Lately, we’re boycotting Loblaw. The real forces behind a gripping national uprising.
This month, people across Canada are boycotting Loblaw and its affiliated stores, thanks to momentum from a popular sub-reddit. It’s a sweeping revolt but it isn’t just about sticker shock, bread fixing and Galen Weston’s folksy image. It’s about how your friendly neighbourhood grocer turned into Amazon, and why Canada is struggling to adapt to the new competitive era.
Our guest is Denise Hearn, a researcher who looks at how economic power shapes our world. Hearn is a resident senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, and she coauthored The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition. She and Vass are the 2024 McGill Max Bell Lecturers and will publish their book on corporate power in Canada this fall.
Also, Vass and Katrina talk about crowdsourcing the title of the aforementioned book in progress.
This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day.
Lately is a Globe and Mail podcast.
Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad.
The show is hosted by Vass Bednar and produced by Andrea Varsany.
Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
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Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
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Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] We're just getting started on Lately and we'd love to get your opinion. There's a brief survey at the end of the episode, and as a thank you for taking it, we'll give you a chance to win some prizes. More details at the end of the show.
Vass Bednar [00:00:14] Hi, I'm Vass Bednar, and I'm the host of Lately.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:16] And I'm Katrina Onstad. I'm the producer of Lately and Vass it's beautiful out. It's May. The birds are tweeting, people are TikTok-ing and they are mad.
TikTok #1 [00:00:27] Do you guys remember when Galen Weston insisted that Loblaws was not price gouging?
TikTok #2 [00:00:31] Why is it $40 for a salad and a piece of meat?
TikTok #3 [00:00:34] There is a special little new fun layer of hell for people that almost double the price of something and then lowered by a tiny bit and call that the deal, because this ham used to be $5.
TikTok #4 [00:00:47] Western intentionally fix the price of bread and on top of everything, profited from a global pandemic.
TikTok #5 [00:00:52] One third of the groceries bought, purchased, sold, etc. in Canada have something to do with the Weston family that feels a little bit like, you know, a monopoly.
TikTok #6 [00:01:04] Loblaws has discontinued the 50% off stickers for things that are almost going bad, and replace them with 30% off stickers. This is some first ballot Hall of Fame Scrooge McDuck-ary.
TikTok #7 [00:01:17] This latest $500 million profit proves that everything they've been saying is complete doodoo. Bruh. At this point, drop the act.
Vass Bednar [00:01:31] Wow. Move over N'Sync. May is Loblaw boycott month. It's an online movement driven by a subreddit group which is called Loblaws is Out of control, where people were sharing memes, price comparison and just their frustration. As of early this week, it had 73,000 members. And together they've started to organize to have this boycott. And there are two petitions. One is on Change.org. It has over 100,000 signatures, and the subreddit itself has culminated their demands, their hopes, for policy change and corporate policy change in an e-petition that's currently in the House of Commons.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:11] And the word that's in the Change.org petition is greedflation. Right. That's the word of the day. And it doesn't help Loblaws case when we recently learned that CEO Per Bank earned $22 million in 2023. There were some TikToks about that.
Vass Bednar [00:02:25] Absolutely. It's not helpful. Prices still seem bonkers and profits remain high. Recently, posting a quarterly profit of $459 million, marking a 9.8% increase. And one element I do want to take a second to shout out is just the shift, the change that people are comfortable speaking out loud through social media and with their friends about where and how they feel pinched at the grocery store. I do feel like in the past that would be something that was a little bit more private. Maybe there's a bit more of shame or concern associated, but now it just feels like it's something that we all have in common.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:02] Yeah, this is the upside of life online I guess, that we're in it together. It does feel like there's a kind of collective experience of anger. This is the thing that's finally going to bring our fragmented country together. We're united under the banner of being angry at our grocers. And Vass, so we were talking a lot about how this hits us in our wallets, and therefore it hits us in our hearts.
