Members of Parliament add six more meetings to their schedule as they investigate food price inflation and its possible causes
The House of Commons agriculture committee has unanimously agreed to expand its study on food price inflation and call grocery chain executives as witnesses.
NDP agriculture critic and committee member Alistair MacGregor moved during the Feb. 13 meeting to add at least six meetings on the topic to the schedule.
The motion included a clause to “summon the chief executive officers and presidents of Loblaw, Metro and Empire to appear before the committee.”
During previous meetings, MacGregor took issue with the fact that witnesses from the grocery companies were not the CEOs.
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“Given the state of Canadians’ anger with the high cost of food, why wouldn’t Mr. La Fleche take the opportunity, as the face of his company, to come here and publicly defend it?” he asked during the Feb. 6 meeting, referring to Metro Inc. CEO Eric LaFleche.
“Is he not prepared to take responsibility as the CEO?”
Executive vice-president and chief financial officer Francois Thibault, who was at the meeting, said he was a company leader and could answer the questions.
However, all parties supported MacGregor’s motion to call the CEOs to testify.
In Feb. 13 testimony, Jim Stanford, economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, presented his analysis of profits and prices in the food retail business using Statistics Canada data.
“There is no doubt that aggregate profits have risen sharply in food retail in Canada since before the pandemic,” he said. “In the last four quarters reported by Statistics Canada, net income was 120 percent higher than it was in 2019.
“The profit margin on total sales has also increased notably. The net income margin, net income as a share of total revenue in food retail, is up by about three-quarters in the last four-quarter period compared to 2019.”
Stanford also said consumers are buying fewer groceries because of higher prices, leading to stress and hunger.
He said the supermarkets’ claims that they are collecting a constant margin on a growing business is false. The margin was not constant but growing, he said, and the business is not growing but shrinking in real terms.
Both he and James Brander, professor at the University of British Columbia, said Canadian food inflation is lower than food inflation in other industrial countries.
