Quebec’s population is rising, and half the increase is in Montreal. An estimated 9.1 million people now call Quebec home.
But we now have more deaths than births in Quebec for the first time.
Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The Gazette is on the story about the prices of non‑dairy milk options in cafés.
I still don’t get it. Where does the assumption come from that businesses must sell a product at a set price because you want them to? Nobody gave consumers the “right” to buy alternative ingredients at the same price as a more familiar ingredient.
Mark Côté
Apparently the lawsuit is calling it an “abusive charge under the Quebec Consumer Protection Act”. I opened that Act and scanned quickly for “abusive” but didn’t find anything so must be a different specific legalese term… maybe H John can weigh in. 🙂
(Completely off topic, this blog always saves my name as “Mark Côté” so I have to rewrite it every time… something you can fix in WordPress maybe? My name is an interesting test case for many applications…)
Joey
That’s a pretty long article to not feature anyone making an actual case for lowering the price of non-dairy milk, aside from Sylvain Charlebois (about whom the less said the better, but it should be noted that this genius university prof didn’t even bother to distinguish between retail and wholesale prices, as we discussed ad nauseam here last time).
Blork not Côté
I agree with Kate. While I understand that paying more for alternative milks is annoying, I don’t see this as a LEGAL issue. Since when is it the government’s job to step in and set prices for retailers on everyday items like this? It annoys me that people so quickly jump to the legal/legistative way to resolve their annoyances, without thinking about what that says about the role of the law and of governments in our society. We’re not China (yet) so we shouldn’t act like we are.
Plant-based milks are a different product. The retailer can charge a different price if they want. Case closed.
To me it sounds like self-entitled children crying to their parents to solve their problems.
(BTW, adding “Côté” to my name here as a test to see if Mark’s problem happens with me too.)
Blork not Côté
Follow-up on the Côté test. Problem does not happen with me. I’m using FF on a Mac. Mark, maybe the problem is your browser, or something in the settings?
Mark Côté
Huh weird, it happens to me on multiple machines and multiple browsers. Thanks for testing it out for me; I’m even more confused now! 😀
Meezly
“Since when is it the government’s job to step in and set prices for retailers on everyday items like this?”
Extracts from some recent articles:
In 2024, Loblaw Cos. Ltd. and its parent company George Weston Ltd. agreed to pay $500 million to settle a class-action lawsuit regarding their involvement in an “industry-wide price-fixing arrangement” to raise the price of packaged bread for over ten year span. The class-action case was brought against a group of companies that includes Loblaw and the Weston companies, Metro, Walmart Canada, Giant Tiger, and Sobeys and its owner, Empire Co. Ltd.
In June 2023, Canada Bread was fined $50 million after pleading guilty to four counts of price-fixing bread products under the Competition Act. The Competition Bureau called it the highest price-fixing fine ever imposed by a Canadian court.
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Earlier this month, CBC investigation uncovered grocers overcharging customers by selling underweighted meat. Under federal regulations, posted net weights for packaged food — and prices based on that weight — can’t include the packaging. Worried the problem could be widespread, a customer complained to the federal food regulator, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), which alerted Loblaw.CBC’s findings are no surprise to Terri Lee, who worked as a CFIA inspector for 24 years until her retirement in 2021. She said grocers need to better monitor their weighing systems, and the CFIA needs to do more in-store inspections.
“The cost of food has really increased,” Lee said. “It’s extremely important now to protect the consumer.”bob
@Meezly – cartel pricing is not the same as setting a price according to the market. What Loblows et al. did (and continue to do) is to use their effective monopoly to steal from people. Charging a premium on a niche product is not in any way the same. A café setting prices is not at all the same as an industry cartel fixing prices. One is natural competition, the other is fraud. One affects some bougie latte-drinker’s price slightly, the other has an impact on whether poor people can eat. The moral difference is stark.
Meezly
Is there really a moral difference or is it just one of degrees? These are not individual coffee shops we’re talking about, but major coffee chains like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, and Second Cup. As I had previously stated, plant-based milk is no longer a niche nor bougie product for precious snowflakes (as many of you seem to keep thinking despite the evidence saying otherwise) as it can account for 30-80% of sales depending on where you live. It is a valid alternative to dairy milk for health and environmental reasons and for those who are lactose-intolerant.
The difference is that plant-based milk historically was a niche product, which was why coffee chains charged a higher price. Fair enough, but this is no longer the case. The plant-based milk industry has grown exponentially in recent years and has even overtaken the dairy industry in some cases. So there is no longer any real reason to charge extra other than to continue making a profit at the customer’s expense.
Joey
@Meezly one is about sellers colluding to artificially inflate the price of bread, the other is about the price of a niche good not dropping fast enough, in the opinion of some – I don’t see how they are meaningfully comparable (also those evil major corps you mentioned have already stopped charging extra for non-dairy milk, so what are we even talking about? That the price of oat milk lattes two years ago was immorally high compared to dairy milk lattes, even if the difference was under a dollar?).
Government does set price caps all the time – e.g., pharmaceutical products, for which not only is the price set, but the related fees and uncharges for others throughout the supply chain. Your local pharmacist cannot set their dispensing fee at whatever amount they want, nor can their distributor charge more than a few percentage points for the cost of acquiring, storing and delivering your medication. Obviously, it’s. in the general interest to not allow the free market to run wild when it comes to essentials, like prescription drugs; I don’t think we can make the case that the same logic must apply – on moral/ethical grounds – to lattes.
