Food Prices And The NDP's Adjacent War

On A Party Lying To Voters

There is no policy that will lower food prices – or even stop future increases – that is fundamentally reliant on private businesses to act with goodwill or to care about the well being of the broader public. There can be hopes, or aspirations, or wishes, but there is no policy outcome to fixing this that can reliably lower costs (or lower future rises) without a huge government intervention.

Neither an excess profits tax nor taxing Galen Weston’s salary increase accomplish anything to the goal of making it easier for people to afford food, either – the idea that you can levy a tax on corporations and they will just swallow the tax rise is laughable, as every economist who isn’t insane knows. As far as I can tell – and I’m not an economist nor should what I’m about to say be taken as an endorsement of these ideas – there are three options to (at least in theory) actually lowering costs.

Option 1 is nationalizing one of, if not multiple, of the big grocery chains in this country, and operating them as Crown Corporations with explicit permission to undercut whichever of Sobeys, Metro, and Loblaws you’re not buying and run at a small loss. Option 2 is a new Crown Corporation with the same mandate, again designed to undercut the Big 3. Or Option 3 is Britain circa the Winter of Discontent-style price controls.

The downsides of all three are pretty apparent – buying out one of the Big 3 would be expensive, creating a new Crown Corp would take time and not be an immediate solution to any of this, and price controls have never shown themselves to work for any extended amount of time, as the whole Winter Of Discontent shows.

Why am I getting existential about my economics on a Thursday night? Simple – the NDP are lying to everybody about what is standing between the public and lower grocery prices. Taxing Galen Weston’s raise at 100% and namecalling on Twitter isn’t a solution – and they expose their fundamental unseriousness when they act like it is.

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There is not always a solution to every problem. Sometimes, there’s not one, or more accurately, there’s not one that isn’t radical. And this is one of those times. There is no solution to high food prices that accepts as its premise private ownership of stores dispensing essential items. This isn’t a statement of political desire – corporate ownership requires, at its core, maximization of profits above all else. Even if you take Loblaws at face value – that their profit margins haven’t gone up, but their increase in aggregate profits is solely an increase in volume – Loblaws could, in theory, accept a decline in profit margin to ensure their aggregate profits stay the same, and therefore help consumers.

Except they can’t, because if they did that their shareholders would fire every single person on the Board until they got a board that gave a shit about their legal responsibility to the company, which is maximizing revenue and profits. Any solution to high food prices that treats this as an immovable fact of life isn’t a solution to high food prices by definition, but the NDP are trying to come off as giving a fuck while not actually having any ideas on how to actually do what they’re ostensibly trying to do.

Again, there’s three options – or, actually, there’s four. There’s the three outlined earlier, or you just keep sending people more and more government money to cover rising costs that end up creating a wage price spiral, but even without the obvious spiraling effect that doesn’t actually lower prices, so there’s really three options.

Where is the NDP’s broad plan for price controls? Where’s the calls for the creation of the Canadian Food Price Board? It wouldn’t work in all sectors but where’s the calls to dismantle dairy supply management, which would allow Canada and Canadians to get increased supply of essential items, which would lower prices? Where is the vision?

The advantage of being a minority party is that you don’t have your intellectual heavyweights busy with the actual tedium of, you know, running the country. A lot of an MP’s time when they’re in Ottawa is open – it’s a job that can be as fulfilling or as tedious as a member wants to make it, because there’s very little that has to occupy their times. Question Period, votes, maybe a few hours on Committees, and the occasional session sitting on the House floor to make sure nothing gets through by Unanimous Consent. A minority party’s job is to come out with ideas, and try and get them adopted by the big parties. It’s to shape the debate, because when you don’t have the Ministerial cars the only way you get to exert your power is by moving the public.

The NDP has an opportunity here to make the political weather – we see time and time again here and in the US that voters under 30, and even under 40, are less bound by conventional views and the past. In the US, only half of Millenials and Gen Z voters have a favourable opinion of capitalism, and 67% of young Brits said in a 2021 poll they’d want to live in a socialist economic system. Even if those numbers exaggerate the number of people ready for revolution (or at least radicalism), there’s still an opening here. And the NDP aren’t even trying to do the hard yards on coming up with anything.

The NDP have decided that food prices and cost of living are a lane for them to connect to the electorate, and they’ve decided to propose nothing that would fundamentally change the status quo that led us to this place. They decry excess profits but have no interest in a conversation about what might dismantle. Hell, I’d even settle for trying to break up the big chains into separate companies by their brands (say, a split of Loblaws and Superstore). Fucking anything would be better than this stupid populism.

The problem for the NDP is that the voters they want to win over with their social policy don’t like the populism, and roll their eyes at this shit (and the various other idiocies recently), but the voters they’re worried about losing on their regional flank aren’t going to come back despite the airquotes woke shit because of some shitposts.

What the NDP needs to do if they want to become a serious party is come to the table with a serious policy on food prices, market competition, and what kind of economy they want. If they want to tinker around the edges and be Liberal-lite, say so. If you want to argue for a radical departure from the modern economic consensus, do that. But right now, the party is attempting to look serious on food prices while proposing to fight broad, economy wide factors with punitive taxes on the basis that frankly Galen Weston has a punchable face.

This isn’t good enough from a party that alleges it wants to govern this country one day. Their unseriousness is equal parts politically dumb and offensive to the electorate’s intelligence.

If this is all you got, fold the fucking party.