Worthwhile Canadian initiatives
I swear I’m not trying to put you to sleep.
(Honk if you’re old or sophisticated enough — or both! — to know why the headline to this post is hilarious. Let’s get together and rant about the good old days together, okay?)
A big old fucking yes to this bill, removing restrictive covenants that protect grocery stores from competition:
Manitoba is on track to become the first jurisdiction in Canada to have true competition in the grocery sector, with 23 property controls already submitted for removal in response to the Property Controls for Grocery Stores and Supermarkets Act (Bill 31), which passed earlier this year, Premier Wab Kinew and Public Service Delivery Minister Mintu Sandhu announced today.
“Our government is committed to making life more affordable for you and your family,” said Kinew. “Manitobans can’t take on the big grocery chains on their own, but we can. This is just one tool we are using to aggressively work toward affordability in this province. There will be more measures to come, but the early success of Bill 31 shows we are on the right track when it comes to lowering prices for Manitoba families.”
The Property Controls for Grocery Stores and Supermarkets Act, passed in June 2025, prevents grocery stores from creating new restrictive covenants or exclusivity clauses. A six-month period was provided for grocery stores to register a property control if they believe it should be maintained or to amend controls to remove the grocery-related component. Any grocery-related property controls that were not registered are considered void.
Restrictive covenants are used by big businesses to limit similar businesses from setting up shop in close proximity to their own place of business. It’s not the only reason grocery prices have gone up, for sure. But it’s one thing that restricts competition and as we all know, protecting businesses from competition has never led to lower prices for consumers in the entire history of ever. So, good for Kinew and his government for taking that on, and can we clone the Manitoba premier already?
On a completely different note, you may not have noticed it as much in the MOU Brouhaha or the Ma Xmas-Party Double-Dipping Kerfuffle (such excitement around here, I tell you), but the federal government has introduced Bill C-16 which, among other good things, would make femicide a first-degree murder. So that’s another big old fucking yes from me.
I would go even further to protect victims of intimate partner violence — overwhelmingly those are women and children, so for simplicity’s sake I will write accordingly, but that is not to deny that men can also be victims of intimate partner violence. I would create a new offence for coercive control and have that handled in special courts with special judges who are trained in the matter and have powers to investigate in addition to adjudicative powers.
France has a model that can serve as inspiration. The “juge d’instruction” is a magistrate who conducts criminal investigations and rules on same. In the system I have in mind, delays would be very short, so as to avoid people having clouds of suspicion above their heads for years.
In such a streamlined and specialized system, coercive control would not be a criminal offence. First of all because in criminal court, you have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and as we know only too well, in cases of intimate partner violence that does not include physical abuse documented by medical professionals or police officers, that’s almost always impossible to accomplish and abusers walk free and continue to re-offend.
Coercive control should be a non-criminal offence, and someone should be found liable if it is proven on the balance of probabilities — i.e. if it’s more true than not. With judges who participate in the investigation, and procedures simple enough that presumed victims don’t go bankrupt paying for lawyers.
Of course, in such a system, you wouldn’t want punishment to include jail time or indeed anything unduly harsh because the corollary of making an offence easier to prove is that punishment has to be lighter. Someone found to have engaged in coercive control could be punished by civil penalties and maybe restraining orders. But someone found to have engaged in coercive control more than once — say, three times? Then it could become a criminal offence that, if proven beyond a reasonable doubt after a fair trial, might be punishable by jail time.
Oh, and one more thing: There should be very serious punishment for anyone knowingly making false accusations, especially those made in bad faith. Wanting to protect victims of intimate partner violence should not be an excuse for taking revenge on someone who may have been a jerk but not abusive.
Such a system would go a long way towards protecting victims before abusers go from coercive control to physical violence.