On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to an ill-informed snipe at @TheFoodProfessor for a post about Avi Lewis:
This take reads like someone who’s never had to meet a payroll or balance a ledger under real pressure.
Accusing the “Food Professor” of being bribed is just noise. No evidence, no numbers, just a conspiracy to avoid the actual argument. Classic move when the facts aren’t cooperating.
I ran a grocery business. Not a theory. Not a model. A real one. Thin margins, constant spoilage risk, price swings, labour costs, supplier pressure, and customers who notice every 10-cent increase. Grocery isn’t some gold mine. It’s a logistics grind with razor-thin profit.
Here’s the part people like this never mention:
Canada’s total grocery profits are roughly $6 billion. Spread that across 40 million people and you’re looking at maybe $12 a month per person if you wiped out every dollar of profit.So what’s the fantasy here?
Government steps in, runs stores “for the people”, eliminates profit… and somehow prices magically drop while efficiency improves?
Let’s test behaviour, not intentions.
What happens when you remove profit?
No incentive to optimize operations
No accountability for waste
Political hiring instead of performance hiring
Pricing driven by optics, not supply reality
Losses covered by taxpayers … meaning you, againYou don’t eliminate costs. You just hide them and move them.
I lived through high interest rates north of 20%, carried customer debt, and still had to make the numbers work. Government doesn’t operate under that discipline. It can fail indefinitely and call it policy.
Public grocery isn’t “not Marxist”. It’s not even that sophisticated. It’s just naive.
The real issue isn’t ideology. It’s a complete lack of understanding of how incentives drive outcomes.
You don’t fix affordability by replacing people who have to be efficient with a system that doesn’t.
You fix it by increasing competition, reducing regulatory drag, and letting supply actually respond.
Everything else is theatre.
In the National Post, Kelly McParland outlines the scale of challenge Lewis is facing to make the NDP electorally viable again:
Thumbnail of one of Avi Lewis’s campaign shorts
After two weeks on the road [Jagmeet Singh] finally conceded to reality, allowing that while “I would be honoured to serve as prime minister … I don’t want to presuppose the outcome of the election”.
Maybe Lewis should start straight off with that line, since choosing him as leader saves the party from pretending it expects to find itself in power. “The return of the NDP starts today!” Lewis declared in his victory speech, but as the most out-there ideologue of the candidates he defeated he’ll have a harder time convincing ordinary Canadians than he did winning over his fourth-place party. A film-maker and activist, he’s not just left-wing, but way off in a universe of his own.
His ambitions are dazzling: a Canada powered entirely by renewable energy in which everyone gets a guaranteed income, vast infrastructure projects are built to sustain the environment, farmers produce healthier, affordable, cleaner food while homebuilders concentrate on energy-efficient homes for lower income groups. All this paid for by an economy that somehow remains vibrant while its vital energy industry is crippled, jobs are lost, taxes are raised, royalties are increased, government spending balloons, the carbon tax is re-introduced and “the rich” are somehow found to have plenty of excess revenue to cover the costs.
Voters who continue to back the NDP will now know exactly what they’re casting their ballots for. That wasn’t always clear under previous leaders. Thomas Mulcair didn’t hate trade deals or pipelines enough to satisfy party stalwarts deeply hostile to both. To the unyielding, Singh did a deal with the devil when he agreed to prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, even if the decision succeeded in squeezing out some policy victories.
Small victories aren’t in Lewis’s lexicon. He wants a revolution. “This is more than a rigged economy, it is a war on working people”, he declared on Sunday. “It is immoral, it is unCanadian and we cannot let it stand.”
