Photo illustration: The Walrus / The Canadian Press / Chris Young
Frustrated consumers are boycotting Loblaw in May just as the behemoth announced $13.58 billion in first-quarter revenue—a 4.5 percent bump from the year before. But refusing to shop at the company is easier said than done for many Canadians, as
As
, the executive director of McMaster University’s master of public policy, reminded us in her Substack newsletter, “Loblaw isn’t just a grocery company. It’s a company with diverse revenue streams that produce an ecosystem of financial assets.” That structure means that merely introducing competition in the grocery industry won’t be enough to dislodge Loblaw’s dominance. In another of its recommendations, the Competition Bureau got at a concern that transcends the grocery industry and touches on the threat mega corporations pose when they have a hand in several industries at once—particularly when those industries intersect. The bureau suggested the government “limit the use of property controls that make it difficult for new grocery stores to open.” [Read more]A recent episode of Frontburner asked: When did the mainstream hatred for Prime Minister Trudeau start? Back in 2016, Brian Busby looked at how the Conservative Party allowed nastiness to flourish on their Facebook page:
Since last fall’s election loss, the Conservative Party of Canada’s Facebook page has come to look increasingly like The Rebel. Visitors vent, writing that immigrants and twenty-something pot smokers stole the election. Anti-Quebec rants are frequent. Comments are left that promote Western separatism, while conspiracy theories abound: Justin Trudeau is a Muslim convert, Mick Jagger is his father, and he and wife Sophie Grégoire are bipolar. The party sets the tone, seemingly stuck in the attack mode that cost them the election. [Read more]
A very stinky scandal unfolded at the Good Food Awards when a vegan cheese was crowned a finalist, upsetting dairy diehards. Many were left wondering what makes a cheese a cheese. Fortunately, Nicole Schmidt explored the hot (and gooey) topic in “Let’s Brie Real: Can Vegan Cheese Pass the Taste Test?”:
Dairy cheese owes its texture and meltiness to casein, a protein found exclusively in animal milks. During digestion, it’s converted into casomorphins, which can attach to opiate receptors in the brain and release dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter associated with all of life’s most delectable things, including sex and chocolate. In 2017, Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, went as far as to call cheese “dairy crack” because of its addictive qualities. Without casein, vegan cheese, for many years, seemed destined for disappointment. But a handful of companies have started to figure out how to replicate the most attractive qualities of casein. [Read more]
“Everybody is looking for the magic tree” as cities grapple with climate change, Grist reports. Which will survive the initial plantings and actually thrive in urban environments? Mira Miller reported on a Manitoba community that’s managed to boost its canopy:
In 2017, Shawn Dias, Morden’s director of parks and urban forestry, led a project to catalogue and analyze all trees on municipal properties, assigning a concrete dollar value to each one and describing the benefits they provided. His goal, he told me over Zoom, was to demonstrate to city council that “what we have here is not just nice to look at.” Trees, he says, are “assets within the city—no different than a fire hydrant or a sidewalk or a water main or a sewer.” Except that, unlike most built infrastructure, trees offer more value as they age. And to get the most out of them, cities need to invest more in their upkeep. … Ever since, his department has been shielded from budget cuts and has had a bigger voice at the city planning table. [Read more]
The Walrus has received 19 nominations at the National Magazine Awards, four nominations at the Digital Publishing Awards, and two of our long-form articles, both uncovering predatory sexual misconduct (one about a megachurch, the other about the St. John’s Police Department) have also been nominated for awards. Congrats to all the nominees!