Grocer summit to ‘take the heat off’ Ottawa, not tackle food inflation: experts

globalnews.ca:

The federal government’s efforts to gather Canadian grocery executives for a summit to tackle food inflation is “disingenuous” and unlikely to bear much fruit, analysts say.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday announced he was summoning leaders from Canada’s biggest grocers together on Monday, calling for a plan to stabilize food inflation and warning tax measures were on the table should Canadians continue to face undue pain at the grocery store.

“It does not make sense in a country like Canada that our largest grocery chains should be making record profits while Canadians are struggling to put food on the table and we’re seeing record usage of food banks,” Trudeau said.

Loblaw president Galen G. Weston, Metro CEO Eric La Fleche and Walmart Canada CEO Gonzalo Gebara will all attend the meeting on Monday, spokespersons for the executives’ individual companies confirmed to Global News.

Representatives for Sobeys parent company Empire Co. Ltd. and Costco did not respond to requests for comment before publishing deadlines.

The calls come as Canadians continue to face price hikes at the grocery store even as overall inflation cools.

The latest consumer price index from Statistics Canada showed inflation was up 3.3 per cent year-over-year in July, while food prices at the grocery store were up 8.5 per cent in the month. While still elevated, that’s slowed from annual price hikes of 9.1 per cent in June and of more than 11 per cent last fall.

Sylvain Charlebois, the director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, will also attend the meetings in Ottawa on Monday as an unpaid observer. He said it’s not a surprise to see Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne step up to take on food inflation, as