Indulge me in a radical legal proposal: criminal law should apply to the rich and the poor. I know, shocking. Billions in the bank should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card, but somehow, for the ultra-wealthy, the law is less of a system of justice and more of a mildly annoying suggestion.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, it’s not just that every billionaire is a policy failure. It’s worse than that. Every billionaire is a criminal. And we’ve known this for centuries! In 1835, French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote, “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out because it was properly executed.” And here’s the thing – billionaires no longer need to properly execute their crimes. They can be caught red-handed, stuffing their pockets like a cartoon villain, and still, nothing happens.
This grim reality plays out every single day in Canada’s overburdened courts. What’s the bigger crime: the rich getting richer by systematically looting the poor or a hungry, desperate person stealing food to survive? Only one of these people will be arrested, prosecuted, and possibly jailed. Do you want to guess who? (Hint: It’s not the guy with a yacht and a private island.)
Every year, thousands of Canadians are charged with minor shoplifting offences. And I’ve represented hundreds of hungry people charged with stealing food – because, apparently, the actual crime isn’t that they’re starving; it’s that they dared to take a sandwich without a platinum credit card. And the sheer waste of it all is staggering. Each case burns through thousands of dollars in police resources, court time, prosecutors, legal aid, and even jail costs. And here’s the kicker – the stolen food? It gets thrown away.
So not only are we hemorrhaging public money to prosecute poverty, but we’ve also essentially turned the justice system into the private security force and debt collection agency for billionaire grocery store owners. Because God forbid someone takes a $5 granola bar but Loblaw price-gouging people out of basic nutrition? That’s just “market forces.”
And make no mistake, while the court dockets are full of the poor, the billionaire crowd is getting away with financial murder.
Take the great Canadian Bread Cartel – yes, a literal price-fixing conspiracy that sounds like it should involve shady figures in back alleys but instead features grocery executives in a corporate boardroom. Canada Bread colluded with grocery giants, including Loblaws, to illegally raise the price of bread by as much as $1.50 per loaf over at least 16 years, siphoning an estimated $4.9 billion from Canadian consumers. Canada Bread agreed to pay a $50 million fine for this grand heist – less a punishment, more of a slightly inconvenient parking ticket. Meanwhile, Loblaw was granted full immunity.
And while you or I would be charged criminally for shoplifting a loaf of bread, not one executive from this corrupt flour syndicate faced actual jail time. Because when regulatory fines and civil lawsuits don’t deter billionaires, they simply become a cost of doing business. At some point, we need to consider sending executives and their corporate masters to jail.
But apparently, Loblaw didn’t learn its lesson. A CBC investigation uncovered that the grocery chain overcharged customers for meat. Not just once, not in one rogue location – across 80 stores. And when they were caught? They issued a half-hearted apology, claiming they sold a “small number” of underweight meat products. Ah, yes, because CBC just happened to investigate the exact stores at the same time when this was happening. Total coincidence!
And yet, Loblaw conveniently failed to explain when this “mistake” started, how long it lasted, why 80 stores all had conveniently broken scales, why it ignored Canadian Food Inspection Agency warnings about weight discrepancies, and just how much money it pocketed from this “oopsie.”
Meanwhile, while Canadian grocers were fleecing Canadians at the checkout, they were raking in record profits. As journalist Jeremy Appel reported, in the first quarter of 2024 alone, Loblaw made $13.6 billion in total revenue – $9.4 billion from food. That’s 69 percent of their earnings from, you know, the basic necessities they keep price-gouging. And the best part? Shareholders pocketed $460 million in profit – a 10 percent increase from 2023. Meanwhile, 18 percent of Canadian households face food insecurity.
So, while Loblaws, owned by the mega-rich Galen Weston and their merry band of grocery robber barons, live the high life off stolen bread and underweight meat, ordinary Canadians struggle to afford basic nutrition.
And lest you think billionaires only steal from consumers, let’s not forget that being rich does not mean rejecting government handouts. In 2019, the Liberal government handed $12 million to Loblaw to subsidize – wait for it – energy-efficient refrigerators and freezers. That’s right. While working, Canadians were told to tighten their belts, and taxpayers footed the bill for Galen Weston’s fancy new fridges.
So, here’s the reality: the poor get prosecuted for survival, while the rich get publicly funded bonuses for their next yacht upgrade. If Canada wants a justice system worthy of the name, then billionaires shouldn’t just be facing the Competition Bureau – they should be facing a judge. Because if we’re throwing the book at the starving, we should at least consider cracking it open on the people robbing the entire country.