Western Standard - September 21, 2023


Trudeau’s war on grocers will raise food prices

Topics
food crisis warming up
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Chrystia Freeland
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

183.86

Word count

850

Sentence count

60


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau is desperate to find evidence of price gouging by retail grocers, but a new report from the Competition Bureau found that they are not only not gouging citizens on food prices, but their profits are actually modest. Now he s taking a threatening tone with them, saying he ll impose taxes on them if they don t lower grocery prices.

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 And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he desperately wanted an investigation he initiated by the Competition Bureau to find evidence of price gouging by retail grocers.
00:00:10.760 So he must have been terribly disappointed when the report found that not only were grocers not gouging citizens on food prices, but their profits were also modest in the words of the authors.
00:00:20.760 That's it. Modest is what they called them.
00:00:22.880 Net profit margins for major grocery retailers sits around 3.6%.
00:00:27.640 That's pretty thin.
00:00:29.860 Now, the Liberal government's been collapsing in the polls, and Trudeau is desperate.
00:00:34.960 He ignored the results of his own study and jumped out there, and he's trying to blame the grocers yet again for the food price increases.
00:00:43.100 Now, he's taking a threatening tone with them.
00:00:45.540 He said he'll impose taxes on grocers if they can't tell them how they will lower grocery prices by Thanksgiving, which is just a few weeks away.
00:00:53.320 Now, even if those grocers decided to be completely altruistic and become non-profit organizations, the price drops on food would be negligible at best.
00:01:02.020 Again, they only got 3.6% to work with.
00:01:04.900 Shareholders, of course, would say, to heck with that.
00:01:06.440 Then they're barely making anything anyways.
00:01:07.660 They'd flee.
00:01:08.120 And stores would start closing.
00:01:10.540 We wouldn't see new ones constructed, and we would actually see food shortages.
00:01:14.120 Not only is Trudeau ignoring the results of his own data, but he's also playing loose with his language in an effort to villainize Canadian businesses.
00:01:22.940 He angrily spits out the words record profits as if profits are an evil thing.
00:01:27.280 Those record profits are due to a declining dollar and a growing volume of sales.
00:01:32.920 They're not taking any more as far as profit margins go.
00:01:36.160 As long as their margins remain in the realm of 3.6%, nobody's getting a windfall here.
00:01:40.940 What will Trudeau's taxes look like when these grocers fail in finding savings where they don't exist?
00:01:47.880 I mean, how on earth would laying a tax upon grocers reduce prices for anybody?
00:01:52.480 I mean, we've got liberal simpletons, and they've been flooding social media and cheering Trudeau's war with the grocers.
00:01:58.260 They want easy solutions to complex problems, but it just never works that way.
00:02:02.960 The numbers look big because there's only five major grocery chains in Canada.
00:02:07.220 They have to operate in high volumes in order to keep the prices down.
00:02:11.260 Logistics, buying power, training efficiency, and management systems, they're all superior with large businesses.
00:02:17.120 That's why products usually cost more at farmer's markets, for example,
00:02:20.560 where you're buying direct from a producer than they do at the big box store.
00:02:24.200 If we did do something as ridiculous as forcing big box stores to break up,
00:02:31.160 you know, in some sort of antitrust legislation, grocery prices would go through the roof,
00:02:34.560 and selection would go into the toilet.
00:02:36.600 Nobody suggested that yet.
00:02:38.300 But if Trudeau thinks he can somehow make food prices get lower through adding taxes to them,
00:02:41.880 I won't put anything beyond them.
00:02:43.400 He's the man who said budgets balance themselves.
00:02:46.120 Now, the heads of Canada's largest grocery chains,
00:02:48.200 they dutifully attended a meeting with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland
00:02:51.540 and Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry, Francois-Philippe Champagne, this week.
00:02:56.620 They came from the meeting and said,
00:02:58.020 well, they'll see if they can find ways to stabilize food prices.
00:03:01.080 They took part in Trudeau's theater, made their statements,
00:03:04.400 but nothing's going to change.
00:03:05.580 The grocers know that.
00:03:07.060 Economists know that.
00:03:08.360 Anybody with even the tiniest understanding of basic economics knows that.
00:03:12.160 The thing that's questionable is whether or not Trudeau knows that.
00:03:14.900 If the Prime Minister imposes taxes on an industry claiming that a 3.6% profit margin is a windfall,
00:03:21.960 he's going to send shockwaves to the Canadian economy.
00:03:24.580 What businesses are going to be next?
00:03:26.420 Most industries have higher margins than that.
00:03:28.880 Dairy farmers, for example, they have profit margins around 20%.
00:03:31.620 Supply management systems have been serving them well.
00:03:34.340 Canada's inflationary situation is due to several factors.
00:03:37.280 We've got high new taxes, such as the carbon tax.
00:03:39.980 We've got massive immigration numbers adding to demand,
00:03:42.340 as they need housing and food like everybody else.
00:03:44.680 We've got ongoing supply chain issues going on and lingering still from the pandemic lockdowns.
00:03:50.280 And of course, we've got the massive debt the government's taken on.
00:03:53.280 Until all those issues are somehow addressed, Canada's going to see continued inflation.
00:03:57.340 Going after grocery retailers, it won't do a damn thing.
00:04:00.640 Trudeau's desperately seeking distractions from his own dismal record
00:04:03.960 as his public support evaporates.
00:04:06.220 It's like his bombshell about India allegedly assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.
00:04:12.200 Why did Trudeau wait until the day Parliament opened before making those allegations?
00:04:17.080 And why hasn't Trudeau expanded upon or provided some evidence then of such a serious charge?
00:04:22.220 Let's pray this isn't a stunt on the part of Trudeau.
00:04:24.920 It's terrifying to think that a governing party is diplomatically and economically inept
00:04:29.980 as the Trudeau Liberals might still have two more years of power ahead of it.
00:04:34.120 So guys, yeah, the food crisis, it's just warming up.