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.
00:00:00.000And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he desperately wanted an investigation he initiated by the Competition Bureau to find evidence of price gouging by retail grocers.
00:00:10.760So 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.
00:00:20.760That's it. Modest is what they called them.
00:00:22.880Net profit margins for major grocery retailers sits around 3.6%.
00:00:29.860Now, the Liberal government's been collapsing in the polls, and Trudeau is desperate.
00:00:34.960He 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.
00:00:43.100Now, he's taking a threatening tone with them.
00:00:45.540He 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.
00:00:53.320Now, even if those grocers decided to be completely altruistic and become non-profit organizations, the price drops on food would be negligible at best.
00:01:02.020Again, they only got 3.6% to work with.
00:01:04.900Shareholders, of course, would say, to heck with that.
00:01:06.440Then they're barely making anything anyways.
00:01:10.540We wouldn't see new ones constructed, and we would actually see food shortages.
00:01:14.120Not 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.
00:01:22.940He angrily spits out the words record profits as if profits are an evil thing.
00:01:27.280Those record profits are due to a declining dollar and a growing volume of sales.
00:01:32.920They're not taking any more as far as profit margins go.
00:01:36.160As long as their margins remain in the realm of 3.6%, nobody's getting a windfall here.
00:01:40.940What will Trudeau's taxes look like when these grocers fail in finding savings where they don't exist?
00:01:47.880I mean, how on earth would laying a tax upon grocers reduce prices for anybody?
00:01:52.480I mean, we've got liberal simpletons, and they've been flooding social media and cheering Trudeau's war with the grocers.
00:01:58.260They want easy solutions to complex problems, but it just never works that way.
00:02:02.960The numbers look big because there's only five major grocery chains in Canada.
00:02:07.220They have to operate in high volumes in order to keep the prices down.
00:02:11.260Logistics, buying power, training efficiency, and management systems, they're all superior with large businesses.
00:02:17.120That's why products usually cost more at farmer's markets, for example,
00:02:20.560where you're buying direct from a producer than they do at the big box store.
00:02:24.200If we did do something as ridiculous as forcing big box stores to break up,
00:02:31.160you know, in some sort of antitrust legislation, grocery prices would go through the roof,
00:02:34.560and selection would go into the toilet.