Luckily there’s a lot more than the grocery rebate.
That said I hope these investments don’t go to the existing monopolies:
To help bring down the cost of groceries, which have been rising faster than inflation, Carney said he will direct $500 million from the government’s Strategic Response Fund to help food suppliers “expand capacity and increase productivity.”
So basically subsidizing grocery stores raising prices?
How about instead we hire an oversight board and embed them in these companies to ensure they aren’t price fixing. And when they bitch about that, we start talking about bringing charges for price fixing for past and current conspiracies.
That would be communism! ™ (The Chinese commies do this in their large private corporations.)
But in all seriousness, it’s definitely one solution. Another is creating a parallel public (state-owned) grocery supply and retail chain that operates at very low profit and letting these bastards compete with it. Both of those are significant market interventions though so … I don’t think the LPC would go for any of them. They’ve signalled that Competition Bureau is getting a boost to regulate from the outside. We’ll see how much effect that has. In theory the CB can stomp the fuckers into submission if the gov’t really wanted that but you know, the Liberal party tries to “balance” the workers’ and business interests.