Opinion: Competition Bureau report puts grocery 'greedflation' to rest
By Karl Littler
The Competition Bureau’s just-released report on the grocery industry should be the final nail in the coffin of the “greedflation” campaign against Canada’s grocers. In a period of understandable consumer angst about rising food prices, political opportunists have pointed the finger at the grocery industry, first on rising food costs and later pivoting to accusations grocers were padding their margins on the back of inflation.
The fallacy of the “greedflation” story has been in plain sight for months. Statistics Canada put out a study last November that attributed food price inflation to its multiple global causes, with no suggestion Canada’s grocers were taking advantage of the situation.
More recently, the Bank of Canada found that while retailers (of whom grocers are a huge component) have passed on increases from their suppliers dollar-for-dollar, there is no indication they have increased their own margins along the way.
And specific to grocery profits, Canada’s leading food research institute has found the same thing: Sylvain Charlebois of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University has stated that grocery “greedflation” is a myth and said he “failed to see any evidence of profiteering on all accounts.”
The “greedflation” narrative should have been put to rest by the House of Commons Agriculture Committee, which held hearings and issued its own report earlier this year. It attributed food inflation to global phenomena: war in Ukraine, spiking costs for feed, fuel and fertilizer, supply chain interruptions and climate events. It also declined to offer any examples of or data on grocers increasing their margins.
But instead of doing the right thing and declaring the smear dead, the committee
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