In response to consumer anxiety over rising prices and retailers’ trading practices, Canada’s federal government and parliamentarians took action. 

Grocery store bosses were summoned to Ottawa for scoldings. Promises for temporary price freezes were extracted. Retailers and suppliers were pressured to adopt a code of conduct. Appeals for more foreign grocers to open stores in Canada were made. And the Competition Bureau was granted more authority and latitude to study industry, to assess competitiveness. 

While the federal government has some marketplace-related authorities, Canada’s provinces also play a role in consumer protection. They have ministries and regulations designed to protect consumers from unfair retail prices and practices in all kinds of industries. They govern “contracts,” the agreements between buyers and sellers implicit in every purchase.

Ontario, for instance, passed an updated consumer protection act, the Better for Consumers, Better for Businesses Act at the end of 2023. It explicitly prohibits practices like price gouging, boosts fines, and enhances provincial investigation capabilities. 

Could those powers be used to address grocery prices? 

A representative from the Ontario Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery said grocery prices were not in the purview of the old regulations and aren’t in the updated rules, either.

“Issues relating to market dominance, collusion on price-fixing and anti-competitive conduct would typically fall under the federal Competition Act,” read an emailed statement to the Consumer Council of Canada’s e-periodical, Think Consumers. 

Quebec has taken more action around grocery price presentation, if not prices, to make comparison shopping easier for consumers. The province’s 2024 revisions in its Consumer Protection Act improved the display of product unit pricing, transparency on whether groceries were taxable, and an increase in the costs to merchants if a displayed price did not match the price when scanned at checkout. It remains the only Canadian province with law to assist the consumers in this way.

Ontario also has given itself authority to address price gouging in the event of an “emergency”, but the nature of this authority is not defined and would not be applied to normally functioning markets.

If a provincial investigator wanted to probe price fixing, it would be a difficult task, said Andreas Boecker, chair of the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph. 

“You would have to have a very strong case, with irrefutable evidence to get an investigation started and what any government would want to stay away from is over-regulating because of the high cost of monitoring.”

High prices are not evidence. In the notorious bread price-fixing case of 2017, Boecker said there was considerable explicit evidence. 

“There has got to be documentation of the communication that has gone on,” he said. “It’s very difficult for provincial or federal investigators to find that.”