Canada’s federal New Democrats have appointed their critic for agriculture and agri-food to a new point position on a major issue for the fourth-ranked opposition party.
After the House of Commons resumed sitting last Monday (Jan. 30), NDP leader Jagmeet Singh on Friday named Alistair MacGregor, MP for the Vancouver Island riding of Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, to an additional role as critic for food price inflation.
“Everyone should be able to afford healthy food,” Singh said in a release. “But right now, families are crossing items off their grocery list, or racking up bigger bills at the till — and the Liberals are letting it happen.”
Read Also
U.S. grains: Wheat futures rise on supply snags in top-exporter Russia
U.S. wheat futures closed higher on Thursday on concerns over the limited availability of supplies for export in Russia, analysts said.
McGregor, the party’s ag critic since 2018, will “fight for every tool possible to stop greedflation, so people have… more breathing room,” Singh said. “That includes leading the fight for a windfall tax, because we have to stop rewarding grocery giants for gouging families.”
With MacGregor’s new assignment, his previous additional role as the party’s critic for public safety goes to another British Columbia MP, the NDP’s House leader Peter Julian.
Singh also shuffled duties to two other B.C. MPs: Richard Cannings, the party’s critic for emergency preparedness/climate change resilience, will also pick up the international trade file from Windsor MP Brian Masse, while Taylor Bachrach becomes deputy critic for fisheries and oceans, taking over from another Vancouver Island MP, Gord Johns.
While the NDP sits back in fourth place in seats in the Commons behind the Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois, it holds outsized influence through a “supply and confidence” agreement it reached with the minority Liberal government last March, providing support on budgetary bills and in any confidence votes until June 2025.
The party said its announcement of a food inflation critic follows Loblaw Cos., owner of major retail chains such as Loblaws, Superstore and Shoppers Drug Mart, lifting the price freeze it pledged last October on its ‘no name’ food brand. The company said Oct. 17 it would freeze those prices until the end of January.
The NDP said Friday the end of that price freeze is “sparking worry about food prices rising even faster in February.”
Singh, in a separate statement Thursday, specifically called out Loblaw for ending that price freeze, saying the company’s profits “have skyrocketed. They’ve been using inflation as an excuse to hike prices higher than they need to.”
Publicly traded Loblaw releases its fourth-quarter and year-end results for fiscal 2022 on Feb. 23.
For its third quarter, the company on Nov. 16 reported food retail sales of $12.22 billion, marking a 6.9 per cent increase in same-store sales over the year-earlier period, as well as the majority of the company’s $17.39 billion in gross revenue for the quarter, up from $16.05 billion in the previous Q3. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
