Agriculture committee  Yes, sure. By the way, since we last met—and thank you for having me here again today, by way of conclusion—food inflation has come down from 9.7% to 5.4%. That's good, but it's nowhere near where we'd like to see it. It has to go lower. Again, I don't want to bore you with the

Agriculture committee  I don't have any details on the grocery task force at this time. Whatever it comes down with, I'm sure we'll look into, and if we can help it, we're going to help it. We have been updating the Minister of Industry and his office constantly—they're probably getting sick of us—in

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all the parliamentarians here today. They were great questions. I appreciate it.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I know the numbers probably better than anybody else in our company and I cannot figure out where you're getting that data from. However, I still get what your question is about. As I said, last year we made less money in net earnings than the year before—the out-take

Agriculture committee  Thanks for your question. We did give feedback through our industry rep at the Retail Council of Canada, so feedback was given to the government. Like almost every retailer, we're seeking to reduce our use of plastics. However, I am concerned that the legislation regulation is

Agriculture committee  Thanks for your question. Without a feasible innovation that we could use to wrap fruit safely.... I don't have a number. I can tell you that it's a lot.

Agriculture committee  Yes. That's great. I meant that I couldn't do it right now and I'd pass it on. Having said that, I have to make sure that I can get this information. It only became widely distributed during inflationary times, but I should be able to get something that would help you.

Agriculture committee  I won't give him any insider information.

Agriculture committee  Right now, prices are frozen on all packaged goods, so that's approximately 20,000 items in a store of 26,000 to 28,000 items, to give you some sense of proportion. On the other one—which you know about, because I think it was given to the committee confidentially, and thank you

Agriculture committee  As you know, and as you alluded to there, we haven't price-fixed. We have not had a charge of price fixing. I just want to be clear on that. While we took the extra 1,700 items in our store, we decided to.... I'd have to check. Whenever I say “everything”, I have to check, becau

Agriculture committee  The U.K., Ireland, and Australia have great examples of codes that work. What ends up happening is that instead of fighting each other and having unfairness to the supplier partners, that conversation is taken out of it, because people are fair to each other. They don't do things

Agriculture committee  I have to admit that I don't know the answer to that one, because until inflation took off it wasn't always so much on our minds. We were looking around the world to see if there was something wrong with Canada or if there were things we could do, and we looked at best practices.

Agriculture committee  You've seen that the gap between grocery and the regular CPI has come down appreciably. When I was last with you, I think the gap was 5.4% between grocery and CPI, and now it's down to 2.3%. It's still not good enough. We have to get it to be lower than normal CPI. It's hard to

Agriculture committee  Yes, I'm only speaking about us today. I don't know about the others. You'll have to ask them.

Agriculture committee  With that kind of detail, I really have trouble answering, because I don't know what it is, when.... We put in the price freeze. We also started our price freeze on packaged goods prior to that date, so there would be no question on what we had done. If that supplier in any way