One measure is a short-term price freeze, yet a year ago CBC reported on a Loblaws price freeze for No Name products that “Some Canadian food executives and a rival grocer say Loblaw Companies Ltd.’s ‘price freeze’ may be nothing more than an empty gesture, since the timing of the move lines up almost exactly with a standard, annual freeze on cost increases across the industry.
Providing an update on what he is calling the "initial commitments" from Loblaw, Metro, Empire, Walmart and Costco, Champagne said all five have agreed to begin rolling out various actions at each of their stores that will result in lower grocery prices for Canadians "in the coming days and weeks."
For example, the government is promising that grocers will implement "aggressive discounts across a basket of key food products that represent the most important purchases for most households, "a step the minister said is just the beginning "of a number of actions" being taken.
Another promise is price matching, something most supermarket chains also do when shoppers draw attention to a lower advertised price at a competitor’s store.
Champagne said the federal government is establishing a "grocery task force" within the Office of Consumer Affairs that will be focused on monthly monitoring of grocers' commitments and actions taken by others in the food industry.
It’s a faint echo of the Food Prices Review Board set up by the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau under the leadership of Beryl Plumtree. There is scant evidence that it made any difference.
This task force will be empowered to "investigate and uncover practices that hurt consumers, such as ‘shrinkflation’ and ‘dequaliflation’," Champagne said.
He also said plans are still in the works to establish a grocery "code of conduct" to support fairness and transparency in the sector, and to create a new food price "data hub" to allow better access to information about the price of food in Canada.
That’s been in the works for well over a year.
As for prices, he need only ask for the regular A.C. Neilson report on supermarket prices. They collect it from the supermarkets, prepare a report and sell that back to the chains.
Yet none that I know of use that data to implement their price-matching promises.
One of the major problems is that the Competition Bureau has allowed a few dominant chains to maintain their dominance by buying out competitors such as Farm Boy, T&T Supermarkets and Longo's.
He added the system leading to soaring food prices is complex and interconnected and the ability to bring them down is not solely up to grocers, but rather also in the hands of multinational organizations, such as the ones he’s met with this week.
To that end, Champagne said he told the grocery industry leaders it’s to their “advantage” and “benefit” to work with the government to find a “team Canada” approach to the food supply chain that would allow for stabilized prices.
