Federal NDP Leadership Race - What do you want out of Canada's progressive party?

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by you&me

Maybe you just need to push your point a little more.

Making an argument based on numbers only because they sound big is pointless without context. Woven got close here:



Yes, 6 billion is a big number but when you look at it as the entire profit for an entire industry of a nation, it feels less so. And when you neglect to do the difficult math like $6B for a population of 40mm, the $150 in annual profits per person really doesn't seem like that much...

The added context that it has gone up 100+% in 5 years is kind of a big deal.

[Johnny Makarov]

Sorry NDP. you are going to have to stay dead for the next few elections so we can unite the left.

After watching the deplorable moron on his trumplike press conference today the orange will have to make the sacrifice to save Canada.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by Wolven

Considering how quickly that accelerated, I do not think it is unreasonable to believe that we could get back to 2019+20%, which would be a big step up from 2019 numbers but 20% revenue increase over 6 years is still a big increase. Even if we could just reign that market in at $4B, it would be an unreasonable jump

So to confirm, you think we can reduce profits in the grocery industry by $2 billion, thus offering a savings of $50 per Canadian on food bills (2B ÷ 50 MM).

Originally Posted by Wolven

I think a big thing people will always fail to consider with the idea of a public grocer is that even if we each are contributing $500 in tax dollars to make it happen

And to do this you're prepared to raise taxes by $500 per person.

I feel like it should be obvious why this idea might not resonate with Canadians.

Tbh I think this is emblematic of the problem the NDP has - they float stuff that is obviously a bad idea. If they focused on supporting union jobs and fiscal supports for the bottom 50% of incomes they'd (imo) be pretty electable.

Things like an auto-pact type deal with Asian countries (for every vehicle you assemble with a minimum $ content here you can sell one in Canada duty free).

Provide low cost financing for electrical transmission infrastruce across the country - it's mostly provincially owned, adds tons of union construction jobs, and is necessary for adding data centre/AI industries.

National pharmacare

Etc.

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

So to confirm, you think we can reduce profits in the grocery industry by $2 billion, thus offering a savings of $50 per Canadian on food bills (2B ÷ 50 MM).



And to do this you're prepared to raise taxes by $500 per person.

No, you cut off the second half of my sentence.

"I think a big thing people will always fail to consider with the idea of a public grocer is that even if we each are contributing $500 in tax dollars to make it happen, it is worth it if we end up saving any number that is more than $500 of post tax money when buying groceries."

You can replace "500" with whatever number you want. I think most people understand that spending pre-tax dollars to save post-tax dollars is a win. If we can stop the cost of groceries from continuing to skyrocket in cost then that is a win. If we can reduce the cost of groceries, then that is a huge win.

[you&me]

Originally Posted by Wolven

No, you cut off the second half of my sentence.

"I think a big thing people will always fail to consider with the idea of a public grocer is that even if we each are contributing $500 in tax dollars to make it happen, it is worth it if we end up saving any number that is more than $500 of post tax money when buying groceries."

You can replace "500" with whatever number you want. I think most people understand that spending pre-tax dollars to save post-tax dollars is a win. If we can stop the cost of groceries from continuing to skyrocket in cost then that is a win. If we can reduce the cost of groceries, then that is a huge win.

I mean, I can't believe I'm doing this...

We can figure out what the "whatever number you want" is... There are 30mm tax-filers in Canada and you're wanting to reduce grocery profits by $2B. There was a post earlier that the bottom 50% of filers only contribute 5% of taxes, so let's eliminate them from the equation - you essentially have 15mm people needing to fund a program that will save Canadians $2B annually, which is $133 per payer...

So you have 15mm people paying $133 per year, to theoretically save $50 per year for the entire population.

Or let's take it a step further: since this is such a glorious idea (comrade), let's just nationalize the entire industry and wipe all $6B of profit out. Those same 15mm tax payers would have to pay $400 a year so every Canadian can save $150.

Which all sounds kinda meaningless great, until you consider that this (from the same post I referred to above):

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

...

But the tricky thing is that the median income of the whole top 50% (ie. the top 25%) was 76,200 (2023), which is to say that income level is still a subsidizer and not a subsidizee (which is totally fine)...

So the vast majority of those 15mm tax payers in the top 50% aren't exactly rich. Most likely, a typical family of four in this group has two working parents... so in the scenario where we're slashing profits by $2B, that family would contribute $266 a year to save $200. When we nationalize the grocers and eliminate all profit, that family of four would need to contribute $800 to save $600.

