Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Canada's competition laws should be changed to prohibit cartel-like practices and wage-fixing deals in the country's grocery sector, a new report by the House of Commons industry committee says.
The report comes a year after Canada's big three grocers -- Loblaw Companies Ltd., Metro Inc. and Sobeys parent company Empire Company Ltd. -- cut temporary pandemic-related pay bonuses within a day of each other last June.
The move prompted the committee to hold hearings on the issue and invite senior grocery executives to explain their decisions.
While the retailers admitted to communicating with each other about ending their respective wage premiums of about $2 an hour, they denied co-ordinating the termination of the pay bumps, said the report, which was released Wednesday.
Michael Medline, president and CEO of Sobeys and Empire, said the company watched what other retailers were doing but did not collaborate or co-ordinate with competitors
"We would never do that," he told the parliamentary committee. "Let me be absolutely clear -- we did not co-ordinate our decisions with other retailers."
Metro president and CEO Eric La Fleche said he reached out to his counterparts at Loblaw and Sobeys to gather information -- not to obtain a tacit agreement on wages.
"The more information I have on what others are doing, how they are treating their employees and how much they are paying and for how long, is valid information that I tried to get," he told the committee last July.
But competing grocers communicating about wages at the executive level risks "a slippery slope towards cartel-like conduct," Matthew Boswell, commissioner of competition at the Competition Bureau, testified during the committee's hearings.
Yet he said the bureau lacks the power under the Competition Act to prosecute such behaviour and faces significant resource constraints.
Canada's competition legislation diverges from laws in the United States, where federal competition authorities can criminally prosecute wage-fixing agreements, Boswell told the committee.
In its report, the committee recommended Ottawa provide the Competition Bureau with more resources and align Canadian competition legislation with U.S. legislation in order to criminally prosecute such agreements.
"Doing so would clarify competition-related obligations for businesses active in Canadian and American markets, and facilitate co-operation between competition authorities in Canada and the U.S.," the report reads.
The report also said Canada's food sector would benefit from a code of conduct to address inequalities in bargaining power between food producers and grocers. The long-standing issue gained increased attention in recent months after some retailers unilaterally imposed higher costs on suppliers.
The committee has requested the government table a comprehensive response to the recommendations in the report.
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, grocers said they offered pay premiums as a temporary measure associated with lockdowns.
As restrictions eased and shopping behaviour normalized, all three grocers made the decision to end pay increases, the report said.
Only Sobeys reintroduced its "hero pay" as provinces reinstated lockdowns, the report found.
Metro has offered gift cards to its front-line workers three times since phasing out the wage increase last June, while Loblaw announced a one-time appreciation bonus for workers in April.
Meanwhile, union representatives told the committee that the wage premium for front-line grocery workers was an important recognition of their essential role during the pandemic.
They testified that withdrawing the pay bump exacerbated the already difficult working conditions in food retail, including low salaries and lack of benefits.
Unions play a fragmented role in Canada's grocery sector. While several unions represent a number of grocery workers across the country, the majority of food retail workers are not unionized.
A recent report on Ontario's grocery industry found that about 20 per cent of food retail workers in that province were unionized.
Grocers such as Empire, Loblaw and Metro are at least partly unionized in Ontario, while Walmart and many smaller chains are often not, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship said in the report last month.
"Wages and conditions vary by worker tenure, retailer, and store," the report said. "One national employer noted they operated with 350 collective agreements nationally."
Loblaw did not respond to a request for comment while Metro said it did not have any comment.
But Sobeys vice-president of communications and corporate affairs Jacquelin Weatherbee said the company was thrilled with the report and its support for an industry code of practice.
"We recently sent the (industry) committee a letter to remind them that we do not, under any circumstances, believe in wage fixing -- whether it's legislated or not," she said in an email.
"We also stated that we would welcome any clarification to the legal regime around competitors engaging in wage fixing and we are pleased to read their recommendation to that effect."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 17, 2021.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.