Imagine, if you dare, a different Canada, a Canada where we’re not all hostage to the whims of a few for-profit grocery chains. Imagine a Canada that had cooperative non-profit alternatives, ones anchored in strong socialist and community ideals. A whole network, even, of purely local institutions owned by their customers and governed by member-elected boards. Any profits earned could go back directly to the members, with no overpaid executives devouring billion-dollar slices of the business. You could even have a digital account you could consult 24/7 to see how your investment was doing.
Non-members, of course, would be welcome to shop at these stores: those shoppers wouldn’t have equity in the business, nor would they have the right to choose management and decide on operating principles, but the immense savings alone from the removal of the profit motive would surely attract non-members and keep the for-profit competitors honest…
Canadian newspaper consumers are reading an increasing number of stories with this theme, but it is surely only the ones in Western Canada (and remote parts of northern Ontario) who are meeting them all with a horselaugh as they finish their morning coffee … and then drive off to the Co-Op to get groceries. My parents have memberships in the Lloydminster Co-Op. Lots of you are members of a Co-Op. And you’ll have noticed that Grocer Avi Lewis, the new leader of the NDP, appears to have no idea that there is such a thing as the Co-Op, or that such a thing could exist.
He’s producing thousands of words of babble a day about how grocery socialism can save the country; his supporters are urging us to turn our eyes to Mexico and even, sweet Jesus, the U.S. military commissary system. After all, Grocer Avi argues, individual communities might start co-ops, but in the real world (Ontario?) it’s inevitable that they would be held hostage to oligopolistic distributors and warehousers. (That is in fact what happened to the Co-Ops in Western Canada a hundred years ago, when they decided to solve the problem. How does the saying go? “You can just do things”?) It’s not conceivable that a co-operative system would ever own a freaking refinery or a lumber lot or a fertilizer terminal or agricultural feed stores. The deck is stacked against the little guy!
In the West, Co-Ops are not some invisible niche alternative to the for-profit grocers. The historic Co-Op network, the Federated Co-operatives Ltd., has 275 affiliated stores in the four westernmost provinces, mostly on the prairies. The Calgary area’s Co-Op stores voted to leave the network in 2020 and go on their own; they account for a couple dozen more. All these stores conform to the description I gave in the first couple paragraphs of this column. They are, in fact, a historic living achievement of the Canadian socialist movement that Grocer Avi has inherited from his forebears like silverware.
So why the preposterous, contrived blind spot? The Grocer’s advocacy for state-operated food stores has provoked skeptical reactions from economists and pundits who themselves don’t always seem to know the Co-Op exists. These people rightly observe that profit margins are microscopic for the for-profit groceries, and that the existence of a non-profit alternative wouldn’t, in theory, necessarily do much to reduce costs either for the paid-up members or other shoppers.
I regret to testify, from the bowels of terra incognita, that they don’t! Food inflation isn’t any less high, less infuriating, or less troubling out here in the fantasy Canada where non-profit co-ops are readily available! They may very well, at a guess, be softening price shocks in remote areas of the prairies: that’s an empirical question to which left-wing think-tanks (or right-wing ones) might contribute if some helpful citizen informed them that the Co-Op exists.
But if you had set out explicitly trying to create an economic debate that is maximally alienating to Westerners, well, you couldn’t have done a better job. On Sunday, CBC Radio aired a feature whose headline declares that “Public grocery stores are having a moment” and asks “Can they really make food more affordable?” The experts in the piece are appropriately skeptical about this Betteridgean question, but nowhere do they mention or demonstrate awareness of the poor bloody Co-Op, which is alive and kicking and trying its communitarian best to keep pace with the Loblaws and Sobeys and Wal-Marts every single day. You may very well have heard it here first. If you live in Toronto.