January 12, 2024

Welcome to Letters from CAMP, a newsletter on anti-monopoly activity in Canada and abroad, brought to you by the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. In this installment we have:

• CBC investigation uncovers major grocers consistently deceiving customers on product weight
• Survey finds that Canada’s largest voting bloc supports public interest regulation of business
• Meta’s fact checking 180 shows the need for anti-monopoly internet policy

Now let’s dive in.

Canadian Grocers Torch Trust by Underweighting Products

By now we’re betting that every reader of this newsletter has experienced comparing the cost of groceries, often using standardized pricing by weight to understand which product is the best deal. But what if those weights were wrong, and consistently wrong at the expense of shoppers?

That’s what the CBC discovered when the results of an investigation showed that products in the grocery store consistently weigh less than the label claims. That means Canada’s largest grocery chains—Loblaw, Sobeys, and Walmart—have been selling underweighted meat, potentially pocketing millions in extra profit at consumers’ expense.

How does it work? According to federal regulations, the net weight of packaged food must exclude packaging materials, ensuring you get what you pay for. Yet in cases uncovered by the CBC, meat was weighed alongside plastic trays or incorrectly labeled, shorting customers by up to 11% per item. Loblaw admitted to selling mislabeled meat across 80 stores due to a “packaging error,” but assured reporters that this was an isolated incident. But what good do these corporate-speak responses do for Canadians? Months after Loblaw claimed to have fixed the issue, CBC still found mislabeled meat at multiple locations.

This kind of shortchanging of customers is the absolute baseline for consumer protection regulation. To ensure a stop is put to these widespread “isolated” incidents, the Competition Bureau must act decisively and launch deceptive marketing investigations against the major grocers weighting practices. As Canadians continue to struggle under the weight of food inflation, every gram counts.

Public Interest Regulation Cuts Across Cultural Lines in Canada

At CAMP, we are constantly curious about what different groups of Canadians think about monopoly, and a recent survey has shed some encouraging light on the topic. Conducted by Abacus Data, the wide-ranging survey canvassed a wide swath of Canadians and attempts to sort them ideologically across progressive and conservative lines on the categories of economic and cultural issues. The most interesting finding from our perspective? That support for public interest regulation is shared by cultural conservatives and progressives in Canada, the largest voting bloc responding to the survey.

Of these 41% of Canadians, the vast majority of them agree with the statement “government regulation of business is necessary to protect the public interest.” The next largest group, the 32% of Canadians that consider themselves economically and culturally mixed, also understand the need for government intervention but are less decisive about their support. While less than half of the 23% of Canadians that consider themselves economic conservatives agree with the same statement, it’s hard to imagine that hesitance extends to regulations that ensure Canadians actually get what they pay for at the grocery checkout.

Support for regulation across cultural divides parallels the cross-parliament support for stronger competition laws that saw all parties vote in favour of strengthening the Competition Act in 2023 and again in 2024. At the risk of confirming our own bias, as issues emerge as hinge points for an upcoming election, one thing Canadians of different stripes appear to agree on is the need for a strong stance for the public interest and against the monopolies that dominate our economy.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Goose Media, Can We Solve Canada’s Monopoly Problem? (YouTube)
• Claire Kelloway, America needs a real challenger to corporate greed, not conspiracy-riddled RFK Jr. (The Hill)
• Ben Casselman, Economists Are in the Wilderness. Can They Find a Way Back to Influence? (New York Times)

Zuckerberg’s Fact-Check Flip: Why Anti-Monopoly is the Surest Path to a Healthy Internet

This week, Meta announced it is scrapping its third fact-checking program in favor of a crowdsourced “community notes” system much like the one in place on the Elon Musk-owned X platform, formerly Twitter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed the move as restoring free expression to the platform, but critics argue that the move, along with the elevation of executive Joel Kaplan and appointing of UFC CEO Dana White to Meta’s board, is a nod to appease the incoming Trump administration nod.

These fact-checking programs were never a silver bullet for the thorny issue of balancing online safety with free expression, but the 180 reminds us why an anti-monopoly approach to online platforms is so important. As FTC Chair Lina Khan aptly noted in her exit interview with CNBC, “an economy where decisions by a single executive dictate speech rules is at odds with competition laws,” and we might add to the idea of a free and democratic society.

Meta’s history of suppressing content post-January 6 before abruptly shifting policies to curry favor with changing political winds underscores the dangers of centralized power in the global economy. This isn’t about free expression; it’s about control—control of information, markets, and political influence. While one political faction may see this change as a win today, it was not their choice to make, and powerful companies will continue to morph to fit those they wish to curry favour with. A truly democratic society means breaking the concentrated power of individual companies and returning it to the citizens themselves.

If you have any monopoly tips or stories you’d like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca

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