Finally.
In Ottawa this week, the top executives from Canada’s major grocers will appear before MP’s on the House of Commons Committee Studying Inflation and Food Prices and answer tough questions about how they managed to make so much money through the pandemic and the following period of inflation.
Loblaws, Metro, and Empire Foods will be grilled over the rising cost of food and the substantial profits that these, the Big Three, have posted over the past year.
Loblaws, citing figures from its parent company, George Weston Ltd., posted a last quarter profit of $529 million, a 10% jump over the same quarter’s profits of last year. That’s $529 million a quarter, mind you.
The other two, with different numbers, nonetheless show the same trend of profit increases. So while a lot of us were struggling to simply put food on the table, corporate Canada was busily using the same food to enrich itself.
The grocers boo-hoo’d to the government during the pandemic and received tax relief and the corporate equivalent of the CERB program. And what do corporations do with this life-saving handout of cash? They pay dividends to their shareholders with it, that’s what. If I do something like this it’s called fraud and they’ll nail me to the barn door. When they do it it’s called good business.
Can the government get this money back? Probably not. The grocers will cry foul and point to all manner of other things that should be blamed for rising food prices.
Which brings me to other Canadian corporations, the one’s controlling gas and oil prices, which are interwoven with the price of food owing to transportation and distribution costs. Seven of the ten largest oil and gas companies paid no tax in 2021 despite raking in billions.
This isn’t capitalism at it’s finest. It’s profiteering and greed and exploitation. And it’s wrong.
How do we get these money-making behemoths to pay their fair share of anything?
How about taxing excessive profits? Profits that are not morally or ethically sustainable in a time of economic hardship. People shouldn’t go hungry while corporate executives smoke their cigars, drink their scotch, and clap each other on the back for how brilliant they are at running up profits on the backs of other Canadians.
These so-called windfall taxes have been used before, currently in place in the financial sector. Maybe it’s time to extend them to the grocery, oil, and gas sectors too.
It just seems like they took government money, our money, and paid out their stockholders as if things were going really well.
We should be able to expect a certain degree of responsibility from any company, so these are no different.
Crying poor and making billions is tough for me.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 