EDITORIAL: Avi Lewis and the imaginary war on spying celery stalks

If you happened to be wandering through the produce aisle of your local grocery store this week and noticed the celery was still $1.70—the same $1.70 the person in front of you paid, and the same $1.70 the person behind you will pay—congratulations. You have just witnessed the crushing mundanity of reality.

And reality, it turns out, is the one thing the New Democrats cannot abide.

During his debut press conference disaster—a masterclass in muzzling his own MPs and looking hopelessly out of his depth—NDP leader Avi Lewis has chosen as his signature cause a villain so elusive it may not actually exist: the grocery store price tag that spies on you.

This week, NDP House Leader Don Davies introduced a motion in Parliament demanding a ban on surveillance pricing. The dystopian pitch goes like this: digital price tags on store shelves are secretly talking to your cell phone, scanning your search history, noticing you Googled "baby fever" at 3 a.m., and—sinister music cue—jacking up the price of infant Tylenol, just for you.

It is a terrifying scenario. It is also one for which Lewis and the NDP have provided precisely zero evidence of occurring anywhere in Canada. Not a single documented case. Not one aggrieved shopper. Not even a suspiciously timed receipt.

The Liberals and Conservatives, in a rare moment of bipartisan clarity, voted the motion down. Good.

Manitoba's NDP government passed Bill 49, which bans personalized algorithmic pricing in both online retail and in-store electronic shelf labelling systems. It is a pre-emptive law, and Manitoba's own Finance Minister, Adrien Sala, admitted candidly that they have no evidence this practice is happening in their province. None. They are building a fence before the wolf shows up. Fine. Prudent, even.

But notice the difference: Manitoba did not push to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores. They banned it where the evidence says it might actually be happening—online.

And that is where the NDP's federal theatre collapses under the weight of its own dishonesty.

The real, documented issue of algorithmic price gouging exists in your browser, not in the meat aisle at Loblaws. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—which Lewis cited breathlessly—found that Instacart was charging different customers different prices for the same items from the same store. But here is the part Lewis conveniently left out: experts attribute those price variations to delivery zone differences, not personalized AI profiling of individual shoppers.

Manitoba understood this distinction. Their law was made to target the online checkout cart, where the data actually flows, and the algorithms actually adjust. The federal NDP, by contrast, chose to wage war on the self-checkout screen at Sobeys—a screen that displays the same price for celery whether you are a billionaire or an Oshawa House Café barista.

Avi Lewis himself admitted that this practice is not yet happening in Canada. His defence? “We can't wait until we inhabit a dystopian retail landscape.” This is the political equivalent of banning cars because they might rain next Thursday. It is governing by vibes. And it is a pattern.

The federal NDP is hemorrhaging support, watching progressive votes flee to a Liberal Party that suddenly remembers how to talk about affordability. They are polling in the low double digits. They have six MPs. Their new leader just spent his first press conference physically blocking his own foreign affairs critic from answering a question about Iran because he could not bear to share a microphone.

New Democrats are desperate for relevance, so they invented a crisis. They warn of spying price tags in grocery stores—something no Canadian has experienced, no regulator has found evidence of, and no shopper can verify—then they draft a motion they know will fail, hold a vote they know they will lose, and send out a fundraising email about how the corporate-owned Liberals and Conservatives refused to protect you from a problem that does not exist.

It is cynical. It is lazy. And it insults the intelligence of every Canadian who has ever looked at a shelf price and seen it match the sticker.

If the NDP wants to ban surveillance pricing, they should follow Manitoba’s lead and ban it where it is actually happening: online, in the algorithmic shadows of your Instacart order, where geography—not your browser history—might quietly inflate your bill. That would be evidence-based policy.

Canadians facing actual cost-of-living pressures deserve better than a party solving imaginary problems while real ones fester. The NDP may have traded Jagmeet Singh's designer suits for Avi Lewis's lecture-hall scolding, but the result is the same: a party more interested in how it looks fighting than what it is actually fighting for.

The price of celery at Walmart is the same. For everyone. Always has been.

The only thing being gouged here is our patience.

This piece was written and published by The Provincial Times Editorial Board and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times. Read our Content Policy here.