition in the grocery market,
00:01:22.360 and the fact that people are still willing to pay the higher prices,
00:01:25.760 means that these companies have little incentive to lower their prices and reduce their profits.
00:01:30.800 So until there's more competition in the grocery market,
00:01:33.400 where people simply decide to stop eating,
00:01:35.720 we're going to be stuck with these higher prices.
00:01:37.560 So before that,
00:01:55.540 we're going to have to wait for a long time.