Nine million Canadians worry about where their next meal will come from.
Repeat after me
Nationalize
The
Food
Chain
Farmers don’t make enough to pay employees, groceries make too much for it to make sense, fuck that shit, crown corporation to run the whole thing.
Seriously. Even my dad who has a seemingly near-religious belief in capitalism (hello from 'murica) thinks that nationalizing food production wouldn’t be unreasonable.
(I don’t think my dad is as much of a capitalist as he thinks he is, but don’t even think about using the scary S word around him. He’ll try to find any excuse to say that capitalism is better than socialism. I don’t think he really understands what socialism is, but he’s not really interested in learning either so I just avoid using the term when talking to him. *shrug*).
This is my answer to pretty much everything. Create a consistent baseline both in terms of consumer services/pricing and for employee work environment/compensation. Then let private industry compete with that crown corp. perfect example, the state of telecommunication services in Sask. Sasktel offers cell, internet and cable TV services while private companies compete along side them. The private companies have to actually be competitive(or at least convince customers that they are) with Sasktel if they want to capture any significant market share. They’re also competing with Sasktel to hire employees into similar roles, so they have to provide competitive wages and work environments. Prices in Sask tend to be lower than elsewhere due to Sasktel’s presence.
I don’t see what we wouldn’t have similar results in other industries, as long as the government actually allows it to happen and doesn’t just sell off the crowns to create a short term budget surplus or reward their buddies in competing private industries.
Singapore was able to moderate the price of groceries by opening a government owned grocery store chain called FairPrice in the 70s. This forced all the other stores to actually compete on price. Nowadays grocery stores match or beat FairPrice on cost and (shocker) are still profitable.
It wouldn’t solve the production issue though. We shouldn’t have to rely on foreigners to grow our food locally but people won’t work in that field unless salaries and conditions make sense and that won’t happen unless it’s nationalized or profits are distributed in a more fair way…
Crown corp would be great but letting them monopolize the entire process might not be the optimal thing to do. In some cases it worked well (e.g. hydro-quebec prices are very competitive) but in others it gives them unlimited power to set the prices as they want in order to achieve a target profit, with potentially murky decisions like automatic bonuses and millions in severance payments.
Oth crown corps competing in the market allows it to be more efficient since other players cannot push crown corps out of the market through acquisition, yet crown corps have to adapt their practice to be competitive and lean; good example is CDPQ infra participating in a competitive market when building light rail systems across Canada/UK.
We need to break up the grocery conglomerates. Nowhere else in the world is the food system so heavily monopolized and vertically integrated. Go tell an American about Cara Foods/Recipe Unltd[1] — they won’t believe you!
A “Groceries and Essentials Benefit” is basically a wage subsidy, and you can bet the grocery chains would raise prices by just a little less than the benefit, and if it’s like food stamps in the US, it’ll be chipped away at and rendered humiliating and useless.
We’ve seen this play out with gas tax reductions: resellers know a lot about price elasticity, and any savings from a tax cut gets quickly eaten up by price increases.
Here’s what we could do:
- Tax the rich until we can afford to pay for services again
- Raise marginal and corporate rates, forcing companies to re-invest instead of hoarding profits
- Make stock buybacks illegal
- Significantly raise capital gains taxes
- (this is tricky) find a way to tax net worth as income
I mean, if we had actual competition they’d be forced to pull their prices right back down again competing with each other.
Lowering prices is only one possible outcome of competition though. So is lower product quality, and laying off workers. In general, cutting costs.
Did someone say UBI? UBI. UBI, FFS!
Actually Canada is the closest it has ever come to getting UBI, as there are two bills (C-223 and S-233) being reviewed for it right now. It still is going to need a lot of support though, so head over to https://www.ubiworks.ca/guaranteed-livable-basic-income to sign the petition, learn more about these bills, and otherwise tell everyone you can, and we might have a chance!
I’m so tired of people thinking these “benefits” are a solution to the problems we have today. At best they ease things temporarily for those that receive it, while continuing to allow the grocery corporations to pad their profits by charging way too much. We either need regulation about how much profit can be taken on food (at least on a large list of the types of foods people should be buying), or the addition of significant competition within the space and a complete ban on acquisitions within the sector.
