The other cost of living

We live in interesting times. Canada's new normal is a country where everything is under the microscope. Tariffs from our largest trading partner, a stubborn productivity gap and a cost-of-living squeeze have forced governments to question old habits. It’s long overdue.

Nowhere is that clearer than in how Canada builds. The Building Canada Act, passed last year, created a Major Projects Office to fast-track projects in the national interest. Good. But governments have become laser-focused on two things: the cost of living for consumers and the cost of building for major projects. What they keep missing is the cost of doing business for the small businesses that hold our communities together.

That is a serious issue. When a local convenience store can't cover its rising costs, the owner has three choices: raise prices, cut staff hours or close the doors. Every one of those outcomes lands on consumers. You cannot fix affordability for families while ignoring the businesses that serve them.

Barriers to build, barriers to do business

If governments can clear the way for a port or a pipeline, they can clear the way for the corner store. Convenience stores are closing at an average of 1.5 a day. In many smaller communities, that store is the only game in town. When it closes, there's no plan B.

It’s hard to do business in Canada and harder still behind the counter of a convenience store. Nearly every product category we sell comes with its own rulebook, its own licence and inspector and many of those rules change at every provincial border. What a store can sell, where it can display it, who can buy it and how it is taxed differs from one province to the next. A retailer operating in three provinces runs three different compliance regimes. So much for one Canadian economy.

Then there are three front-line challenges.

1. Contraband is out of control. Illegal product now makes up more than 38% of Canada's tobacco market and in Ontario as many as 3 out of 5 cigarettes may be illegal. Illicit vapes and nicotine pouches are sold online, on social media and out of unlicensed shops. Do those sellers check ID or collect taxes? Of course not. The licensed retailer who checks ID loses the sale and the milk and coffee that came with it, to organized crime.

Want to see where this ends? Look at Australia. At our Summit, Theo Foukkare, chief executive officer of the Australian Association of Convenience Stores, told us organized crime now supplies 80% of the tobacco consumed there. His verdict: "You could argue that market's gone." But where authorities shut down illegal storefronts, legal tobacco volumes recovered by 44%. Enforcement works. Canada still has time to prove it.