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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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LOL. Conservatives aren't willing to do much to help taxpayers.
IMO, this money should go directly back to consumers. After all, these companies are stealing from us, so we should be entitled to get our money back. But $25 million wouldn't be enough... these guys are robbing us of an extra 20-30% on each grocery bill.
Agreed.
There are about 40M people in Canada.
Presumably, all of them eat food.
Granted, not everyone shops at the same chain, but for quick/easy math, let's say ~25% (10M) shop at "GroceryCorp".
If GroceryCorp fixes prices by just $1 per shopping trip, they will make an extra 10M.
If we assume biweekly shopping trips, that's an extra $20M per month of stolen money.
These numbers are all very generously underestimated ($1?? I wish), and this corporation still nearly breaks even in one single month of price gouging. This has been going for years.
I almost hesitate to say this bill is better than nothing, even. Those responsible need to be subject to prison, not some mildly bigger slap on the wrist ffs.
That's the problem, isn't it? Any large corporation will happily eat fines all day long if they are still turning a profit from whatever crime they are committing.
This is why Facebook and Google continue to commit privacy violations. Why Bell Canada still practices deceptive marketing and sales. And why Loblaws and friends are reporting record profits each new year.
If the fines don't HURT these companies, they are ineffective.
The moment corporations outgrew fines was the moment capitalism seriously turned sideways. Not that there weren't always serious issues, but it's insane that we allow these entities to exist entirely outside of meaningful legal prosecution.
I'd prefer to see fines linked to profits AND length of time they were stealing, ie: $20 mil x 44 months of theft = $968 million fine
That will get their immediate attention.
Fines of any sort for large corporations are literally just legal bribery to get some responsible party out of facing prosecution. Corporate bad actors have the power to do far more damage to people and land than an individual can, yet they get to buy their way out.
That's exactly why any punishment has to do damage. And it needs to be swift and severe.
An individual who ruins lives tends to have their lives ruined buy the justice system in most cases. The same needs to apply to companies, or at least, the people running those companies.
It's worse than nothing because a lot of people will see this and think "well a million is a lot, so this is good."
Appeasing people with what amounts to nothing is not a good thing.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. It's worse than nothing, because it's in place of anything actually useful.
The fines needs to be at least equal to the profits, and preferably a more. Anything less and it's a "cost of doing business"
ETA jail time for company officers would work, too, but it's hard to prove, especially when corporations are designed around the idea of distributed malfeasance.
The jail time would be hard if you were arbitrarily picking officers or trying to prove what each one did or didn't do, but I'm sure a law could be written laying out a chain of command/criminal responsibility. And instead of increasing a single scapegoats sentence for multiple offences it could be distributed among the c suite / board.
It nearly does. The government collects the fines, which reduces public deficit, which allows the government to either lower taxes or spend more relative to what it would do otherise, which means money ends in the pockets of citizens either way.
That may be true, but consumers who overspent on food, and are in this present day struggling, should get the money back in cash.
I've never had a tax break in all the years that I've been robbed by grocery stores.
In other words, we haven't been collecting nearly as much as what's been taken from us.