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Anthony Furey: Toronto copies Mamdani's worst idea — socialized grocery stores

How will they provide low-cost groceries if they have higher labour and operating costs than private grocers?

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It’s hard to say what’s the worst part about Toronto City Council voting in favour of government run grocery stores. Perhaps it’s just that, shockingly, it’s a real thing that actually happened, taking valuable time and resources away from serious governance that could improve the livability of Toronto.

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Last week, Councillor Anthony Perruzza put forward a motion that “City Council establish a pilot project to open four municipally operated grocery stores within the City of Toronto.” The locations would be chosen with “priority given to neighbourhoods with limited access to full-service grocery stores and where residents have lower average household incomes.”

Anthony Furey: Toronto copies Mamdani's worst idea — socialized grocery stores Back to video

The motion had originally called for an implementation report to be issued by staff within a month, but Mayor Olivia Chow amended it to give them a year to work on it. The plan then passed with 21 for and 3 against.

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Etobicoke Councillor Stephen Holyday got to the heart of the matter, as he often does, when he said: “I don’t think the government could possibly run this more efficiently than the private sector does. To suggest that a government-run store is suddenly going to be better is preposterous.”

The pitfalls are obvious from the outset: How will they provide low-cost groceries if they have higher labour and operating costs than private grocers? If they only have four locations how will they match the bulk buying power of large grocers? What will stop higher earning people from flocking to the store in search of deals? And so on.

Let’s not overthink this one though — because the objective isn’t for it to be efficient or better. The objective is to present a headline grabbing populist gimmick during an election year.

If these grocery stores do happen, they will be a massive failure and run at a considerable loss to the taxpayer, only to be quietly shut down one day with zero accountability placed on those who peddled them in the first place.

The good news is that it’s highly unlikely the project will happen. By the time the staff report is delivered the councillors will have moved on to some other scheme and they will just ghost away from this one, letting it sit in report purgatory.

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Perruzza admitted he was flat out copying New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s similar pledge from last year, right down to portioning out one store location per borough. It’s uninspired policymaking to just cut and paste what’s happening in NYC, and why do it with the most ridiculed and least likely to succeed of Mamdani’s policies?

Perhaps when the vote for this happened council was at the point where they just needed to get their sillies out, because it came amidst a number of other ill-advised decisions.

During the same council session, Mayor Chow made headlines across Canada and the United States when she moved for American ICE officers to be banned from Toronto during the FIFA games.

“ICE is known to operate beyond American borders, including at times within Canada,” a motion put forward by Chow that was passed by council last week states. “Any presence of ICE in Toronto is liable to create fear during a time when we want to welcome the world and ensure that everyone feels safe.” The motion goes on to call for “no ICE in Toronto” and to relay the memo to Toronto police as well as federal ministers.

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The motion is full of misinformation designed to stoke the very fears it claims it wants to avoid. ICE doesn’t conduct immigration enforcement in other countries, but this motion implies that officers will come up to violently detain people during FIFA.

Then there was the case of council voting to reject a report from their own Integrity Commissioner, who found that downtown Councillor Chris Moise violated the Code of Conduct by using “derogatory” language towards Daniel Tate, executive director of IntegrityTO, a municipal watchdog. Tate has long been a critic of the costly renaming of Yonge and Dundas Square and it was in this context that Moise made offensive comments aimed at him, falsely accusing him of supporting “white supremacy.”

IntegrityTO has become a refreshing voice on the municipal scene, advocating for accountability and transparency. By voting against the Integrity Commissioner’s findings, council was weaponizing a politically neutral office to send a chilling message to watchdog organizations.

And all of the above was in a matter of days.

The City of Toronto should be focused on unifying approaches to economic prosperity, public safety and easing gridlock. Our elected officials would be well-advised to practice serious governance instead of reaching for gimmicks like government grocery stores.

Anthony Furey ran for Mayor of Toronto in the 2023 election. Reach him via anthony@furey.ca.

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