Vass Bednar [00:03:22] Yes.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:23] But you think the issue that's grinding everybody's gears is something more complex. And this was kind of a great get for Lately that we have you as our host because this is your sweet spot. This is your week Vass. It's your time to shine. You are the competition resident genius.
Vass Bednar [00:03:41] One of the other things I do when I'm not hosting Lately is I'm working on a book project. It's my first one, and it's all about how competition has changed in Canada and what that means. It's going to be out this fall and I'm collaborating with this amazing woman. Her name is Denise Hearn. Now she's an applied researcher and advisor who's focused on how economic power and paradigms shape our world. She's currently a resident senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, and she coauthored The Myth of Capitalism; Monopolies and the Death of Competition, which was named one of the Financial Times' best books of 2018. So don't worry, I'm not the guest this week. But our guest is certainly a friend of the show.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:23] Yes, we were not worried. We're happy that the guest is a friend of the show and your collaborator, because for me, listening to you talk was really interesting. It was like, I don't know, I imagine that you're putting this book together around like a big dining room table, and I got to just sort of sit at the end of the table, ears perked, and hear you hashing out these ideas about corporate power, why Loblaw is less your grandfather's warm, fuzzy national success story, and more like Amazon and also wrestling. You talk about wrestling.
Vass Bednar [00:04:51] We love wrestling.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:51] What is the name of this book?
Vass Bednar [00:04:54] What? You've stumped me. I have no idea. Next question please. Let's please move on.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:59] I asked that to put you on the spot because I know you don't have a name.
Vass Bednar [00:05:03] No.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:03] But I think that our listeners are going to help you find a name.
Vass Bednar [00:05:05] Okay. That would be really helpful. Thank you. Take something off my plate here.
Katrina Onstad [00:05:09] See you in the comments.
Vass Bednar [00:05:11] Thank you so much. So Canadians are really paying attention to Loblaw and we didn't want to turn away from this frustration. Maybe our diagnosis of the core problem is a little bit incomplete. This is Lately. Welcome, Denise.
Denise Hearn [00:05:40] Thank you. Hi, Vass.
Vass Bednar [00:05:42] You're talking to us from beautiful Burlington, Vermont. But you grew up in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada. What do you miss most about Canada when it comes to snacks?
Denise Hearn [00:05:52] Oh, okay. So I actually grew up mostly outside of the U.S., but every summer my parents would send me back to summer camp in Ontario in the Muskoka area, which is paradise for a kid, obviously. And they had a tuck shop, and I would always go in and get my favorite Canadian treats, and it was really any and all of the Canadian chocolate bars. So Coffee Crisp, I think.
Vass Bednar [00:06:15] Yeah.
Denise Hearn [00:06:16] And Score and you know, Smarties. And I would just go to town on all of those sweet treats.
Vass Bednar [00:06:22] That's delicious. I also used to go to the tuck shop at basketball camp. I played six hours of basketball camp a day, but I also eat chips all day, so...
Denise Hearn [00:06:29] Yeah, chips are now my Achilles heel.
Vass Bednar [00:06:31] That's important to know. That's important to know. So you may have heard people are boycotting Loblaw here in Canada right now.
Denise Hearn [00:06:41] I have heard, yes.
Vass Bednar [00:06:43] We've seen accusations of pandemic profiteering. And of course, the trust, consumer trust was shattered or damaged back with the bread price fixing scandal. And most recently when Loblaw, I don't know if you heard about this, but sort of tried to reduce the price reduction on expiring produce. So typically they'd throw a 50% off sticker on this and they changed the 50 to a 30%. But in spaces like the Loblaw is Out of Control Reddit people started pushing back and speaking out. So can you tell me about what people could be reacting to and then maybe what they might be missing?
