Trudeau threatens grocery stores to lower their prices or face new tax measures

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued another ultimatum Thursday. It wasn’t to a group of truckers whom he deems to be “fringe,” “racist,” or “misogynistic” – no this time he has the grocery stories in his sights. He’s given large grocery stores in Canada until Thanksgiving, less than a month away, to come up with a plan to lower prices.

Or else, "Let me be very clear: If their plan doesn't provide real relief ... then we will take further action and we are not ruling anything out, including tax measures."

Like half of the things that Trudeau says, it’s not clear what this even means. What kind of “tax measures” does he envision for Loblaws and Save On Foods? Isn’t Canada already reeling from Trudeau’s tax measures?

The one that continues to smother Canadians is, of course, Trudeau’s carbon tax, which now amounts to 60 cents of every liter that consumers put into their gas tanks. It has also caused the price of home fuel to skyrocket. It means higher prices to transport anything from the producer to the consumer. 

Hey, doesn’t that have something to do with the price of groceries going up? Exactly.

He has further placed high tariffs on fertilizer because it supposedly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, producing what former Conservative Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz told me was a “war on farmers.” It will inevitably be a war on all Canadians as food becomes more expensive and more difficult to grow. 

Up to now, Trudeau has even pretended that inflation is no big deal in Canada and that the one-time grocery stipend checks that the federal government mailed out to the poorest of the poor would rectify any imbalance. 

So wunderkind Trudeau has pushed up the price of fuel – and thus of transport and thus of groceries – and he really expects another tax to solve the problem? Some people objected when Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called Trudeau “a Marxist.” But Trudeau has gone and proved his point again. He will punish the grocery stores for his carbon tax, who will then pay less money to the farmers, who then produce less food.

The result will inevitably be more poverty all around and food shortages, perhaps even an artificial famine – the kind that Soviet despot Joseph Stalin engineered in the 1930s in the name of a communist ideology that sought rapid industrialization of the cities and the liquidation of for-profit farming in the countryside. It ended in the death of millions from starvation and state-sponsored murder. 

Just look at the video of Trudeau making this announcement. Beside him stands Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Now Freeland may be an unpleasant person at the best of times, a political personality just bursting with supercilious rancor for the unwashed masses, but she does have a tad more intelligence than Trudeau and you can just see her fidgeting and wincing throughout Trudeau’s speech; even she knows full well that this latest notion from Trudeau is not just hypocritical but insane. She can see Venezuela on the horizon, with empty shelves in vacant grocery stores because the government had artificially dried up the supply because it thought it understood economics better than the free market. 

Industry reaction to Trudeau’s ”plan” has been less than enthusiastic but even academics are bristling at the idiocy of the prime minister’s latest scheme. 

It’s not clear what such a plan from the grocers would look like, or how the government would measure its success, said Michael von Massow, a food economy professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, to the National Post. 

“I am disappointed that we didn’t get more detail in what the government is asking,” he said.

“It just feels a little bit half-baked.”

Just a little. Like the bread that people won’t be able to buy after a few weeks of this madness.

Interestingly, Trudeau’s father, the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was also called a Marxist in his lifetime, introduced wage and price controls after winning a majority government in 1974. He had promised all during the campaign that he would not institute that policy while his hapless competitor, Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield, said he would freeze wags and prices if elected. 

Trudeau’s policies led to the predicted shortages and poverty that comes when people have to charge the government’s artificial price and frozen wages can’t even afford to pay for that.

Trudeau Junior has pushed Canada to the brink of economic and political collapse. As Parliament prepares to resume for the fall sitting, his Liberal government is poised to introduce a host of new measures that will restrict individual freedom, including a third part of his internet censorship legislation that will target but not define “disinformation.”

Price controls on food would further undercut the economy and eviscerate the food supply. 

The insanity has to stop.