Aldi or Lidl could come in, but they’d be years lining up real estate leases, suppliers (both food and packaging/ops) all while trying to compete is already-saturated markets, against competitors that are vertically integrated (especially LCL/Loblaw) and already have much of the existing base locked up.

Interestingly they’re both actually privately owned. So if they wanted to break into the Canadian market they wouldn’t have the worry of shareholders getting cold feet in the same way a publicly owned company would.

The way it would probably work is they’d wait until their presences in the USA were large enough that they could supply the Canadian operation cross border. Until they had large enough portfolios to make it worth having a proper network in Canada.

The last attempt was Target, and while they were the architects of their own fate in a lot of ways, even they weren’t planning to be profitable for years.

Yeah I would imagine that Aldi and Lidl are barley profitable in the USA yet, and they’ve both been in that market for over a decade.

If the government was serious about competition, trying to bribe a foreign company with billions of dollars would be a huge waste of money. A better option would be either nationalizing one of the existing chains or taxing their owners appropriately, so that they’d stop profiteering and put money back in the business

Would breaking them up not be an option?