Denise Hearn [00:07:18] Sure. I think one of the biggest disconnects for Canadians and also for Americans, especially during the pandemic, the prices of staple grocery items started going up and up and up. Some of that was due to supply chain constraints, and companies were very quick to say that they were struggling because this was one of the worst economic disruptions of our time, which was true. But then the longer that it went on and the more data started rolling in, it was starting to become clearer that companies were actually experiencing some of their best years. You know, in the U.S., there was a 70 year all time high in corporate profit margins in 2021. And similarly, the Canadian grocery firms did very, very well throughout 2021 and 2022. And so people, I think, started asking deeper questions about, all right, is this really just a reflection of an economic disruption that's sort of beyond the control of these large dominant retailers, or is there something deeper going on? There's a German economist named Isabella Weber who became quite famous for popularizing the term seller's inflation, which was basically saying that dominant firms were in a position to be able to take advantage of this situation and raise prices not only to cover the costs of inflated supply chain prices, but actually to inflate the cost over and above their marginal cost increases, and therefore experience huge profit margins and charge much more than they had been in the past and take advantage of this inflation narrative. And so I think as people started to see that, then this is where the conversation around concentrated market power and firms actually price gouging or pandemic profiteering or greedflation, all these different terms started to come into more public use. And that's where the origins of this kind of backlash, I think, really rest.
Vass Bednar [00:09:12] Well Loblaws response to this backlash, which has been reported in The Globe and Mail and elsewhere. Galen Weston called the pushback, quote, misguided criticism, saying, quote, inflation is a global issue. It is not specific to our company or to our industry. Allegations of profiteering on the back of inflation are untrue. Is Loblaw actually doing anything wrong? Who should we believe here?
Denise Hearn [00:09:35] So first of all, there are many contributing factors to inflationary dynamics. Obviously, the central banks have been raising interest rates, which makes the cost of capital much higher for firms and the world wars that have been happening. And the pandemic did actually provide these supply chain shocks. But I think there has been a lot of research now that's come out to prove that, particularly in concentrated industries, it's much easier to sort of tacitly collude and watch what your competitors are doing and price follow. And so firms have been spectacularly successful over the last two years at raising the price of goods over and above what it costs them to produce it. And one of the reasons they could afford to do this was because they expected that their competitors would do the same. And when you have highly concentrated markets, it is much easier to do this kind of what's called conscious parallelism, where you maybe you're listening in on the earnings calls of your competitors or, you know, it's all so much easier now with things like algorithmic pricing to take advantage of the kind of ubiquity of data that's available to the firms to be very dynamic and responsive as they set prices. So I do think that that is certainly a piece of the story that Mr. Weston is not including in his narrative as to how this is played out, but I think Canadians are rightly attuned to this.
Vass Bednar [00:10:54] It sort of leads us to this bigger question about competition in Canada. Is this Loblaw problem or boycott or mood don't hate the player, hate the game situation? Could there be anything incomplete about our frame so far?
Denise Hearn [00:11:08] Yeah, I love that. I think that while it's easy to point to the one person who is representative of these issues, I think they really are more structural. And they don't just afflict Loblaw. They afflict many companies across the Canadian economy, not just the obvious ones that we tend to think of, like banking and telecoms and airlines, but many firms where there's been an increase in concentration due to mergers and acquisitions that haven't been contested by our competition regulator. You know, Canada has never blocked a merger in its history, successfully.
Vass Bednar [00:11:42] Points for trying though. We have tried.
Denise Hearn [00:11:43] We've tried, yes. And I think there was one case where the competition regulators did block, but then it got reversed. And so we haven't done that, nor have we structurally separated or broken up a company like the US has. So it's clear that these are areas where Canada needs to improve. Something Vass, you and I have talked a lot about it and I'd love to get your thoughts on is these kind of calls for more competition, increased competition, let's bring a foreign competitor grocer into Canada and that's going to fix this problem.
