Thank you very much, and thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today, in particular Mr. Littler, on behalf of Canada's grocery retailers.
It would have been nice to see some folks from those companies directly, just because some of the questions that members of the committee may have liked to ask would be best answered by folks who have a command of the details of the individual businesses. They have different business models, and are recording different profits against previous years. I hope maybe we'll be able to get into a little bit of that. Of course, it's always better to get it directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
The basic problem for many Canadians, as they try to understand the experience they're having at the grocery store.... They're going to buy their usual basket of goods, and some folks are having to put things back on the shelves. We've talked already today about the extent to which people are certainly looking at changing the composition of that basket in order to make their grocery shopping fit within their household budget in these difficult times.
As they're having that experience in the grocery store, we're often hearing reports in the news of higher profits by grocery chains, and higher dividends being paid out to their shareholders. Many large retailers are contemplating share buybacks now with the extra capital that they have on hand from the higher profits they've been making. I am using the word “profit” intentionally. It's not just that their revenues have gone up, as one would expect. If they have higher costs, and they have to pass that on to the customer, then you would expect them to have higher revenues, but not higher profits.
For Canadians who are trying to understand the news reports they're hearing about large grocery retailers posting record profits, and their shareholders enjoying record revenue from their shares, what is the explanation for that if not that some of these price increases are exceeding the increase in costs that grocery retailers are seeing?