Economy
When Potatoes Become a Luxury: Canada’s Grocery Gouging Can’t Continue
By Jeremy Nuttall
I don’t want to live in a country where pensioners have to put back potatoes, a food that supported millions of lives in desperate times
It was a routine wait in the grocery line last year when I personally witnessed the true cost of the grocery price spike. An elderly lady in front of me in the lineup did a double take when the clerk told her the total for her bill.
“What’s $10?” she asked, looking at the cashier’s screen. The clerk told her it was the handful of potatoes she’d grabbed. The woman, easily old enough to be retired, put the potatoes back.
Being middle-aged with a decent full-time job, until that moment, I was fortunate enough that experiencing the rising cost of groceries was not much more than a bit of a drag. But seeing a pensioner putting potatoes back highlighted the problem. The humble tuber has sustained whole civilizations in dire circumstances due to its being inexpensive and nourishing. Now it’s a luxury item?
After two years of complaints about the cost of groceries, the government pretending to fix the issue with the grocery code of conduct (and a lot of big talk), and more Canadians hitting food banks than at any time in recent memory, earlier this month we found out food prices will rise again next year.
The Food Price Report, produced by a joint effort between several Canadian universities, predicted a five per cent increase for meat and vegetables in 2025. That’s more than double the predicted rate of inflation from BMO for the coming 12 months.
Yet again, Canadian government actions have proven worthless.
The message is clear, and “we can’t really help you” is pretty much that message.
Another idea the government had to solve this was to head down to the U.S. to beg some of their chains to open up in Canada. This, rather than breaking up the big Canadian-owned grocery chains dominated by a couple of corporate giants already caught in a major price-fixing scandal, was their best idea.
Anything to get out of doing the work and angering the people with whom they hit the cocktail circuit.
I stopped buying my produce, and most of my meat, at large outlets a couple of years ago. I knew I was saving money, but just how much surprised me recently. I was at a Safeway and wanted to buy a russet potato there to save myself making another stop. I saw the price was $2.69 a pound. The spud I chose was more than a pound—potentially a $3 potato. Disgusted, I left the store without a thing to mash, bake, or julienne.
A few days later, I headed to my usual produce market, the Triple A market on Hastings in Burnaby, a trusty institution with a lot of character. I purchased a big russet potato, a big red onion, two Roma tomatoes, and two Ambrosia apples. (These are random items; please don’t try to make a pie out of this.)
My total was $5.15. This seemed reasonable to me. Right after, I went back to the same Safeway. I purchased the same items, while trying my best to get the weight as close as possible to the first batch I bought.
The result? Even with the Triple A red onion and potato having a couple hundred grams more weight, the Safeway total for the same basket was $8.83. That’s forty per cent more, probably closer to 50 per cent if you factor in the size difference for the onion and potato from Triple A.
A quick look around my nearest Jim Pattison-owned Buy-Low (or Buy Low Sell High, as we call it around my house) revealed prices similar to Safeway, yet the neighbourhood Sungiven, a Vancouver Asian market chain, had prices closer to those of the produce stand.
Now, the argument is often that big grocers have more overhead, advertising budgets, and larger staff. But I think it’s fair to say there’s something suspicious going on here. One thing is clear, though: big grocers are increasingly strictly for suckers.
Out here in B.C., this predicted five per cent increase in grocery prices will have companions by way of increases to property taxes recently passed in Metro Vancouver and a 17 per cent increase to natural gas rates in the province.
We may have a tariff war on the horizon, making all that even worse.
This crushing of Canadians can’t go on. Sadly, it will, due in part to the complete lack of real action from the authorities meant to protect the public interest.
To be clear, I’m not an expert on grocery stores or farming. I’m sure there are flaws in my complaints.
But one thing I know for certain is I don’t want to live in a country where pensioners have to put back potatoes—a food that has saved millions of lives during destitute times—at the checkout after seeing how much they cost.
And any government agency or elected official who thinks it can half-ass the response to something like that while collecting a paycheque is gouging Canadians in their own way.
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From the Fraser Institute
By Scott Lincicome
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide the fate of the global tariffs President Donald J. Trump has imposed under the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). A court decision invalidating the tariffs is widely expected—hovering around 75 per cent on various betting markets—and would be welcome news for American importers, the United States economy and the rule of law. Even without IEEPA, however, other U.S. laws all but ensure that much higher tariffs will remain the norm. Realizing that protection will just take a little longer and, perhaps, be a little more predictable.
As my Cato Institute colleague Clark Packard and I wrote last year, the Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, but the legislative branch during the 20th century delegated much of that authority to the president under the assumption that he would be the least likely to abuse it. Thus, U.S. trade law is today littered with provisions granting the president broad powers to impose tariffs for various reasons. No IEEPA needed.
This includes laws that Trump has already invoked. Today, for example, we have “Section 301” tariffs of up to 25 per cent on around half of all Chinese imports, due to alleged “unfair trade” practices by Beijing. We also have global “Section 232” tariffs of up to 50 per cent on imports of steel and aluminum, automotive goods, heavy-duty trucks, copper and wood products—each imposed on the grounds that these goods threaten U.S. national security. The Trump administration also has created a process whereby “derivative” products made from goods subject to Section 232 tariffs will be covered by those same tariffs. Several other Section 232 investigations—on semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, and more—were also initiated earlier this year, setting the stage for more U.S. tariffs in the weeks ahead.
Trump administration officials admit that they’ve been studying these and other laws as fallback options if the Supreme Court invalidates the IEEPA tariffs. Their toolkit reportedly includes completing the actions above, initiating new investigations under Section 301 (targeting specific countries) and Section 232 (targeting certain products), and imposing tariffs under other laws that have not yet been invoked. Most notably, there’s strong administration interest in Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers the president to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits via global tariffs of up to 15 per cent for no more than 150 days (after which Congress must act to continue the tariffs). The administration might also consider Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930—a short and ambiguous law that authorizes the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 per cent on imports from countries that have “discriminated” against U.S. commerce—but this is riskier because the law may have been superseded by Section 301.
We should expect the administration to move quickly to use these measures to reverse engineer Trump’s global tariff regime under IEEPA. The main difference would be in how he does so. IEEPA was essentially a tariff switch in the Oval Office that could be flipped on and off instantly, creating massive uncertainty for businesses, foreign governments and the U.S. economy. The alternative authorities, by contrast, all have substantive and procedural guardrails that limit their size and scope, or, at the very least, give American and foreign companies time to prepare for forthcoming tariffs (or lobby against them).
Section 301, for example, requires an investigation of a foreign country’s trade and economic policies—cases that typically take nine months and involve public hearings and formal findings. Section 232 requires an investigation into and a report on whether imports threaten national security—actions that also typically take months. Section 122 has fewer procedures, but its limited duration and 15 per cent cap make it far less dangerous than IEEPA, under which Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs of 100 per cent or more.
Of course, “procedural guardrails” is a relative term for an administration that has already stretched Section 232’s “national security” rationale to cover bathroom vanities. The courts also have largely rubber-stamped the administration’s previous moves under Section 232 and Section 301—a big reason why we should expect the Trump administration’s tariff “Plan B” to feature them.
Thus, a court ruling against the IEEPA tariffs would be an important victory for constitutional governance and would eliminate the most destabilizing element of Trump’s tariff regime. But until the U.S. Congress reclaims some of its constitutional authority over U.S. trade policy, high and costly tariffs will remain.
It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
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Try it out.
For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
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From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
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