An incomplete list of the businesses owned by the Ontario government would include: a liquor outlet, a pot distributor, several casinos, not one but two train companies, a public broadcaster (ahem), multiple power companies (all of Ontario Power Generation and most of Hydro One), and several convention centres. Within recent memory Ontario owned an amusement park (RIP Ontario Place) and a telecommunications company (Ontera, privatized by the Wynne government in 2014) and within my lifetime it owned a bank. And that’s before getting into the holdings of municipalities, those creatures of the province, who operate their own litany of services from parking lots to golf courses.
But talk about government-owned food distribution and people get weird about it. That, at least, is the lesson of recent populist left-wing politicians such as New York City’s Democratic candidate for mayor Zohran Mamdani, or NDP leadership aspirant Avi Lewis. Both have proposed a more direct government hand in distribution of groceries and have been greeted with comparisons to Soviet bread lines for their trouble.
Lewis, for his part, has talked about creating a national “public option” for groceries as part of a broader campaign against the concentration of economic power in Canada, not restricted to the country’s grocery barons.
But “public option” is an ambiguous phrase, so I spoke with Lewis last week to sound out more precisely what he means by it.
“I don’t have the team and the infrastructure to present you with the 150-page white paper,” Lewis conceded in our conversation. “I look forward to having those resources to develop that level of detail, but I think the notion of a public option is a powerful tool that governments should be using to discipline these very consolidated sectors.”
That isn’t to say that Lewis hasn’t considered any of the details of implementation. He acknowledges that a public grocer of any kind would need to be subsidized as it got off the ground, though he says the expectation would be for something that could operate on a cost-neutral basis. He argues that, without the profits extracted by private corporations, a public option would lower prices for consumers.
This is a claim readers might treat skeptically: the profit margins on groceries are generally small, in the range of a few percent with the headline-grabbing profits made up on high sales volumes — and, occasionally, illegal price fixing. The grocery companies, for their part, argue that neither windfall profits nor insufficient competition are responsible for high prices (and, by extension, only marginal public policy changes are needed).
Lewis had heard all that by the time we spoke last week. “This is also where we get into the fake debate about a public option,” Lewis says. He argues, for example, that nominally low profit margins conceal the full extent of corporate profit-taking throughout the food supply chain. The big grocers, for example, also own their own brands of processed foods and control their own network of trucking and warehouses.
“When you start to introduce a public option throughout the supply chain, there are massive returns on investment all the way through the chain,” Lewis says. “You’re talking about a low profit margin but a huge return on investment.”
The questions don’t stop there. There are any number of potential justifications for a more direct government hand in food distribution, but Lewis has focused primarily on affordability. But that means that a public grocer would need to be laser-focused on controlling costs to beat the private sector at its own game — or simply be subsidized in perpetuity.
Another way of putting it: to be substantially more affordable than the incumbents, a public grocer might need to pay its workers less than Loblaws, or bargain harder with its suppliers than Wal-Mart, or be even more bare-bones in its stores than Dollarama — and it’s fair to question whether an NDP government would (or should) be willing to do any or all of that. Lewis acknowledges that an NDP government would probably see something like a public grocer as a tool with many potential uses, including supporting workers and healthier food options.
“Food touches every part of life… When you’re talking about a public option, you’re getting into questions of food security, and sovereignty, in Canada. You’re getting into the question of how we respond to tariff attacks on Canada.”
“I’m not fussy about the exact mechanism, and there are many different models that could be pursued," Lewis adds.
One option would be for the public option to leave the actual operation of stores to third parties. Lewis points to the possibility of expanding the role of food co-ops across Canada, building on advocacy work from groups like Food Secure Canada. Last year the non-profit group published a report asserting that co-ops and other non-traditional forms of food retail “can offer food at affordable prices to community members… [and] emphasize the fair distribution of food, ensuring that no one is left behind.”
Fortuitously, food co-ops already exist in many parts of the country — increasing federal support for them is the kind of thing that could be done relatively quickly. Lewis also suggests that in some areas municipalities might be willing and able to operate groceries, and an NDP government would be willing to support them. (Over the objection of recalcitrant provincial premiers, if needed.)
One of the other competitors for the NDP leadership, Heather McPherson, has proposed other methods for bringing costs down for consumers, including an emergency price cap on staples and a windfall profits tax on the big grocers. Lewis says he supports those methods as well, but adds that even the debate around a public grocer and other cost-containment measures could have an effect in the private market, disciplining what he calls “cartoonish” profit-seeking behaviour by the major grocers.
Finally, while Lewis referred to the current cost of food as an “emergency” or “crisis” multiple times during our discussion, he says that a public option for groceries would likely be permanent, and not a temporary response to the current cost of living.
“Something has to be done, and I believe it’s the role of government to goddamn govern,” Lewis says. “It’s kind of up to corporate Canada whether a public option would be required forever or not. I believe they can still deliver the necessities of a dignified life for working people at prices people can afford and still be profitable corporations. They are choosing to extract as much as they possibly can, and getting away with it, because the government lets them.”
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