NDP bill wants to bring grocery prices down. How will it work?

Pushing a grocery cart up and down the aisles of Loblaws, Jagmeet Singh has to admit it’s all a little bit awkward.

After all, the NDP leader has lambasted the grocery giant and its former president Galen Weston Jr. — famous among Canadians for his 30-second COVID-era TV and radio ads — for “ripping people off.”

Today, however, Singh is just running errands. Well, mostly.

He selects a loaf of sourdough bread and a bouquet of Valentine’s Day flowers for his wife. In the dairy aisle, he eschews the familiar yellow “No Name” butter in favour of a more costly brand — a small act of personal rebellion.

“I wouldn’t have thought twice about it before,” he says.

But Singh has made it a central tenet of his party’s policy to take on big companies he believes are making record profits while ordinary people struggle to afford the basics.

“That is something that people are becoming really aware of — and that creates some opportunity for us to fix it.”

Singh’s private member’s bill, which aims to bring down the cost of basic essentials, passed second reading in the House of Commons with the support of Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs.

Liberals have voted against the bill, with some accusing the NDP leader of trying to stifle free enterprise.

“Do you think that I want to stifle them from ripping people off? I 100 per cent want to stifle them,” Singh says.

“I want to stifle them from exploiting people.”

The bill proposes stiffer penalties for price and wage-fixing – measures that would have had consequences for the bread price-fixing scandal of 2017. It would also set rules to prevent mergers that Singh believes lead to abuse.

Under pressure in the polls, the Liberals introduced measures aimed at easing the pain, including a grocery “rebate”