Vass Bednar [00:12:10] I mean, yeah, I personally get a little bit annoyed by the drumbeat of just add a foreign competitor, this kind of bat signal that we've put out there in Canada, like, you know, a little S.O.S. call, hey, could one more company just come here and we'll revolutionize and change everything? The reason that annoys me is because I think it ignores the reality of how companies have evolved, and how their terms of competition have fundamentally changed. So adding one more competitor to the mix, who is able to kind of replicate these structures or is unable to directly compete with a company that's become very, very complex doesn't help us. So let's talk about that complexity people, I think, in Canada appreciate more and more. Loblaw used to just kind of be a grocery store, and now it has a grocery store. You and I were looking at one of their initial shareholder reports from 1986, the same year that the Competition Act was introduced, and, incidentally, that we were born so incredible year.
Denise Hearn [00:13:09] Yeah, yeah.
Vass Bednar [00:13:10] So, so special, and sort of thinking about how it's changed. But what else do they own? Let's see how much we can come up with.
Denise Hearn [00:13:18] Yeah I mean they have obviously food retail, Loblaws you know, No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Maxi, Zehrs, Fortinos etc. They also have their own private label products. So No Name and President's Choice and Blue Menu and T&T private label. They also have pharmacy obviously Shoppers Drug Mart, clothing retail, financial services. So they have President's Choice Financial. They have the PC optimum rewards system. They have PC insurance. They also have PC mobile. And then they also own real estate. What you and I have been talking a lot about is that Loblaw and so many companies like them are really the kind of everything company right? They're moving away from competing within industries to owning assets across industries. And that's turning them into ecosystems of all of these different types of assets that they can combine in different ways to kind of leverage or flywheel their market position. And that's a problem for competition policy, because typically, the way that a competition case is built is to look at market share, right? And you say, well, how much market share does Loblaw have in the grocery sector? But that's kind of like looking at the trunk of the elephant without really seeing, you know, all the different parts and components. And so we miss the full picture of how companies are operating today.
Vass Bednar [00:14:38] And Loblaw is also in the health care space. Right? One of their latest elements is we want to be the front door to Canada's health care system. They have a subsidiary called Maple. They're incentivizing healthful behaviors through an app. So there is this increasing ubiquity to the firm. And I wonder partially if that ubiquity is part of what people are reacting to. Roughly 90% of Canadians live within ten kilometers, Denise, I'm not sure how many miles that is, but we could do the conversion.
Denise Hearn [00:15:07] Fewer, fewer miles.
Vass Bednar [00:15:09] Of a Loblaw store or pharmacy. And the PC optimum program has more than 16 million active users, or about 42% of Canadians so...
Denise Hearn [00:15:19] That's wild.
Vass Bednar [00:15:19] Yeah, you can kind of feel like a little bit haunted, right? It's just like really part of the fabric of Canada.
Denise Hearn [00:15:25] I mean, those stats are really astounding. And I think it also pulls into stark relief, this idea of a consumer boycott. Right. How effective can it be? Because when you have concentrated markets and you really have few alternatives, how effective can you be at taking your business elsewhere? I mean, it's really tough for Canadians to actually switch. And there's that term high switching costs for a reason. And I think that that's the case here. You brought up the health care piece, earlier this year Canadians were incensed when they learned that Manulife was going to create this exclusive agreement with Shoppers to fulfill certain specialty drugs and-
Vass Bednar [00:16:00] Right.
Denise Hearn [00:16:00] -The prescriptions around specialty drugs don't make up a huge percentage of claims in Canada, but they are the really big ticket items the, you know, cancer treatment, drugs for Crohn's disease and other sort of chronic illnesses which people have to be on for a long time, they're quite expensive. And thankfully, because of pushback from the public and the ministry Manulife and Loblaw walked back this exclusive arrangement where consumers were only going to be able to fulfill these prescriptions through a Shoppers Drug Mart, but I'm sure they'll try again. And that's just one example of firms more and more trying to operate these kind of choke points, you know, as Cory Doctorow calls it, or act as a gatekeeper to markets, preventing consumers from actually accessing a range of choices and locking you into their ecosystem in a way that makes it very, very difficult for you to boycott or move away from.
