Western Standard - April 07, 2026


CORY MORGAN： Toronto’s nationalized grocery store experiment will be a catastrophe


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

194.53221

Word count

944

Sentence count

52


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 so thanks for tuning in i'll get on what i meant to go on about now and that's
00:00:11.360 food the food production and distribution system in the western world it's an incredible marvel
00:00:16.160 i mean with modern advancements food production has expanded beyond population growth
00:00:20.460 and it continues to do so though my teleprompter doesn't just give me a moment and i'll catch up
00:00:26.340 of that, hopefully. Oh, there we go. So in 1950, let's just look at some of those numbers. North
00:00:33.380 America averaged 40 bushels of corn per acre. Today, those same fields have yield surpassing
00:00:38.600 180 bushels per acre. Soybean, wheat, canola, other staples, they've had similar rises in yields.
00:00:44.300 Meat, dairy production, those have increased. Specialty crops and meats are also more prevalent
00:00:48.920 than ever. Niche producers of rural retail operations and they supply farmers markets and
00:00:53.620 local selections of grocery retailers throughout the continent. For internationally produced goods,
00:00:58.260 I mean the selection is higher and more affordable than ever. Even in the depths of winter frozen
00:01:02.100 cities in Canada can get fresh fruit and vegetables at reasonable prices and this is due to an
00:01:06.420 incredible and vast distribution network with rail trucks and flights moving refrigerated products.
00:01:11.940 So those overseas goods frozen transports opened the world as well. It's ironic though that the
00:01:16.420 avocado toast crowd tends to be from the urban living socialist set demanding people buy local.
00:01:22.180 I haven't seen any avocados grown in Alberta, but they can bring them to them year round.
00:01:25.780 And while there's only a small number of major grocery companies, there are still dozens of
00:01:29.540 dozens of options for people to choose from if they want to go to smaller outlets. Prices tend
00:01:33.380 to be a little higher at smaller stores due to economies of scale and reduced distribution
00:01:37.140 ability, but they provide an option. Competition among retailers is high and consumers are well
00:01:42.340 served by the ability to shop around. I mean, for people with press for time and with money to burn,
00:01:47.060 they got home delivery of groceries. It's become commonplace. All of this affordable convenience
00:01:51.940 is due to the free market evolution of the food industry.
00:01:54.840 And now the morons within Toronto's city hall
00:01:56.680 want to undo it all.
00:01:58.260 I mean, from the 1920s until the 1990s,
00:02:00.780 the Soviet Union, they grew in size as well,
00:02:03.460 but their food production and distribution abilities didn't.
00:02:06.900 Government-managed food systems
00:02:08.220 led to chronic food shortages and hunger.
00:02:10.640 Food distribution was used by the state as a weapon,
00:02:12.840 killing millions of Ukrainians in the 30s.
00:02:15.180 Ukraine was one of the highest grain-producing
00:02:16.920 nations in the bloc,
00:02:18.500 but due to putative quotas mandated by Moscow,
00:02:21.240 starvation became rampant. This was convenient for Stalin, who was trying to quell an independence
00:02:25.940 movement in Ukraine. The world saw the dangers of leaving food production in the hands of the
00:02:30.300 government. Socialists today, though, still haven't learned that lesson. By the 1970s,
00:02:35.180 the Soviets had managed to modernize their systems enough that starvation became uncommon,
00:02:39.180 but shortages still persisted, and this election was terrible. I toured the Soviet Union in the
00:02:44.320 late 80s, and while they were fantastic hosts, it was a few weeks of the worst food I've ever
00:02:48.680 endured. It was presented, I was presented with a much better layout of food in my hotels than
00:02:53.020 the common Russian was, and it was bad. Today, a generation of spoiled and poorly educated fools
00:02:58.560 gaining power in North America by taking control of municipal governments. They're going after the
00:03:03.200 food distribution. Extremists are being elected by a naive snowflake generation to city halls and
00:03:08.900 administrative offices, and they're being filled with the same twits. In Calgary, even a little
00:03:13.820 room for city staff to cry in and play with toys if the stress of public hearings overwhelms them.
00:03:17.920 The offices of municipal halls are infested with these emotionally inept souls.
00:03:22.760 Now in Toronto, by a vote of 21 to 3, the City Council voted to task their bureaucratic team of incompetence with opening four government-run grocery stores.
00:03:32.140 They feel the people who can't efficiently fill a pothole or collect garbage can manage to run a business as complicated with as narrow margins as grocery retailing.
00:03:40.060 Food is different than many of the things the government gets into.
00:03:42.540 For example, unlike with bridge construction, food delivery can't withstand just delays of years
00:03:46.640 while city staff try to work their way through their own bureaucratic mire.
00:03:50.000 It will spoil.
00:03:51.260 Another difference is they're entering an already competitive market.
00:03:54.080 If the city-run grocery stores don't deliver services as efficiently as the private stores do,
00:03:58.360 though, people won't use them.
00:04:00.080 The city won't have that monopoly.
00:04:02.140 So why do these people think they can succeed?
00:04:03.700 Well, to quote from Hayek,
00:04:05.120 if socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists.
00:04:07.620 they honestly believe that grocery provision is easy and that retailers are secretly hiding
00:04:12.180 massive profit margins. They don't understand the logistics competition or staffing, and these
00:04:16.700 grocery stores will fail catastrophically. The only question is how many millions of tax dollars
00:04:20.880 are going to be sunken into these poorly run union-dominated storefronts, suffering from a
00:04:25.400 lack of selection due to incompetent management before they do finally get shut down. This dip
00:04:29.700 into Soviet-style food distribution in Toronto is going to serve as yet another working example of
00:04:34.920 white governments must stay out of services private enterprise already does well enough.
00:04:39.180 People with common sense will see the lessons here. Socialists, though, never will. So don't
00:04:44.140 forget to vote wisely in your next municipal election, guys, or maybe you'll see grocery
00:04:47.580 stores being run by Gondek's old crew in Calgary soon.