Nice! That could actually work, unlike a lot of the stuff they’ve been doing with grocery prices. It’s just a matter of swinging it, which could be pricey.
It sounds like the feds want a grocery that’ll compete directly with Loblaws and co across all their domains. But what if we required divestment? Like, a grocery store shouldn’t own a clothing brand, a separate pharmacy, a banking line, a telecom brand, and whatever else they’ve bought.
Maybe those should be spun into separate businesses.
Nationalize Telco, Groceries, Insurance, Utilities, Education. For local, by local.
If done correctly (big stretch here, and without the corruption that is already blatantly happening within our borders) it should drive prices hard enough to increase competition especially if someone wants to maintain a company. No more of this bullshit multi named single company operations.
We have at least three generations of civil servants and politicians who grew up under neoliberalism, and the idea of regulation and government intervention isn’t just distasteful, or even heretical, it’s actually inconceivable.
If you try to float the idea of direct government intervention in the modern era, people look at you like you’ve grown a second head. They can’t even imagine the idea of government directly employing people or owning buildings and equipment to provide a service.
I do quite like co-ops, but I was thinking a crown corporation, just because that way they’d have the scale to seriously threaten Loblaws and the like.
Of course, the problem with crown corporations is that as soon as the Conservatives get into power, they’ll sell it for pennies (and probably to Loblaws)
My main issue with that is that food availability, preferences, regulations, and suppliers vary wildly from city to city, let alone province to province.
A provincial crown corp might be able to pull it off, a national one couldn’t.
I disagree; loblaws is under no pressure to standardize between provinces and sub-brands, a national crown corp would be.
I.E. Nobody cares if potatoes are a different price in different loblawses or no-frillses; but it would be a grand grievance, real or precived, of potatoes in Toronto were cheaper than PEI.
Kinda but Canada Post and SaskTel are crown corporations which means pipsqueak can sell them like Manitoba sold MTS. A private workers’ co-op (could even be a non-profit) can’t be sold by an ideologue and its workers are likely to keep it sustainable and a good place to work. Theoretically they could vote to sell, but I think that would be unlikely since they would be giving up a lot. But don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer a crown corporation than a foreign grocer.
Mountain Equipment ~~Coop ~~ Company is a sad example of a coop that got sold pretty much out from under it’s membership.
I’d posit the best option would be a crown corporation operated at arm’s length, for the reasons you cite about MTS (and Potash, and Telus, and Petro Canada, etc, etc.) so that the company could remain solvent, but would be relatively immune from the neoliberal addiction to public/private partnerships.
MEC was not a workers’ co-op though. It was a members’ co-op and I don’t even know what the voting structure was - whether it was one member one vote or something else. Simply saying co-op is kinda meaningless but I think the original comment mentioning it meant a workers’ co-op, one-person-one-vote. That’s a specific configuration that creates a democratic workplace which has been shown to be resilient. It mitigates bad decisions being done by a small exec team. I certainly mean this when I say co-op.
I’m mostly in agreement, and would prefer worker-owned co-ops over crown corporations in theory, my only issue is one of scale, and that’s unfortunately where a crown corp wins out, unless UFCW starts opening union co-ops across the country to compete with Loblaws.
Which they should, but UFCW doesn’t have the guts to try
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