Vass Bednar [00:16:55] You've mentioned how Loblaw may be structured or behaving a little bit less like a family grocer and more like a digital juggernaut. Can you tell me more about what that looks like or what that feels like?
Denise Hearn [00:17:09] Okay, well Vass let me tell you a story. So a few years ago I was visiting London. I used to live there a number of years ago, and I went back to my favorite markets, Spitalfields Market, which was right around the corner from where I used to work. And I was totally flabbergasted because there was a new store that had opened in Spitalfields Market, and it was an Amazon store, and it wasn't, you know, an Amazon Go or an Amazon retail store. It was a hair salon. Amazon had opened a hair salon in the middle of my favorite market in London. And of course, they were undercutting other hairstylists for similar services. And I just thought to myself, this is the perfect example of Amazon not being any one particular industry. Amazon's whole raison d'etre is to insert themselves into every aspect of our daily life, anywhere where we spend money, that is where Amazon wants to be. So back when Amazon was still in its early days, it was well known that Bezos would tell executives to essentially reverse engineer a consumer's day to day. And from waking to sleeping, you know, would find ways of inserting Amazon products into our lives. And so Amazon is the quintessential everything company, right? They own a staggering amount of businesses. Their economies of scope are unparalleled. They've got Amazon Health, small Business lending, AWS, they own the Washington Post, etc., etc.. And so Amazon I think is is the best example of this. But it's it's kind of a shining light, you know, for other firms to try to emulate.
Vass Bednar [00:18:49] A beacon, an inspiration.
Denise Hearn [00:18:50] Yeah. Of course, I mean who doesn't want to be Amazon, right? And so I think it- it shows again, this core point that companies don't want to compete in industries. They want to collect assets across industries.
Vass Bednar [00:19:00] So the idea that Loblaw is much more like an Amazon in terms of the structure and kind of behaviors that the company displays, doesn't really jive with, with its, you know, family owned company ethos. It's kind of dissident. And their image in Canada is mythic, right? It's a storied family shop, opened back in 1919. They always emphasize how they care. For quite some time, Galen Weston was the face of the company, appearing in advertisements on or television, in sweaters and his khakis. A columnist at The Globe and Mail, Robin Urback, has called his image Uncle Galen. I will note that he has stepped down as president and CEO in 2023, but he remains chair of the board and CEO of the parent company. How does that image of a family owned company line up with how the company is structured, and how it behaves in what we're seeing?
Denise Hearn [00:20:02] It may be a uniquely Canadian predilection to sort of treat our monopolists as these, you know, homey, down to earth figures. You don't necessarily see that in the US. And so I do wonder if we've given too much credence to the idea that these are grandfathered companies with storied Canadian history that we need to protect and that we need to sort of celebrate these, these homegrown national champions. But when you start looking at the chains of ownership and more importantly, the chains of control, that is where you can see that this family still maintains a sort of dynastic control over many of Canada's most important companies. So even if the company is broadly owned by a lot of us through these different investment vehicles, through our pension funds or invest in directly, we may not have much, if any, voting control over that company. And that tends to be highly concentrated in Canada. As an example, the Rogers family owns less than 30% of Rogers Communications equity, but they control 97.5% of the voting stock. So in Canada, the control of companies is really highly concentrated among kind of a small collection of dynastic families.
Vass Bednar [00:21:18] But that doesn't seem to be something that the Competition Bureau or the commissioner is really touching on at all. Of course, in Canada, it's not just grocery where we see a lack of competition. A recent report from the Competition Bureau looked at 20 years of data and revealed what many basically feel in their bones that Canada's economy has less competition than it used to. What's the problem?
