The new figures for the consumer price index confirm what we were saying last June. Despite the timid relative decline in inflation, food prices continued to climb to 10.8% over 12 months in August, a 41-year high. Moreover, according to economists, these prices will continue to climb in the coming months. The products that have experienced the most significant increases over the past year are oils (27.7%), bread (15.4%), fresh fruit (13.2%), pasta and cereals (14.5% ), eggs (10.9%), vegetables (9.3%), fish (8.7%) and dairy products (7%). Commodities.
People’s incomes do not make up for this price increase, to the point where, according to the National Payroll Institute, many have had to borrow to pay for groceries. It is the low-income middle class that suffers the most in this equation. A growing number of these people must now request a basket from food banks. These, moreover, confirm that more than 19% of their food donations benefit salaried families who can no longer make ends meet. Worse, Moisson Montreal can only meet 20% of requests and is now calling on the community groups it serves to ask them to find new suppliers.
Faced with this economic debacle of the low-income middle class (and what about the difficulties of the poorest among us), our political parties find nothing better, in the electoral campaign, than to promise new checks in the short term, thus feeding inflation, according to many economists, rather than fighting it. The big food chains, understandably, died laughing: they can continue to increase their prices, knowing that the State will give people the means, for a time, to pay them.
If the political parties really wanted to help the people affected by this inflation, which is confusing them, they would rather give this money that they have too much to community groups. They are actually asking for $475 million to support people in their process of getting out of poverty. They would also hasten to update the government’s food security reference framework, which dates from 2008, so that it better meets current needs.
But the fundamental and long-term solution that we are proposing to the political parties and to the future government to curb this bulimia of the large food chains (40% excess profit for Loblaw in one year), is to regulate these inflationary prices by measures such as the tariff shield (for example of 4%) imposed in other countries on products controlled by the private sector. These anti-inflationary government rules would target basic necessities, such as fruits and vegetables, bread, root vegetables and dairy products. Obviously, the state would compensate certain actors, such as farmers, to guarantee them a decent income, as it does with supply management.
In fact, the issue here, which no party dares to name, is the choice between the sacrosanct right to make profits, even excessive ones, and the fundamental right of the population to be able to eat normally. If the State, sole guardian of the common good, does not set restrictive rules to limit the gargantuan appetite of the shareholders of these large companies and allow the families of the people to eat better, who will?
It is time to have a societal debate on this anomaly constituted by a private sector based on the accumulation of profits which has a monopoly and which alone controls access to an essential, even vital, need such as food. . For all other essential needs, however, the State is called upon to set the rules of the game, in principle for the good of the greatest number.
When will a real state arbitrate between the interests of the common good and those of a few?