Sure some single income households, single parents with 2 or more children would come out ahead... but at what cost? Like someone said earlier, this sounds like a really really (really) complex wealth redistribution scheme.

The list of assumptions to get to this point is so long I can't believe anyone would genuinely believe this is a good idea.

Like I said, just because the numbers are big doesn't mean that they're meaningful... you seem really hung up on that $6B in profit, but it's really a nothing-burger in the scheme of things.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by Wolven

No, you cut off the second half of my sentence.

"I think a big thing people will always fail to consider with the idea of a public grocer is that even if we each are contributing $500 in tax dollars to make it happen, it is worth it if we end up saving any number that is more than $500 of post tax money when buying groceries."

You can replace "500" with whatever number you want. I think most people understand that spending pre-tax dollars to save post-tax dollars is a win. If we can stop the cost of groceries from continuing to skyrocket in cost then that is a win. If we can reduce the cost of groceries, then that is a huge win.

I guess you separately came up with (what I would consider reasoable) estimates of the costs and benefits as $500 and $50 respectively, and then said that as long as the benefits exceed the costs we're good.

There's no situation where people save more than $500 on groceries per person from the system with a subsidy of only $500 per person - there isn't enough profit in the system that can be eliminated.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I wonder how old Wolven is.

[chemgear]

Can you imagine the utopia I can build with all of your money?

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I wonder how old Wolven is.

Eh, young or old, I think people kind of get flummoxed when numbers this big are involved. It's kind of hard for most people to think in terms of the budget of a reasonably large country like Canada, with numbers like hundreds of millions, billions, a trillion, etc. being thrown around. Numbers that sound huge really don't end up being much.

It's like asking someone to guess how tall a building is and express it only in millimetres.

[GranteedEV]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

I guess my question to you is where do you see the benefits coming from?

Empire Co (owner of Safeway and Sobeys) had sales of $31.4 billion and profits of $700 MM in the trailing twelve month period. So if your baseline is the government coule be as efficient as the private sector and could operate with zero profits you could drop food prices 2.2%.

Of course, they've invested ~$12 billion in property, plant and equipment to get that result, so to duplicate the real estate base you have to spend all that money first (and probably much more - not that likely their real estate has gone down in value...)

If you just want to subsidize people with tax dollars you can do that, but then why spend tens of billions setting up infrastructure - just use direct deposit.

And of course, the government isn't going to do all those bad things to boost profits, so the savings will be smaller. Then you have the cost of bureaucratic oversight and less aggressively negotiated labour contracts. Hard to see there being any savings at all.

For starters, a government run grocery store could implement the policy that France uses to not throw away expiring food but rather to donate it. The former policy exists to artificially deflate supply.

Originally Posted by Johnny Makarov

Sorry NDP. you are going to have to stay dead for the next few elections so we can unite the left.

After watching the deplorable moron on his trumplike press conference today the orange will have to make the sacrifice to save Canada.

I would not call the LPC part of the left at this point. They have been pushing right-leaning policy since trudeau left and the elections occured.

They only appear "left" because your frame of reference is the fascist CPC, but that's exactly why "uniting" the "left" is inherently problematic. We don't need to be a two party state where the options are far right and right. That's how you get the USA

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Eh, young or old, I think people kind of get flummoxed when numbers this big are involved. It's kind of hard for most people to think in terms of the budget of a reasonably large country like Canada, with numbers like hundreds of millions, billions, a trillion, etc. being thrown around. Numbers that sound huge really don't end up being much.

It's like asking someone to guess how tall a building is and express it only in millimetres.

In both cases those are just a framing problem. If you want to estimate a building in mm first you should estimate it in metres and then multiply by a thousand.

If you want to understand the impact of billions of dollars of spending/benefits in Canada I think it's helpful to think about it on a per-person basis (ie, if you cut $2 billion in profits out of the system that's a savings of $50 per person).

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

In both cases those are just a framing problem. If you want to estimate a building in mm first you should estimate it in metres and then multiply by a thousand.

If you want to understand the impact of billions of dollars of spending/benefits in Canada I think it's helpful to think about it on a per-person basis (ie, if you cut $2 billion in profits out of the system that's a savings of $50 per person).

Had I followed my gut instinct and said "inches", the simplicity and elegance of a base-10 numbering system would be out the window and I think it would have demonstrated my point a bit better. Damned metric-ish upbringing.

