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

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The food production and distribution system in the western world is an incredible marvel. Food production has expanded beyond population growth, and it continues to do so though my teleprompter doesn t just give me a moment to catch up.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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. 1.00
00:01:54.840 And now the morons within Toronto's city hall 0.99
00:01:56.680 want to undo it all. 1.00
00:01:58.260 I mean, from the 1920s until the 1990s, 0.92
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 0.91
00:02:25.940 movement in Ukraine. The world saw the dangers of leaving food production in the hands of the 0.94
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 1.00
00:02:58.560 gaining power in North America by taking control of municipal governments. They're going after the 1.00
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 0.85
00:03:13.820 room for city staff to cry in and play with toys if the stress of public hearings overwhelms them. 0.81
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 0.52
00:04:25.400 lack of selection due to incompetent management before they do finally get shut down. This dip 0.71
00:04:29.700 into Soviet-style food distribution in Toronto is going to serve as yet another working example of 0.95
00:04:34.920 white governments must stay out of services private enterprise already does well enough. 0.98
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.