Western Standard - March 27, 2026


Why Canada now has the highest food inflation in the G7


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

145.39719

Word count

338

Sentence count

17


Summary

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

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the impact of food inflation on the economy and the possibility of a recession. We also talk about the Manitoba government's new plan to take out the PST at the grocery stores.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I also wanted to ask, is this food inflation that we're experiencing now, is this indications of a recession?
00:00:08.160 I guess going back to history, has it been a pattern in the past where one of the first things we see is this high spike in food inflation?
00:00:18.800 Well, it depends how governments react.
00:00:22.060 The more a government will print money and inject money into the system, the more likely you'll see a recession because things get more expensive.
00:00:32.420 Everything gets more expensive.
00:00:34.400 And we tend to see that like the grocery benefit program that we saw a few weeks ago.
00:00:39.600 That's exactly that.
00:00:41.200 And so that was certainly was a step in the wrong direction.
00:00:44.080 So if provinces and the federal government actually stop doing that, then yes, we have a chance of avoiding a recession.
00:00:54.780 Manitoba is announcing today that it's actually stopping.
00:00:59.940 It will actually take out the PST at the grocery store, which is certainly good news.
00:01:06.800 you want to reduce taxes. You want to reduce the fiscal burden on people and not increase
00:01:12.640 it due to monetary and fiscal policies.
00:01:16.120 Oh, okay. On that Manitoba point, I guess I remember you talking about this before,
00:01:23.840 about how when the federal government did their tax break, grocery stores increased
00:01:29.420 their prices as a result. That's how it worked, right?
00:01:32.560 Yeah, good memory. So it's called opportunistic pricing. So whenever
00:01:36.300 like if you actually take out a tax temporarily you'll see certainly you'll see uh the private
00:01:45.060 sector or retailers grab that void temporarily even though it's temporarily they'll actually do
00:01:50.900 that so it is now that we're measuring the impact of opportunistic pricing a year later after the
00:01:58.180 GST holiday and so yes people saw the break last year but what we saw what we're seeing now
00:02:05.220 is how much more food became. And now it's no surprise that Canada has the highest food
00:02:12.200 inflation rate among G7 countries, even if you take out the effects of the GST holiday a year ago.