[you&me]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

In both cases those are just a framing problem. If you want to estimate a building in mm first you should estimate it in metres and then multiply by a thousand.

If you want to understand the impact of billions of dollars of spending/benefits in Canada I think it's helpful to think about it on a per-person basis (ie, if you cut $2 billion in profits out of the system that's a savings of $50 per person).

The real framing problem is looking at the profits private businesses generate and thinking the government needs to enter the market to actively manipulate the market and reduce the prices... even after being informed that margins are already very thin, profits on a per-customer basis are ridiculously small... And in light of that, looking at those numbers and the complexity of the business (real estate, supply chain, distribution, staff, etc) and still thinking "this is a business the government should get into itself"

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Had I followed my gut instinct and said "inches", the simplicity and elegance of a base-10 numbering system would be out the window and I think it would have demonstrated my point a bit better. Damned metric-ish upbringing.

Lol. To be honest if I was estimating the height of a building in metres I'd probably estimate in feet and then multiply by 3.

But my recipes are an unholy mix of cups and mL measurements, so you know...

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

I wonder how old Wolven is.

Way to make it weird.

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Eh, young or old, I think people kind of get flummoxed when numbers this big are involved. It's kind of hard for most people to think in terms of the budget of a reasonably large country like Canada, with numbers like hundreds of millions, billions, a trillion, etc. being thrown around. Numbers that sound huge really don't end up being much.

It's like asking someone to guess how tall a building is and express it only in millimetres.

There appears to be a lot of struggling with numbers here. I tried to put a couple of example numbers to prove a point around pre-tax dollars being worth less than post-tax dollars and that the goal of the system should be to have the savings in post-tax dollars be bigger than the cost in pre-tax dollars. Clearly that was a mistake on my part as we have latched onto imaginary numbers and making more imaginary numbers instead of talking about the issues.

The napkin math being used to refute the idea is the struggle. I mention that it would be more reasonable if the food retail profits only went up by $1B (30%) instead of $3B (100%) and then that gets converted to trying to "$50 per year per person (if Canada suddenly added 9M people to make the math easier)". This had nothing to do with the point I was trying to make. I was talking about a reasonable expectation for profit growth over a short 4 year period. 100% is stupid. Even 30% is too much on something as essential as food. But since the number is 100% increase in profits I think it is safe to say that the Food Retail market is out of control.

Perhaps it would be best to try a reset on the talk on this concept.

1) Affordability is one of the top issues in Canada.
2) Since 2019, Food Retail profits has gone up 100%
3) Since 2019, grocery prices have gone up 32% (not the same number as 100%)

Ignoring the absurd profit increases. To understand your grocery bill, if you were spending $350 per month ($4200 per year) on groceries in 2019, the same groceries would now cost $462/month or $5544/year - and increase of $1344 per year for the exact same products. Most of Canada believes this is far, far too much.

The goal of adding a public grocer is not to replace the 5 mega-corps currently dominating the grocery market but to add competition. Adding a non-profit competitor to the market creates downward pressure on pricing as the difference in prices between the public stores this would likely result in more and more people switching to the cheaper option and thus force the private companies to adjust their prices down (or at least stop jacking them up). If we already had a public grocer, perhaps our grocery bills would have only gone up a few points instead of 32.

Looking forward though, Loblaw is showing inflating prices another 3.8% in the first quarter of this year (2025). At the same time they are also showing record profits that are growing faster than the inflation:

In the first quarter of 2025, Loblaw shareholders made $503 million in profit, representing a 9.6 per cent increase from the same period a year earlier. From mid-December 2024 to mid-March 2025, Metro reported profits of $220 million, a 17.6 per cent increase from the previous year. Empire, which owns Sobeys and Safeway, reported $173 million in profit from February through April, a 16.1 per cent increase from the previous year.

Note: the 9.6% increase in profit is not the same as the 3.8% increase in inflation.... numbers are hard?!?

There are existing examples showing that public owned grocers (specifically the ones in the US military) save people about 25-30% on their groceries. Looking at our earlier numbers, saving 30% is close to $1300 per year per household, depending on the size of your household, not $50. $50 is a meaningless number.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Wolven

The added context that it has gone up 100+% in 5 years is kind of a big deal.

I don't know if I should bother, but that increase in profits is not based on grocery. It's based on everything else that you buy in these stores now (that massive section of clothes/housewares/electronic/junk in a Superstore, for example). The margins on food are notably small, as numerous people in this thread have tried to explain to you.

