Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. Loblaw reinvests over 100% of its earnings back into this country in capital, with new stores and infrastructure. The jobs are not capital. When we look at it, we are investing substantially more back into the country than we are taking out. That's a good benchmark for whether our capital allocation strategy is balanced or imbalanced.

Agriculture committee  First of all, I am extremely empathetic to the circumstances that Canadians who are struggling to put food on their tables face and to how all of the cost pressures they're experiencing are contributing to that. That's why we as an enterprise are focused on finding ways to lower prices.

Agriculture committee  Could you maybe clarify what you mean by “relative prices”?

Agriculture committee  No, I don't believe that's the case. There is no evidence that I have seen or that we have been able to get hold of from the U.K., Australia or Ireland that suggests there's a relationship between the codes of conduct that were implemented in those countries and materially lower prices.

Agriculture committee  I think there is a risk that it could add.... I gave you a specific example of how it could add $750 million to the cost of food, and that's inside our enterprise alone, so a billion dollars is a broad and meaningful number but it's certainly not too high.

Agriculture committee  I don't know precisely where it's accounted for. I can tell you this, though. As I've said before, when we have compliance charges built into the business, they're based on a very specific set of criteria. We make exceptions to those criteria more often than the other way around, and those compliance charges have decreased by nearly 50% over the last 24 months.

Agriculture committee  I can't speak to Metro's perspective.

Agriculture committee  In our case, that meeting resulted in materially lower prices on the 35 items and in the categories that we communicated here to this committee. It's also important to note—and this is, I think, the message that Eric was perhaps trying to communicate—that we as an industry have been making collective efforts for months and months.

Agriculture committee  Any way you look at it, with the affordability challenges faced in this country, whether for food, gas, electricity bills or mortgage payments, there is enormous pressure on Canadians. Whether it's seven million, two million or four million, it's too many people.

Agriculture committee  I don't know specifically how many employees access food banks, but I'm sure it is a material number.

Agriculture committee  This is an important point, because for a grocery store business, for any private enterprise, the goal is to grow the business. It's to increase the number of customers. It's to invest in communities, to build more stores and to increase the amount in sales. If we can increase the amount in sales, then the profit of the enterprise will go up.

Agriculture committee  The way the process was set up was that Sobeys and Metro would be the representatives of the industry in the working group. That's fine. All the way through, we've been trying to provide feedback about our concerns, and we're continuing to provide that feedback.

Agriculture committee  Throughout this process we have been engaged and we have acted in good faith, and we continue to do so. We were not on the working committee, but, as I said, we have been providing our feedback and our perspective all along. We have senior executives who have been participating in this process.

Agriculture committee  Hold on. Sixty per cent of the time we make exceptions to those charges based on good-faith conversations with our manufacturers.

Agriculture committee  As I said before, the most important thing here is that we not do the opposite of the intention of this committee and put in place conditions that lead to higher prices from the largest multinational manufacturers in the world. It's important to separate that risk from how we effectively support Canadian growers and manufacturers.