The Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, recently introduced a motion to direct senior civil servants to prepare a report outlining how the city could use its legal authority to ban surveillance pricing for grocery sales and delivery within city limits. To be clear, no one can point to an example of surveillance pricing actually being used in the context of grocery sales in Toronto, but even the idea is unpopular enough that Toronto City Council passed the motion unanimously without amendments. Two major grocery chains told TorontoToday that they do not engage in the practice.
Mayor Chow’s letter explicitly cites Manitoba’s ban on the practice earlier this year, but what is not clear is whether Toronto has the legal authority to enact such a ban, especially given the Ontario premier’s opposition to such legislation at the provincial level.
I guess we’ll see what the Toronto bureaucracy comes back with next year, and how the Canadian prime minister’s own signals against surveillance pricing will affect the situation, if at all.