People are fed up with Loblaw stores’ rising prices. Would a boycott accomplish anything?

It may very well have started with a tweet about a $37 package of chicken breasts. Or it could have been the $10 birch sticks.

The $9 butter didn’t help, or $30 for Feta cheese — allegedly twice the price a competitor was charging for the same product.

Whatever may have been the social media tipping point, a lot of people are angry about high prices in grocery stores, Loblaw brands in particular. Throw in shrinkflation, skimpflation and greedflation, and now a growing group of people online is calling for a boycott.

“I think a lot of people have very little faith in our political leaders to actually hold corporations accountable for the positions they are putting Canadians in,” said Emily Johnson, a mental health and addictions worker in Milton, Ont., who runs a quickly growing Reddit community called “Loblaws is out of control.”

“People feel voting with their dollar is the best way of showing companies that they’ve had enough,” Johnson told CBC News.

In a post last month, she and the other moderators of the subreddit encouraged its 45,000 members to start boycotting Loblaw and Loblaw-owned stores, such as Superstore and No Frills, in May. The movement has gained traction on other social media platforms like X, formerly Twitter, and TikTok.

“Canadians are facing a cost-of-living crisis, and grocers are a major contributor to this. Vulnerable populations such as seniors, persons with disabilities, and those on fixed incomes are left further behind,” the post reads: https://www.reddit.com/r/loblawsisoutofcontrol/comments/1bff9rm/boycott/

For those looking to participate in the sub boycott:

We are boycotting Loblaw and Loblaw owned stores for the entire month of May 2024 (obviously you can boycott past this point in time)

*  We are asking for a reduction in prices by 15%

* We are asking Loblaw remove "member only pricing" where customers are forced to sign up for a PC optimum card in order to receive sale prices

* If shopping is taking place at Loblaw stores, we are focusing on purchasing loss leaders

Loblaw is a massive company, extending into groceries — where it has nearly a third of national sales — as well as pharmacy, health and beauty, apparel, general merchandise, financial services and wireless mobile products and services.

In terms of grocery stores, there’s Loblaws, Atlantic Superstore, Dominion, Maxi, No Frills, Provigo Le Marché, Valu-Mart, Real Canadian Superstore, Wholesale Club, Your Independent Grocer, T&T and Zehrs.

|Read more https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaws-boycott-canada-1.7164506| cbc.ca/news/business/loblaws-b…

#cdnpoli #boycott #Loblaws #BoycottLoblaws #PriceGouging

Now that bird flu is spreading among cows, scientists worry where H5N1 will jump next

On March 25, American officials published an urgent announcement: Dairy cows in Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico were falling sick.

The cows had low appetites, and produced less milk than normal. Some farms also discovered wild bird carcasses on their grounds. Tests on a cow throat swab and raw milk samples all confirmed an unusual finding: for the first time, cattle were catching a dangerous form of bird flu.

Within days, highly pathogenic avian flu — a type of influenza A known as H5N1 — was identified in at least a dozen herds across six states, from Texas in the south, up to Michigan and Idaho on the Canadian border.

Louise Moncla, an avian influenza researcher and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was stunned.

“The overwhelming feeling that all of us have is that this is mostly just incredibly strange,” she said. “To our knowledge, I’ve never seen a cow be infected with any influenza A viruses.”

But the curveball wasn’t entirely unexpected. And it may be a harbinger of more species-jumps to come, including the rising possibility of H5N1 appearing in pigs — which could offer it a new route to better adapt to infect humans, inching the world closer to a bird flu pandemic.

Sporadic human cases — and deaths — are also occurring around the world. The second-ever human infection in the U.S. was reported just days ago in Texas, in an individual with mild symptoms who’d had direct exposure to cattle. |Read more https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/avian-flu-h5n1-cow-outbreaks-1.7162626| cbc.ca/news/health/avian-flu-h…

#cdnpoli #health #environment #disease #virus #H1N1 #influenza A #human danger #infectious diseases

‘Starlight tour’: Mi’kmaq fisher allegedly dumped without boots or phone feared death

HALIFAX – Hours into a barefoot trek in the middle of the night along a highway in rural Nova Scotia, stranded without a phone, Mi’kmaq fisher Kevin Hartling says he and his friend felt that if they stopped walking they might die.

Hartling, who is from Membertou First Nation, and Blaise Sylliboy, from Eskasoni First Nation, say that last week they were detained by federal fisheries officers for fishing near Shelburne, N.S. The two men from Cape Breton say that at around 1 a.m., they were left at a gas station far from home without footwear or cellphones and ended up walking for about six hours before they used a borrowed phone to get through to a friend, who picked them up.

“It’s basically a starlight tour, ” Hartling said in an interview Wednesday, referring to a practice where police in Canada have taken vulnerable Indigenous people to a secluded location and left them to find their way home, sometimes in freezing conditions. “That’s what was going through my mind the whole time …. If we stop moving, we’re going to die. If we go and just sit somewhere to rest and fall asleep, we’re dead.”

Hartling, 29, and Sylliboy, 25, were apprehended in the late evening on March 26 as they fished for baby eels, known as elvers. They say three fisheries officers put them into a vehicle and confiscated their phones and hip waders before leaving them at a gas station about a 45-minute drive from where they had been fishing.

The pair said when they were dropped off, they asked the DFO officers if they could have supervised access to their cellphones to write down contact information, or cut the feet off the waders so they wouldn’t have to walk barefoot, and Hartling said they were turned down.

“They said: ‘No. That’s not our problem,”‘ Hartling said. Sylliboy gave a similar account in a Facebook post and during remarks at a protest Tuesday. |Read more https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/starlight-tour-mi-kmaq-fisher-allegedly-dumped-without-boots-or-phone-feared-death-1.6832346| atlantic.ctvnews.ca/starlight-…

#nspoli #Mi‘kmaq #StarlightTour #injustice #law #indigenous #treatment #cruel #inhumane #environment #politics

Facebook Really, Really Doesn’t Want You to Read This One Story

Facebook’s content-moderation calls often leave people struggling to figure out what’s off limits, but for most of Thursday a Kansas newsroom had no trouble discerning what Meta’s flagship social network found unacceptable: the entirety of its work.

“This morning, sometime between 8:20 and 8:50 a.m. Thursday, Facebook removed all posts linking to Kansas Reflector’s website,” a post on that Topeka-based site explained Thursday afternoon. “This move not only affected Kansas Reflector’s Facebook page, where we link to nearly every story we publish, but the pages of everyone who has ever shared a story from us.”

The notifications Facebook sent to readers after removing their posts sharing Reflector stories falsely suggested violations of its cybersecurity policies: “It looks like you tried to gather sensitive information, or shared malicious software,” read one such note as shared by a reader as a screenshot posted on Bluesky.

The Thursday story by Reflector Editor-in-Chief Sherman Smith and Opinion Editor Clay Wirestone said this bulk deletion happened hours after the site published an opinion piece from filmmaker Dave Kendall headlined “When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet’s future.”

Kendall’s piece recounted how Facebook rejected his attempt to pay to boost a post about his climate-change documentary Hot Times in the Heartland because it “doesn’t comply with our Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.” |Read more https://www.pcmag.com/news/facebook-really-really-doesnt-want-you-to-read-this-one-story| pcmag.com/news/facebook-really…

#facebook #climate-change #policy #right-wing #kansas #news #blocked