Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne says he’s ‘disappointed’ in the lack of transparency Canadian grocery store giants have offered so far when it comes to tackling food inflation. He’s sending a letter to Canada’s Commissioner of Competition to express his dissatisfaction.
While I appreciate that this guy is trying to get more competition, it seems like a cop out.
We had a ‘lower prices or else’ statement, they chose to respond ‘lol k’ and then did nothing. He should tax the fuck out of them, AND get the competition minister involved.
If you’re gouging on vital products, you’re fucking scum.
He should tax the fuck out of them
Ok, but realistically now, how would you even do that. What would be the law you’d implement to allow you to do that? That’s not how taxes work at all.
The gov’t can request info from the CRA on profits the big grocers make, compare them to pre-pandemic numbers and adjust their tax rate.
The other way is to reintroduce taxation rules from the 70’s (pre Reagan/Thatcher trickle-down stupidity) and force the companies to pay more for larger profits.
The gov’t can request info from the CRA on profits the big grocers make, compare them to pre-pandemic numbers and adjust their tax rate.
You can’t adjust the tax rates of INDIVIDUAL companies.
Well, his first problem is thinking “food inflation” is a thing. There is no inflation, it’s all just unchecked corporate greed.
Want to fix the problem? Introduce a new tax that cleans house of all the money stolen by the corporations and put them back into education and health care.
That would just increase the price further as the corporations would shift the cost to the clients.
Want to solve it permanently? Crown corporation grocery stores.
Nothing essential should be in private hands. NOBODY should be making a profit from anything essential. Everything deemed essential should be provided by the government at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayers. If the private sector wants a share they can be in charge of alcohol, drugs, cosmetics, swarovski crystals, celebrity car air fresheners etc…
Is it bad to let private companies compete with a public institution? If they want to do it for less, go for it, but if they charge more, people can use the public option?
Tax. Them.
If they still don’t reduce profitability, tax them some more.
This is fucking grocery distribution and retail. It’s not microprocessor research or cancer-care drugs, there’s no “innovation” you’re stifling. Tax them.
Tax them > They increase prices to compensate > They sell essential products so people still need to buy
The only way you can break them is by creating a non profit crown corporation to compete with them.
The point of marginal taxes is to make it acceptable to turn a reasonable profit, but taxes get more and more punitive as profits go up, and thusly price gouging isn’t really worth the effort.
It still incentivizes making money but rather than taking those profits and grinding employees, suppliers and customers, you’re incented to invest that money back into the business. You can still make millions or billions in revenue and make a reasonable profit, but instead of Galenm, senior leaders and laerger shareholders making bank, the profits go either to wages, facilities or (if you don’t raise pay or invest) to the government.
This is, incidentally, how it all worked prior to 1980 or so, when we had a functioning social safety net.
Put it this way: if Weston is already a multibillionaire and still makes $300M/y in salary and comp, plus additional bonuses, then we’re not taxing Loblaw enough. Could they raise prices? Sure, they could, but why, because they don’t make enough billions yet?
Nuts to this idea of “if we tax them, they’ll raise prices and/or leave”. I’ve had enough of being blackmailed by billionaires. They need us to buy their stuff and back their wealth; we don’t need them. If, eg, Loblaw wants to raise prices to maintain unreasonable post-tax profits, someone else can step in and do the same thing and charge less, and Galen can fuck off.
We’re talking about essential products. No matter the price people need to eat so from the get go the “price gouging isn’t worth the effort” argument goes out the window.
99% of the products in a grocery store are not essential.
Essential foods are things like flour and oil and potatoes.
To miss the point by that much you must have done it on purpose
They make most of their money on luxury items and processed foods, not essentials.
It’s ok buddy, no need to reply anymore, you’ve proven you’re an idiot already, we get it.
