MPs 'running out of patience' amid fight with grocers even as price pressures ease: expert

Growth in the price of groceries slowed in January in tandem with a drop in the headline inflation rate, according to Statistics Canada, but a food expert says the fight between parliament and the country’s largest grocers is far from over.

The growth in prices for food purchased from stores last month declined to 3.4 per cent year-over-year, compared to 4.7 per cent in December, according to StatCan’s latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) reading.

“Things are easing for sure,” Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University told BNN Bloomberg in a Tuesday interview following the CPI release on Tuesday.

“If you talk to food companies, they are seeing the same thing; supply chains are much easier to manage right now, and margins are more predictable, so it's not surprising that we're seeing consumers benefiting.”