The NDP's dishonest war on Big Grocery

They're taking advantage of public ignorance about how political donations work in Canada

Look, I hate cartelism in the Canadian economy as much as the next guy, but NDP boss Jagmeet Singh’s dogged determination to make a war on Canada’s big grocery chains the issue of the moment is getting a bit sad.

Jagmeet is committed to a few ideologically-driven narratives about what’s wrong with the Canadian supermarket industry, including that the big chains have been engaging in “greedflation,” wherein grocery prices are rising not for any rational market-driven reason, but just because the CEOs feel like hiking them, and that these greedy CEOs are getting a pass from the “establishment” (ie: non-NDP) political parties, because said greedy CEOs fund those parties.

That last line of argument intrigued me, because one of my contrarian hot takes about Canadian politics is that there actually isn’t enough “big money” in Ottawa. Years of populist legislation from both Liberal and Conservative governments alike have made it quite difficult for any Canadian to make a substantial donation to any political party these days, which has had negative consequences for free speech, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, most Canadians are broadly ignorant about just how strict political donation laws are in this country. It’s a very entrenched trope in our culture that corporations/rich people “buy” politicians with their enormous donations, and those politicians then dance obediently to the tune of their rich backers. The other day, the NDP played into this narrative by sending out this tweet:

They posted this on Instagram as well, with a clearer image of the chart on the right:

So Sean Fraser is the current minister of infrastructure in the Trudeau cabinet. He represents the riding of Central Nova, NS in parliament, which is where the Sobey family, who run the Sobeys grocery store empire, live, and where their corporation is headquartered. Sobeys runs “1,500 stores in all 10 provinces,” according to their website.

Now, what’s revealing about the “damning” chart above is just how underwhelming it is, and the fact that the NDP had to edit it to make it seem more damning than it is.

Under current Canadian law, corporations cannot donate to political parties. Individuals can give money to parties, or candidates, but face a pretty low upper limit of how much money they can give in total. In 2006, the maximum was $1,000 annually for each type of donation (which is to say, a max $1,000 donation to all parties, and a max $1,000 donation to all candidates) but this figure was raised to $1,500 in 2015 and has gone up $25 every year since. So you can figure out the maximum donation limit in any given year just by starting at the 2024 cap of $1,725 and subtracting backwards.

In any case, these numbers aren’t terribly impressive, and are probably much, much lower than the amount of money your average Canadian in the street imagines Canada’s billionaire CEO class to be giving to politicians.

This is probably why the NDP cropped out the actual donation numbers when they posted their scary chart on social media.

Searching the Elections Canada website, I was able to recreate the NDP’s donation chart, so now you can see exactly how much money the Sobeys have given to Minister Fraser since Prime Minister Trudeau’s government was elected in 2015.

For those who don’t want to do the math, the grand total is $6,150 over eight years, or about $770 a year. That is how much it costs to control grocery store policy in Canada?

To be fair, the NDP’s chart doesn’t include donations the Sobey fam have made to the Liberal Party proper (a topic for a future tweet?), which as mentioned, is limited by a distinct, but equivalent donation cap.

So if you prefer, the NDP is currently alleging that grocery store policy in Canada can be bought for just $1,540 a year.