[Discussion] Should BC create a grocery crown corporation?
BC should should compete with the other grocery chains to lower their prices. The first stores should be set up in First Nations communities as they often have the most expensive food.
Its tough out here on Vancouver Island seeing those high totals.
Gee, it’s almost like it was a bad idea to let Loblaws buy out most of the competition, have Walmart undercut them at razor or losing margins until they left, and then be stuck with few choices and even less good ones…
Everything essential should not be in private hands. Food, water, shelter, transportation, education, and healthcare should all be provided at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayers by the government.
No, it should happen at the national level for buying power. It should include the full supply chain as exploited by current national and multinational grocers.
So I guess what I’m saying, is pick one and nationalize the whole damn thing. Weston/Loblaws would be my pick.
Everyone in a position to complain about loss of wealth or income as a result of nationalization has enough of either or both to just ignore.
Absolutely. Access to food can be thought of as a utility just as necessary as power, heating, healthcare, etc. And just like those industries, a public option or preferably full nationalization will deliver better results than private interests.
The issue with BC Ferries is that it’s run as a private company despite its only owner being the government. Worst of both worlds. They need to be under the Ministry of Transportation like the inland ferries.
The most obvious comparison would be BC Liquor Stores, which is doing pretty good in fact. But we’ll see how they’ll fare once we get alcohol selling on supermarkets… by the end of this century perhaps
There is a lot more to how you buy food then the stores alone. There is the distribution network that brings food to the stores. Without those, you’re just buying food from the existing grocery stores (who own the distribution) — and will likely need to charge the same prices.
And the Province setting up their own distribution is never going to be able to have the purchasing power of a national grocery chain, and won’t come close to something like Walmart. Everything they buy (either imported or local) will be more expensive.
So the only way to make it cheap would be to subsidize the pricing — and if you’re going to do that, why bother duplicating all of the effort of stores and a distribution network? We can subsidize people in need directly for much cheaper than it would be to setup all of that infrastructure and then offer the same sort of subsidy (that, or you could spend the same amount of money to just subsidize those in need even more).
That would conceivably be better — but I still suspect the government and citizens of Canada would get better bang for their buck making deals with existing food distribution networks, instead of using billions of dollars building a new distribution network.
Canada’s problems are ones of affordability, and not of insufficient distribution capacity.
But when every step thinks they can use inflation as an excuse to add an extra bit of profit it adds up by the time it gets to you or me. And the big grocery stores often own several of the steps on their own.
So break the monopolies up and make them compete, that’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
Government should definitely be operating in some business areas, food isn’t one of them. They should regulate it, but it’s a relatively fluid market that allows people to shift easily between providers by simply looking up prices before shopping.
I feel like setting up a petition and contacting the ndp and the greens about this. It could serve only vegan products to reduce the environment impacts and the intial cost.
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