Denise Hearn [00:21:42] Yeah, I coauthored a book on this a number of years ago called The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition. So I'm certainly a believer in more competition, but the tactics of competition in many ways are getting more ruthless than ever, and firms now can utilize this market position to squeeze out smaller suppliers or to squeeze workers wages. And so just adding a competitor like you and I have talked about to the grocery sector, it's not going to solve the problem necessarily, that smaller suppliers still really have a very difficult time getting their products on the shelf, because they now have to compete against all these private label products from the dominant firms. So competition policy is really much more than just adding a couple of competitors to the mix and stirring. It's really about thinking structurally about how market power operates, and how can our regulatory regime ensure that markets are operating on fair terms, so that every entrepreneur has the ability to start a business and compete on the merits.
Vass Bednar [00:22:46] Could you tell me more about how private labels kind of contribute to this illusion of competition? You know, when I walk into a major grocery store, there's so much stuff that's out there on the shelves, it's hard to maybe appreciate that it's not as competitive as it might seem.
Denise Hearn [00:23:03] So Vass, there's a term in professional wrestling called kayfabe.
Vass Bednar [00:23:07] Yes.
Denise Hearn [00:23:08] And I love this term because I don't follow professional wrestling. But-
Vass Bednar [00:23:13] Yes, you do. It's fine that you do.
Denise Hearn [00:23:15] I have all of the collection of figurines at home. No, but my understanding is that for those who do follow it, there's there's a generalized understanding where, you know, most professional wrestling is all scripted. And so the storylines are scripted, the battles are scripted, and everyone sort of in on this illusion, right? And even the people who are the professional wrestlers rarely break character inside and outside of their professional wrestling career. And when they do, it's called breaking kayfabe. It's sort of the equivalent of like breaking the fourth wall. And the whole enterprise of professional wrestling is really meant to create this illusion of rivalry between the wrestlers. And you could say that increasingly, our marketplaces are sort of like corporate kayfabe, where there's this illusion of rivalry, there's these companies which we think of as competitors, but which actually sort of tacitly collude and are in this together. And so I think there's a number of different instances, private label being one of them, in which, as consumers, we look at the shelf and we think that there's all this competition happening, but really it's kayfabe. So one of my favorite examples is Essilorluxottica, which is a global eyewear monopolist. And whenever you walk into the mall and you go into a Sunglasses Hut, you see all of these different brands of sunglasses and you think, oh, this is great. Like, this store is allowing me to choose from all of these different competitors. But the reality is all of those brands are owned by Essilorluxottica, which also doesn't just own the sunglasses and the lenses, but it owns all the retail outlets so it owns all the Sunglasses Huts and, you know, everything else. So we have this perception that companies are competing for our business, but in reality, that kind of competition is really eroding away.
Vass Bednar [00:25:03] But can we really blame Loblaw for evolving in the way that it did? I found one kind of older news story that suggested private label products, or their growth were an effort to compete with Amazon so that firms could suddenly have products that were proprietary to them that you could only get from their shelves. So maybe they simply created their very own flywheel. And if that's the case, what's the big deal? Isn't this innovation which Canada's pretty desperado for?
Denise Hearn [00:25:33] Yeah. I do think that there is an element where to be able to compete with the likes of the Costcos, the Walmarts of the world, Canadian firms have had to adopt similar strategies and tactics. But I suppose I would say- this is the problem, that's the fallacy of composition, which is an economic term that means that whenever one person or one entity maximizes its own personal gain, the whole system is worse off overall. And the best example is a bank run. So if you think the bank is about to go insolvent, you run to the bank, you take your cash out. But if every consumer does that at the same time because they're trying to minimize their own losses, you're actually going to precipitate the outcome you don't want, which is the bank to go insolvent. And so there's this element where firms are in this kind of race to the bottom. This is the downside of competition, where you have to adopt these more and more aggressive tactics to try to stay in the game, but ultimately that ends up eroding the conditions for all of us. And I want to say that showing up to a grocery store and having the amount of products, the amount of choice and the fact that it's always in stock really is like a modern miracle, you know?
