Paige

I don’t have a universal like or dislike of publicly owned companies. Expending limited resources and political capital on running a supermarket before trying any antitrust regulation is a waste of governmental resources.

Terrible solution.
Break up and split the wholesale and retail operations. Legislate against wholesale pricing discrimination (Wholesale pricing cannot have price breaks which exclude smaller competitors)

Montreal already does this: https://montreal.ca/en/programs/welcome-box-youngest-montrealers

We should have just increased GST a small amount across the board instead of creating a tax that had such a concentrated impact on businesses from the country that is our largest trading partner.
There are these things that Canada does to protect industry or raise funds, but there are consequences for the quite convoluted way we go about it. VATs are a normal thing around the world, but we engineer these weird solutions to try to hide our protectionism.
For example instead of raising taxes and subsidizing the news media as a public good, we made (certain) Silicon Valley companies pay (certain) publishers for linking to them. Facebook then said it just won’t link to them and now there’s no news on Facebook. This was a backfire.
Instead of GST we could have taxed lots of things, fiber internet plans, advertising or digital services across the board, many people warned against the Trudeau era bills, they caused a rift with Biden too, and we’ve now lost the game of chicken and wasted 4 years on something we had to tear up.