Joey
But also, and most importantly, the article makes clear that the market is working here – it includes examples of large, medium and small coffee retailers opting to reduce or eliminate the surcharges for non-dairy milk, given that it’s less and less a niche product (with economies of scale coming on board throughout the manufacturing and supply chain). In other words, oat milk is more popular, it’s therefore getting cheaper for retailers to acquire, and they are in turn reducing their prices. Why would we want government policymakers or the courts to intervene when the desired outcome is already happening?
Tim S.
The lawsuit has certainly worked as a tactic for drawing attention to this issue, judging by the conversation here, even if it might not get far as a court case. If I were one of the people behind it, I would be very, very pleased right now.
Kate
Mark Côté: You have a character encoding problem. Different browsers bury this stuff in different places, but you want to make sure French is selected as one of your language options, for starters.
MarcG
Mark, if you tell me what operating system and version, and which browser and version you’re using I can look into it.
Nous sommes toutes Côté
Ian here, testing
Sonoma 14.7.1
Chrome 129.0.6668.90 (Official Build) (arm64)Côté
Wer mit Ungehuern kämpft mag zusehen daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird
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Kate
Weekend notes from CultMTL, CityCrunch, La Presse.
Also when not to drive in the tunnel.
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Kate
La Presse is predicting a record 6% rent hike when the guideline increase is announced next week. A bar graph shows the leap from 1.2% in 2020 to 4% last year.
DeWolf
That is insane. Last year’s 4% increase was based on large property tax hikes and high inflation. But inflation has dropped and at least in Montreal, tax hikes were minimal. What could possibly justify 6%?
jeather
Landlords want more money.
Kate
I think it’s an Overton window type of scenario. Everyone who has an ongoing lease will have seen how their rent compares to rent for a new place, and may be prepared to give the landlord a bit more cash now rather than tempt them to an eviction. It can even be subconscious.
bob
No, it is the government permitting landlords to rig the market in the middle of an artificially produced housing crisis. Pure rich boy cash grab.
Blork
At the risk of sounding like some “pro landlord” slob, it could also be related to the issue that in a housing crisis we need more rental units, but if rents are kept too low there is no incentive to create new rental units or to not sell off existing ones as condos and co-ops. So by making the prospect of “landlording” somewhat less unappealing, it might encourage more landlording.
Or not. What do I know? I’m not a landlord.
jeather
A new building is not limited in rent increases for the first 5 years, so you’ve got quite a while to set rental prices high enough before you need to follow the guidelines.
CE
There’s also the fact that buildings cost quite a bit more than they did even 5 years ago. There’s a certain expectation that rental income is going to cover X amount of the mortgage. Eventually, the market rate (ie, the amount charged for an apartment in a new building) and the amount charged on an established lease is not going to line up at all. It would all work itself out if wages increased at the same rate as cost of living but that’s not happening for most people.
I increasingly feel like our current rent prices are simply going back to “normal.” We look back at the 70s to early 2000s as a time when rents were affordable and that’s how it’s supposed to be. In fact, rents have always been very expensive and working people have always had trouble paying them. Just look back at the literature of the time, Bonheur D’occasion is mostly a book about trying to find an affordable apartment, Many of Michel Tremblay’s books detail how families crushed as many people into apartments as possible to be able to pay the rent. I don’t see a path to how we’re going to go back to post-industrialization, post-referundum, post-suburbanization rental prices in the city again, at least not in the near future.
Kate
CE: but is there a normal? One of the best things the old PQ did for Quebec was to establish the old Régie du logement. (Well, that and pass laws and call referendums that persuaded people to leave Quebec, thus lowering property values for a generation.) They passed the law that banned deposits on apartments: I can only vaguely remember older relatives talking about a time when getting apartments involved having to pay key money to get access. This kind of thing was made illegal and it was all good.
This whole thing is adjustable by policy, as bob suggests above. There are benefits to capitalism in having the working class worried and scared. We’re living them.
Ian
Landlords and rent-seeking are nothing new. Just look at the Monopoly board game … and know that it was in fact stolen by Parker Brothers from Georgists.
What are Georgists?
“Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource that is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value, arguing that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (such as on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen’s dividend.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
In my opinion, shared by some others, rent-seeking behaviour like subscriptions replacing purchases, landlords engaging in price-fixing, and property speculation in all forms are the core basis of many of the economic evils of modern western society.
Bert
“Where does the assumption come from that businesses must sell a product at a set price because you want them to?”
Real estate and construction costs rise as the market dictates. Rents, who depend on real estate and construction costs rise by a relation to inflation.
CE
@Kate: I don’t think there’s ever a “normal” in the real estate market, it fluctuates in weird ways but I’d say that rents have been “unaffordable” for a longer time than they’ve been “affordable” so unaffordable seems to be the natural (albeit undesirable for much of the population) state of things.
Ian
Gender equality is “historically abnormal”. Most children living to adulthood is “historically abnormal”. Having most of your teeth past 30 years old is “historically abnormal”.
You can see where U’m going with this, I hope.
Chris
Bert, that exact quote from the other thread came to my mind too!
I can’t imagine any mom & pop wanting to be a landlord these days, so many constraints, so much risk, so much hassle. People will just put their money elsewhere instead of being a landlord. So we’ll end up with only corporate landlords, like Blackrock. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.
Kate
Chris, my landlords are a mom and pop, and by virtue of being careful who they rent to, and looking after the building (maintenance, not radical renovations), they seem to be doing OK. As far as I know, they own one other building, a few blocks away, where they live, so they’re not slumlords. There must be a lot of people like this, around here.
Chris
Kate, how long have they been doing it? Ask them it they would start today.
Ian
Didn’t take long to make the jump from “imagine” to asserting your theory.
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