Whistler has always been a tad more pricey in the grocery aisle. We all pay what I call the “cheese tax” to live in a premium tourist destination known for its white powder—and other such dirty pleasure sports.
But that cheese is getting pricey indeed. On the surface we see high prices from all the usual factors in a tourist town: high rent and rich pockets.
There’s more going on, though. According to Canada’s 2024 Food Price Report from Dalhousie University, food prices overall were forecasted to go up at least five per cent in B.C. in 2024.
I don’t know about your credit card bill, but this seems to be on the lower side.
My fave kombucha, for example, has gone up from $10.99 to $17.99. And then there’s the Lindt chocolate bars, a kind of bougie Big Mac test for affordability (highest price I’ve seen yet: $8.79).
Multiple factors are at play in making us pay.
There’s corporate consolidation creating lack of competition.
There’s U.S. tariffs hitting supply chains, imports, and raw materials.
There’s pandemic-era inflation. And dig into the packaging, and we see shrinkflation—corporations profiteering from the pandemic by shrinking their product sizes and retaining, if not raising, their prices.
Couple all that with geopolitical uncertainty, mix in a little climate instability—already wreaking havoc on supply chains worldwide—and the food bill is devouring alive most household budgets.
Global crises impact local prices. Climate storms decimated Greece’s olive crop in 2023, making olive oil the world’s most expensive cooking lube. And when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2021, it impacted trade in wheat, sunflower and vegetable oil, creating ripples across global supply chains that have yet to subside.
And as Naomi Klein points out in The Shock Doctrine, corporations have not wasted a moment in profiteering from it all.
There’s homegrown price fixing and grocery monopolies, right here in Canada, thanks to our very own corporate chains milking us for lunch money.
Add this all up, and we face a potential food security crisis in the Sea to Sky.
For the past two years I’ve been tracking these trends.
My interest was piqued when Nesters was revamped by Jimmy Pattison’s head office. It seems I wasn’t the only one lost in the aisles, trying to find out where the pineapple tidbits had gone. The chaos wrought to our beloved, once independent local grocer seemed to lack any logic.
I love Nesters. So I started getting nosy.
Like why were the posters of local skier legends removed from the windows? (For the record: no one seems to know.)
At first we were told they were just switching distributors. But then local products—particularly produce—began disappearing from the shelves, replaced by pre-packaged food and generic items.
Part of the issue is a loss of purchasing power. Our local grocer once had the purchasing autonomy to simply do a deal with local farmers and producers. Now, it all has to go through head office, distributed via a centralized Lower Mainland warehouse—and they call the shots.
I know Nesters has managed to get many things back, often thanks to the persistence of locals speaking up. In fact, you can politely email and nicely ask for things. This empowers our local managers to petition head office.
But that, too, is part of the problem: a lack of local autonomy and decision-making. Instead we are stuck with what head office thinks we should all be eating—which, of course, heavily favours their in-house brands.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the Agri-Foods Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, has been tracking such food supply scandals.
First, there’s bread. “Let them eat cake,” apocryphally said Marie Antoinette, when hearing of France’s starving populace.
That didn’t work out too well for her head.
Well, this year the bread price-fixing scandal marks its 10th anniversary—and the Competition Bureau’s work still remains incomplete. Sobeys, Metro, Giant Tiger, and Walmart still remain under investigation. Loblaws paid the price.
And that’s not the only price-fixing.
A recent CBC news investigation, spanning 80 stores over several months, found that Loblaws, Sobeys, and Walmart have been systemically overcharging customers by the weight of meat products. By including packaging in the weight of the meat, they’ve been potentially reaping millions in profits.
Millions.
In response, the Liberal government passed Bill C-56, which amended the Competition Act. According to the Food Price Report, the bill “is designed to promote competition in the grocery sector by empowering the Competition Tribunal to terminate agreements between competitors that undermine competition, and by providing the authority to terminate agreements between non-competitors if their intent is to diminish competition.”
It has already led to 14.7 per cent reductions in the cost of cellphone plans, for example.
The impact on our food supply pricing remains to be seen.
Then there’s the other side of the border—and the American potato cartel.
You just can’t hash this one out without being fried.
Two class-action lawsuits filed in US District Court in November 2024 allege that McCain Foods, Cavendish Farms, Lamb Weston and J.R. Simplot conspired by sharing insider information to raise the price of their goods, cornering a multi-billion-dollar potato market.
Pass the hot potato. But do we even want their spuds? Not just because patriotism, or the fact that Pemberton is on our doorstep, but because the Trump administration has all but decimated the very agencies that are supposed to ensure food safety for all American products.
I mean, just think of them pricey American eggs, thanks to avian flu.
And measles.
What is to be done about all this?
While some countries like South Korea, Hungary and Brazil have passed regulations to curb shrinkflation, Canada has yet to do so.
Personally I dig what France is doing.
In 2023, France introduced price caps on close to a quarter of foodstuffs in the average supermarket.
And they singled out Unilever, Nestle and PepsiCo for not doing their part. These global corporations tried to keep prices inflated even as cost in raw materials dropped.
The French, as usual, are good with getting a head.
But then Canadians aren’t too shabby at spilling a few drops either.
Nestle once extracted up to 3.6 million litres of water daily from Six Nations treaty land in Ontario, leaving 63,000 of its Indigenous members, just outside of Toronto, without drinkable water themselves.
Nestle was doing much the same in B.C., taking 265 million litres a year from a Fraser Valley well.
In 2020, Nestle’s water operations were forced out of Canada thanks to action by the Council of Canadians and First Nation communities.
To this day, “Whistler water” draws from local groundwater just north of Tiny Town.
Maybe it’s time to rethink buying what flows freely.
And maybe time for a serious conversation concerning the safety and integrity of our local food supply.
Dr. tobias c. van Veen taught critical humanities and social sciences at Quest University (RIP).