Vass Bednar [00:26:47] It's magic. Yeah.
Denise Hearn [00:26:47] It's magical. I think we all appreciate that during the pandemic and other times where you realize like, oh, if I go to the store and stuff isn't there I have a maximum of like five days that I can survive on my own. Right? And so the just in time delivery and things like that really are kind of engineering and logistics marvels. But I would say that they've also referenced efficiency and margin expansion at the expense of resiliency and also investing in Canadian startups, Canadian innovators, smaller businesses that probably have all kinds of wonderful products that they would like to get in front of consumers, but they really have difficulty accessing the market because of these dominant gatekeepers.
Vass Bednar [00:27:30] Right. One particularly savage story that has to do with Loblaw, which you may know, I'm like lowkey obsessed with because I bring it up quite a bit. Is this leaked memo related to ketchup back from 2016 that revealed Loblaw had stopped stocking French's ketchup because it was, quote, cannibalizing sales of its President's Choice variety. So instead of being motivated to compete more on price or compete more on quality, they just eliminated their competitor. They just said, we're not going to stock you anymore. And I think that hits on the ruthlessness and the new kind of tactics that we're starting to see.
Denise Hearn [00:28:09] Yes, and you could repeat that example a thousand times over in a number of different industries. So we really want to say that, especially when in Canada, there's a sort of oft repeated thing about reducing red tape and lessening the kind of regulatory and legislative burdens on firms. And I certainly think that that is a part of it. We want really smart, targeted regulation, not overregulation. But we also have to realize that now we do have these de facto private regulators that are imposing their own terms on markets all the time, and no one is holding them accountable.
Vass Bednar [00:28:46] What's the endgame here? If prices return to their pre-pandemic norms, would that mean that we've achieved success?
Denise Hearn [00:28:55] I think the question we really want to be asking is, what sort of economy do we want as Canadians, and what kind of opportunities do we want to give to entrepreneurs, innovators, startups, small suppliers and to workers? And if prices return to pre-pandemic levels, that certainly benefits Canadians who are really struggling with cost of living right now for a whole range of reasons. But it doesn't fundamentally rebalance the power structure in the economy away from dominant firms, which increasingly control such a vast swath of our day to day lives.
Vass Bednar [00:29:39] I've been surfing around online, as I'm want to do, and some people have been reacting to this boycott by saying, look, grocery stores are all the same. Not shopping at a Loblaw owned company for the month of May is not going to make a difference. Do you think this boycott is going to have any kind of meaningful effect?
Denise Hearn [00:29:59] Well, listen, I think boycotts can be incredible rallying mechanisms to get more people into this conversation. And I also think it is true that where we spend our money matters. I mean, I always try to buy from my local bookstore, you know, I always try where I can to support independent businesses. Is it enough? Of course, it's never going to be enough. I guess what I don't like about the boycotts kind of movement is it puts too much responsibility on the consumer to solve these problems, when really it should be, again, a structural remedy from unfortunately, the state. I mean, we don't have a big enough other countervailing mechanism at this point to really hold companies accountable. And so that's where we do need regulators not to be overly interventionist, but to really create the conditions on which firms are competing fairly and are treating their consumers, their workers and their suppliers well and that they don't become too big to care. And so I think that the boycott is important because it does give us a sense of autonomy. And I think that autonomy is important, but it needs to be coupled with structural reform as well.
Vass Bednar [00:31:09] I'm with you. Dennis, I get to talk to you a lot, and I really like it, but I've never been able to speak to you like this, so thank you so much.
Denise Hearn [00:31:17] This has been so much fun. Thanks for having me Vass.
Vass Bednar [00:31:33] You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar, and in our show notes, you can subscribe to the newsletter where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
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