Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by stating that I will be sharing my time with my hon. colleague from Longueuil—Saint-Hubert. For that reason, I will be talking less about housing than about competition. I would have plenty to say about housing, but my colleague will do a better job.
All I am going to say about housing is what I said earlier: This is just window dressing, like most of the Liberal government's announcements. We need concrete action and money for social housing on an ongoing basis. I will come back to this if I have time at the end of my speech.
That said, let us move on to the positive feature of Bill C‑56, which is amending the Competition Act. It is good to see meaningful measures that are likely to actually improve things.
The first measure that was announced was one that was proposed in the report on a study during which we, too, met with the heads of the major grocery chains, but not only them. We also met all the stakeholders in the agri-food industry.
Let us talk for a minute about the smoke and mirrors show the government is putting on, convening CEOs and, this week, meeting with the major processors. I suggest that the government meet everyone, including everyday people. Of course this includes the small processors, people from the Conseil de la transformation alimentaire du Québec, which covers a significant number of SMEs, and those from the agricultural world. The message is being sent because if we want to act, then we need to be aware of the challenges that all these people meet along the way.
Let us come back to the first measure, which seeks to give real investigative powers to the Competition Bureau. I must make a confession. When we received people from the Competition Bureau at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, there was a moment when I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed to be an elected member from a G7 country listening to the people responsible for providing assurances of a healthy competition among businesses in the country tell me that they did not have power, explain to me plainly that they would ask the major grocery chains for their profit numbers, but that the chains did not want to oblige. They kept having to say “please” to no avail.
I am going to tell you something even more galling. During the study, we hosted the five CEOs of the major grocery chains in committee. Knowing that the Competition Bureau had no authority to compel them to produce a breakdown of their profits, I personally asked each of them, one by one, to commit to provide Competition Bureau authorities with a breakdown of their figures, which these authorities would keep confidential.
Their standard response when we ask them for their figures is to claim that, as competitors, they cannot disclose that information to us. While they may be competitors, for some strange reason, they all change their prices at exactly the same time. Nevertheless, all five agreed to give us all their figures. A few weeks later I was bitterly disappointed on seeing the Competition Bureau's report. The bureau complained that several companies had refused to hand over their figures. I do not know how to characterize that. If we seriously want to ensure competition in a G7 nation, the institution responsible for market investigations needs the authority to do its job. It needs to be able to compel people to come testify and produce documents. I applaud this initial measure.
Now for the second measure. The law already prohibits agreements between competitors that will restrict competition. That is a no-brainer. However, agreements like that clearly happen at times; the trick is to catch them. Here is the adjustment that is being made to the legislation: Companies are not allowed to enter into an agreement with someone who is not their competitor for the purpose of restricting competition in a market. For example, if a business leases space in a shopping centre to set up a grocery store, it cannot tell the landlord that the only way the it will sign the lease is if the landlord does not lease space to someone else who sells food in the same building. This restricts competition.
Another example is when a food-related business closes down. They sell the building and open another business a little further away. They renovate to make it look good. When selling the old building, they include conditions that the buyer will never be allowed to open a food market. These are real examples that show how competition is reduced. I applaud this measure.
The third measure will likely have a big impact, but it comes a bit late because we now have five major food chains that control 80% of the market. In economics that is called an oligopoly. Even though the owners of these five businesses swear, hand on heart, that they do not talk to each other, we can at the very least assume that they look at one another. We saw evidence of that when they simultaneously stopped giving COVID bonuses to their employees when COVID‑19 was over, on the same day. When the average person sees that, they think that if they are not talking to each other, then they are looking at one another a lot. That is what makes them an oligopoly.
The third measure in the bill relates to not authorizing a merger that reduces competition on the pretext that it increases a company's efficiency. It is important to note that there was a provision in a piece of legislation called the Competition Act that allowed a merger and acquisition to be authorized if it increased a company's efficiency. I should hope that it makes a company more efficient. No company buys another company thinking it will become less efficient or worse at what it does. This can happen because of poor calculations, a poor reading of the market or because it is just not a good company but, generally speaking, an entrepreneur who acquires a competitor on the market clearly intends to reduce competition and become more efficient. If that company is the only one, it can inflate its prices in the long term. That is how it always works.
I could not get over the fact that this criterion existed in the Competition Act. Bill C‑56 proposes to remove that and I applaud that as well. There are some markets that are oligopolistic, but they do not all have the same need for regulations. However, when we talk about food or housing, these are essential needs. I would go further than that and I am sure that my colleague from Longueuil—Saint-Hubert will agree with me. These are more than essential needs. Housing and putting food on the table are fundamental rights. The government needs to take effective measures to address these issues.
We need to be aware of other factors that cause the price of groceries to go up. Let us consider the consequences of climate change that our vegetable producers faced this summer. I have sounded the alarm about this in the House a few times now and we still have not received a meaningful answer from the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food nor the Minister of Finance.
At the start of summer, some people invest $2 million to $3 million in their fields. If year after year they are told that they will have to work themselves out of a tight spot all by themselves, they are eventually going to stop investing that $2 million to $3 million. Instead of growing cauliflower, they might go into field crops, where there is less risk. Consequently, we could end up with a food shortage.
I do not want to sound too alarmist, but it happened in Britain and Ireland this year. The shelves were empty or half empty. They turned to the farming countries that can usually sell food, except that they, too, were having production problems, unfortunately, and could not sell anything. There were empty shelves, or shelves where the product was extremely expensive. We do not want that either.
With pricing policies like these, we need a long-term strategic policy, not a short-term plan. Politics' main flaw is that most decision-makers operate on a four-year timeline centred on the next election. I am calling on elected members of the House to take the high road and make the decision that works best for the next generation. That is our job. Otherwise, we have no business here. That is my philosophical take on it.
In the 50 or so seconds I have left, I want to say that the war in Ukraine has put the world grain market under a lot of pressure. Although these factors are beyond our control, the same is not true of the 35% tax still applied to Russian fertilizer, and Canada is the only country that has it. This measure is not effective. Once again, I am asking that this money be returned to farmers. It will cost less in the end.
I could also talk about percentage margins and many other things. I hope that my colleagues in the House will give me an opportunity to say more by asking me intelligent and structured questions.