And frankly, I question this graph. When I look at the margins for Loblaws for example, the gross margin is up by about 1% and the net margin is almost flat. Revenues are up, but that's inflation because the margins aren't expanding.

[TorqueDog]

Circling back to a post earlier in the thread that actually touched upon something worth talking about:

Originally Posted by Wolven

My thoughts on the 5 of them:
Tony has some interesting ideas but in my small amount of research I feel he is hung up on two ideas that should be low priority: He is against AI and he wants to merge the NDP with the Greens. Personally, I think AI is unavoidable and not something to be scared of, but it is important to understand it and ensure that you have your own AI that is secure for you and your people.

AI shouldn't be low priority in the slightest, AI (and automation, by extension) should be one of their biggest issues. (Also 'having your own AI' is sort of an irrelevant take for the FedNDP to get behind as a policy specific to them.)

Let's think in terms of the FedNDP being the party of the worker, of labour. The biggest threat to workers right now is automation and AI, easily the biggest economic threat facing workers in decades. Amazon alone is targeting 600,000 warehouse roles for automation, and it won't stop with unskilled/low-skill labour. Middle management, clerical, logistics, and customer-facing jobs are all in the blast radius (Amazon has said as much).

The FedNDP should have a strong point of view on AI and automation's impact to the workforce, and my thinking is their point of view should advocate for some means for workers displaced by AI and automation to have a significant portion of their lost salary covered. This could be the start of a very plausible "universal basic income" concept that voters would likely be onboard with, because these things can impact both blue collar and white collar workers.

"AI will free humans from menial jobs to go do things they want to do," yeah sure, with what money from what job? AI and automation will make redundant far more jobs than it'll create. The idea that we're gonna re-skill every labourer displaced by AI or automation is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by Wolven

Way to make it weird.

Your whole approach to this and the fixation on oversimplified metrics to justify something that is extremely complex just reminds me of my more impressionable days, that's all.

Like, now we haven't just got the government in the food retail business, but to create synergies we now apparently also want them to invest in upstream food production, real estate and condo construction and leasing and management as well as catering lunches for daycares and schools?

Do you see the issues in trying to get elected on a platform that features stuff like this?

[Locke]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

"AI will free humans from menial jobs to go do things they want to do," yeah sure, with what money from what job? AI and automation will make redundant far more jobs than it'll create. The idea that we're gonna re-skill every labourer displaced by AI or automation is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.

Yep. Its like they think everyone is going to inherit millions and California beach houses and just live the life they always dreamed about because AI will take care of the rest!

Some people swallow that tripe.

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Your whole approach to this and the fixation on oversimplified metrics to justify something that is extremely complex just reminds me of my more impressionable days, that's all.

Like, now we haven't just got the government in the food retail business, but to create synergies we now apparently also want them to invest in upstream food production, real estate and condo construction and leasing and management as well as catering lunches for daycares and schools?

Do you see the issues in trying to get elected on a platform that features stuff like this?

Have you read a federal party election platform? As much as they try to dumb them down so people can read them, they cover a wide range of topics with policy positions for each.

If you go look at the goverment of canada website now there is already a program in place for apartment construction.

MINIMUM LOAN
$1,000,000

MAXIMUM LOAN TO COST
– Residential Loan Component: from up to 90% - 100%
Loan to Cost.
– Non-residential Loan Component: up to 75% Loan to Cost.
100% Loan to cost is for projects offering the greatest social
outcomes of affordability, accessibility, energy efficiency,
stacking of government programs, and transit orientation.

All you would need to do is add a minor tweak to say that building a non-residential public grocer would be covered 100% instead of 'up to 75%'. That is not a heavy lift or complex integration but it is a simple opportunity to support a new program with an existing program.

But yes, I do see an issue of going into this level of detail on the left, even if there are great opportunities to do these things to create stronger benefits with tax payer dollars. PP is on the right sticking to 3-word slogans and if the NDP mention any of these details it will breaks people's brains just like we are seeing here.

I should start posting these instead:
"Make Groceries Cheap"
"Strong Public Education"
"Valuable Public Healthcare"
"Help the Farmers"
"Integrate the Services"
"Electoral Reform Now"
"Support More Jobs"
"Bigger Bang Buck"
"Class War Now"
"People vs. Elites"
"Workers vs. Owners"

Is that more what you are hoping for?