Canada

Last October, cabinet minister François-Philippe Champagne joined the CBC’s Rosemary Barton to discuss what the government billed as a series of new measures to stabilize the spiraling price of groceries. Even with this somewhat conservative framing onhand (“stabilizing” prices, it should go without saying, isn’t the same thing as actually lowering them) Champagne was remarkably evasive — repeatedly implying that the best solution to high grocery prices ultimately lay with consumers.

“If you ask me, what’s going to have the most impact,” he told Barton, “is really if we as consumers… where we decide to spend our dollars… that’s going to have the most impact on them [major grocery and supermarket chains] responding to the needs of Canadians.” A few moments later, the minister took this absurd premise even further, suggesting that the only real power the federal government has at its disposal with regard to inflated food costs was the ability to get supermarket giants on the phone: “Obviously we have soft power [as the] government because you call them and they come… but then it’s really an appeal to all the consumers out there, all of us, to say ‘listen, let’s watch each of them and let’s direct our dollars to the one that is giving us the best value for our money.’”

Barton, to her credit, wasn’t having it, replying with the question probably at the top of mind for many viewers: “Okay, but then why are you needed at all?”