Loblaw’s decision to freeze prices on all No Name items until January labelled a ‘PR strategy’ | CBC News: Canada’s biggest grocery chain is freezing prices on all its No Name products for the next three months.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. — which operates such grocery stores as Loblaws, Zehrs, No Frills and Real Canadian Superstore — says it has locked in prices of the popular house brand, which includes more than 1,500 grocery items, until Jan. 31, 2023.

Grocery chains have come under fire for being seen to be making excessive profits at a time when consumers are stretched thin due to rising inflation.

A few years ago, grocery chains including Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro and others took a reputational hit with shoppers when they were found by Canada’s competition watchdog to have been colluding to fix the price of bread and other baked goods for years.

Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has made grocery store profits a rallying call, noting that the major Canadian chains have taken in $2.3 billion in profit so far this year.

Loblaw’s profits have indeed risen of late, with the company revealing net earnings of $387 million in its most recently completed quarter. That’s up by $12 million from this time last year and by $121 million from the same period in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Don’t be fossil fooled: a cleaner energy future is a cheaper energy future – Environmental Defence: As if two years of a pandemic weren’t enough, we now have to deal with an affordability crisis. This has been exhausting and stressful for most of us. In an attempt to exploit our concerns, Canada’s oil and gas industry would like us to believe this terrible inflation means we need to throw all caution to the wind, forget about climate action and double down on fossil fuel production. This could not be further from the truth. Not only is investing in more fossil fuels not a solution to today’s problems, it actually will lock us into more turbulence for decades.

Canadian home energy costs to spike by up to 100 per cent on average this winter: analyst:

Some consumers could see their bills rise by as much as 300 per cent
while others could see minimal increases, but the overall trend is
clear, says EnergyRates.ca founder Joel MacDonald.

“In general, Canadians join the global community in seeing 

exceptionally high electricity and natural gas bills,“ MacDonald told
CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Friday. “There are a few provinces
where some of those increases are muted by the structure of the
marketplace, but in general the answer is very high energy bills.”

Most of what will drive up the cost of home energy this winter is the 

rising price of natural gas, which generates 8.5 per cent of Canada’s
electricity.

COVID-19 hospitalizations on the rise in Canada:
More than two-and-a-half years into the pandemic and hospitals across
the country continue to grapple with the effects of COVID-19.

According to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada,
between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15 2022, Canadian hospitals saw an average of
about 4,700 hospitalizations a day due to COVID-19. During the same
period last year, the average had only been 2,000 per day.

Among the hardest hit provinces, <a href="https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/quebec-covid-19-hospitalizations-rise-as-health-officials-urge-residents-to-get-boosted-1.6107504" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Quebec</a>

reported over 2,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations for the first-time since
August as the province’s minister of health urged residents to get their
boosters for added protection.

<a href="https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-s-top-doctor-warns-of-more-recommendations-to-public-on-masking-ahead-of-difficult-winter-1.6107774" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ontario health officials</a>

have also reported similar trends as hospitalizations rose to 1,629
this week marking the highest number of COVID-19 related hospital
occupancies since May 4 of this year. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are
also seeing increased hospitalizations among older patients between the
ages of 70 and 80-years-old.

Infectious disease experts have previously reported an uptick in 

COVID-19 cases was likely to happen in the fall as the influenza season
approaches. However, a myriad of factors like emerging variants, other
viruses and health concerns have put a strain on hospitals.

Poilievre’s Assumed Brilliance: Pierre Poilievre has never shown himself to be an impressive politician.

That
is not saying he won’t win the 2025 election (although I am obviously
on the record with the view he won’t), but nothing he has ever done has
suggested he’s a good politician. He was gifted a seat that the united
Tories were always going to win in the old Carlton-Nepean, he then
sprinted to the safer seat in the 2015 redistribution, and then waited
till every other plausible Conservative leadership candidate had either
lost, served as leader, or decided to retire, and beat the worst field
in recent Canadian political history for a genuinely contested
leadership. (Okay, maybe Trudeau beat a worse one, depending on how you rate Garneau, which I don’t.)

Unlike
Trudeau, who won in Papineau from a Bloc incumbent and not, as you
would have thought a Trudeau would, by waiting out Irwin Cotler in Mount
Royal, Poilievre has never faced a particularly tough election battle,
and his leadership campaign showed nothing in terms of ability to do
high level politics well. That he won isn’t impressive in itself when
the field was so fucking useless.

His sign-ups seem like they’d be
impressive, but as I keep harping on, ability to get a lot of activists
engaged is not the same as ability to win a broader electorate, as
Jeremy “Biggest Labour Party Membership Ever” Corbyn showed
consistently. And yet, there’s this constant refrain from that
godforsaken podcast whose name I cannot say and a lot of people on
progressive twitter that we can’t “underestimate” Poilievre.

Here’s a counterpoint: Why are y’all bending over so fucking backwards to overestimate him?