COLUMN: Think Again – Government grocery stores are a dumb idea

There’s a leadership race happening right now for the federal NDP. You likely haven’t heard much about it.

That’s because the NDP has become even more irrelevant than before. With only seven seats in the House of Commons, the NDP doesn’t even qualify for official party status. It will be lucky if it has enough money to run a federal election campaign when the next one gets called.

Unsurprisingly, when fringe parties hold leadership contests, they tend to attract fringe candidates with fringe policy ideas. The latest example is leadership contestant Avi Lewis’s proposal for government grocery stores.

To be fair, Lewis isn’t really a fringe candidate. Not only is he the son of a former Ontario NDP leader and grandson of a former federal NDP leader, but Lewis is also a well-known filmmaker and activist in his own right. He’s quite media savvy and would no doubt perform well in question period (if he manages to win a seat, that is).

However, one of Lewis’s key policy planks has got to be one of the dumbest ideas that I’ve heard in a long time. He wants to set up a so-called public option for grocery items. In other words, he thinks the time has come for government-run grocery stores.

To support his proposal, Lewis shared a new YouTube video titled, “Why Canada needs public grocery stores.” This seven-minute promotional video was written and narrated by food analyst Aaron Vansintjan. Unsurprisingly, the video claims that Canadians are being ripped off by the big food chains and that the best way to bring prices down is for governments to provide public grocery stores.

Specifically, the video proposes that provinces and/or municipalities create these grocery stores, which would then be subsidized by the federal government. The video points out that governments already provide healthcare and education to Canadians, so we might as well add food to that list.

Indeed, that sounds like a great idea—if you like empty shelves, long line ups, and limited selection. After all, that’s exactly what we are seeing in our government-run healthcare system right now. The last thing we need is to create yet another area for government to screw things up.

Interestingly, the video claims that there are many jurisdictions where government grocery stores are operating with great success. Perhaps the most prominent example given is that of Baldwin, Fla. Back in 2019, after Baldwin lost its last big grocery store, town council decided to open a government-run grocery store called Baldwin Market. However, Baldwin Market closed last year because it kept losing too much money each year.

It turns out that making a profit selling groceries isn’t as easy as socialists seem to think it is. In fact, big grocery chains such as Loblaws make approximately one dollar of profit for every $25 of food that they sell. Thus, even if Loblaws eliminated all its profit, customers would still pay $24 for those same food items. That is a razor-thin profit margin, something Baldwin Town Council found out the hard way.

The only time it makes sense for the government to sell a product is when the private sector cannot do so effectively. Even the most hardened socialist would be hard pressed to make a serious argument that the private sector cannot provide customers with adequate choices in food products.

If Avi Lewis thinks he can win the NDP leadership by campaigning on government grocery stores, he’s welcome to try. He’d be foolish, however, to think that this is a winning idea for a Canadian election campaign. The last thing we need is yet another way for the government to lose money.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.