Madam Speaker, I want to thank my two colleagues who spoke before me. I really appreciated both of their interpretations of this particular bill and the meaning that it has.
I am here today to speak to our leader's bill, Bill C-352, which talks about amending the Competition Act and the Competition Tribunal Act to increase competition and lower prices for Canadians.
My husband's culture is the most northern Coast Salish in Canada. Their nation is Homalco. One of the things that they and their teachings are very clear in is that greed is actually considered a profound illness. If a member of their community shows greed in holding on to wealth, there is a lot of work done to help that person not be in that place of greed. The reason they feel this is an important issue is that the core value of their community is “together we are stronger”. If somebody is suffering, then it is a weight upon all of us to make sure that we lift that person up and support them in the way that they need to be supported.
Unfortunately, that is not the system that we currently see in Canada. I think most Canadians know the reality that the system is rigged to support the very, very wealthy, the one per cent people of Canada. We see this not just in Canada but also in many other countries. We know it is extremely unfair. What bothers me the most about how our system is rigged right now is that the wage earnings of everyday Canadians continue to be stagnant, while the very wealthy are seeing huge increases in their wage earnings and their incomes. We have seen this in a lot of statistics. This tells us that everyday Canadians are going to continue to struggle, because the greed in this country is out of control. That is where we are.
We can look at what is happening in our grocery stores right now, where people are really struggling to be able to afford the basic things they need to feed their families and to be treated with dignity. I bring this up a lot in this House, but I think there should be a bar of dignity in this country. I believe that fits in with the teachings from the Homalco people. They understand that everybody deserves dignity. If somebody has a strength or a weakness, they find a way to celebrate what is good and strong. They find ways to support and love through those weak moments. We are not seeing that right now. We are seeing a lot of people who are doing everything right. They are following the rules that they think are fair. They see themselves falling further and further behind. That makes me think of a lot of young people, who are worried about the fact that they may not be able to afford a home or to ever have a livable wage that will give them the ability to build the things in their life that they want to build.
As we look at this system and acknowledge that it is rigged, the worst thing that we can do is to say we should just not have a system to address that. I like to believe the best of people. I tend to be a fairly trusting person. I believe in the essential good in everyone. However, I also know that, if there is a system that does not keep engaging and making sure that things are fair, there are people who would turn that system to feed themselves at the expense of other people. That is what we have right now.
We are watching people like Galen Weston walk away with multimillion-dollar raises while the workers at Loblaws cannot even afford to buy groceries at the store they work in. We are seeing more people struggling to pay for basic groceries, but we are also seeing much higher outcomes and profits for these grocery stores. It is frustrating that we can see this out-of-touch Liberal Party that calls them in and says to them nicely, “Can you stop raising your prices? It's really hurting the Canadian consumer”. That is talk, but it does not actually say that it is not fair and there is going to be something put into place that makes it fair.
Then we have the corporate-controlled Conservatives. They, quite honestly, have 50% of their governing body as lobbyists for greedy CEOs. That is whom they are talking to. That is their leadership. That is who is helping them plot their own course, moving forward. This worries me, because it means that everyday people doing everything right are continuing to be marginalized because our systems do not hold those folks to account.
What would this bill do? The first thing it would do is increase penalties for price fixing. We all know about this. We know sometimes prices are fixed and consumers are paying way more than they should. When I look at this, it reminds me of the reality that Loblaws recently tried to decide that instead of selling almost-expired food at 50% off, it was going to take only 30% off. It is nickel-and-diming people who are struggling and doing their best every day to get by, and taking away every opportunity for something they can afford.
The other thing the bill would do is help smaller grocery stores by protecting them against anti-competitive tactics from bigger players. Let us be honest. We all know this, especially people in small businesses. When there is a player in town that is a really big corporation with tons of resources, it can undermine them really easily. We need something in place that keeps things on a level playing field.
We also know that businesses that are within a certain radius of a big grocery store and offer a lower price for the consumer are told they cannot do it, because it is anti-competitive. What happens is that those businesses have to raise their prices, even though they could give it to somebody at a lower price. That is wrong, and it is those big corporate giants coming for people who work hard, care about their community and try to make things affordable, and taking away their ability to do that. The bill would fix that.
The bill would also give the Competition Bureau more powers to crack down on abuse like price gouging consumers. This is a real thing. The Conservatives will tell us it is all just about the carbon tax, but when we look at the stats, which I will get to a little later, we see a huge amount of corporate profits made in the last little while. Even with taxes going up, these corporations are still drawing in way more than they did back in 2020. That worries me and tells me they are using this opportunity to mislead Canadians and tell them they need to pay more, even when they do not need to. That is because we do not have strong enough anti-competition laws in this country.
The other thing the bill would do is stop mergers that decrease competition and hurt Canadians. We have just seen this, with Rogers taking over Shaw. Rogers promised it would not raise its prices, and what did it do? It just recently raised prices.
One of the things about Canada that concerns me is that we do not ever see a government, whether it be Liberal or Conservative, take on this real issue of competition and make sure that when people are getting scammed, it does something about it. Governments are just too nice, because they know where their money comes from. That is what I will say in this House. It is shocking.
Right now, there are five companies for grocery stores: Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart. They dominate. There are little ones every once in a while, and in B.C. we lost some of those small grocery stores, which have been picked up by Sobeys. This is shocking. It means those five just talk to each other and decide how much they want to get out of a certain area. There are no more little grocery stores on the corner, doing their best to keep the costs down. The big grocery stores can just wipe them out.
That is what is happening in this country, and the consumers are paying. The people who work the hardest are paying the most. A person who is making $250,000 a year is not going to care if the grocery store prices go up, but someone who is making only $20,000 or $30,000, and there are a lot of seniors living on that amount in this country, is certainly going to feel it. They are going to be making terrible, terrible decisions that no Canadian with any ounce of dignity here could see taken.
I want to remind everybody that margins generally increase by one to two percentage points. This is where it has been at. Now we are seeing huge increases. We know that the three largest grocery stores combined, Loblaws, Sobeys and Metro, in 2022 made more than $3.6 billion in profits. While everyday Canadians are suffering, the reality is that we do not have a system that is going to be making it fair for everyday Canadians.
I hope everybody in this House supports this bill, so we can make things fair for Canadians, because they certainly deserve it when they are doing everything right.
