This week, the federal government will return a small portion of some Canadians’ hard-earned tax dollars to their bank accounts. The Liberals are calling the move a one-time “Grocery Rebate,” supposedly meant to make up for higher food prices caused by inflation.
However, in practice, the payment has no real connection to grocery prices or the soaring cost of living. It’s essentially a GST/HST credit top up, branded to make it look like the Liberals aren’t entirely tone deaf.
Most Canadians won’t be eligible for what little financial relief the rebate offers
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This week, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland went to a Rabba Fine Foods in Toronto to officially announce the launch of the Grocery Rebate, a one-time payout of as much as $500 to enable Canadians to buy groceries. The announcement had a somewhat celebratory air, which critics noted wasn’t a good thing since an incredible 11 million Canadians will meet the low-income criteria for the rebate.

Rest assured that if Canadians were ever to break faith with our leadership, a Poilievre-led government would not think twice of stripping Canadians of their rights to iodine or shoes.
Dear Diary: 'I know that the Grocery Rebate's one-time payment of $387 can be a transformative amount of money for a family in need'
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The Canada Revenue Agency will be issuing the long-promised 'grocery rebate' payments to eligible Canadians on July 5. The food-inflation focused affordability measure is set to roll out to approximately 11 million low- and modest-income Canadians. Here's how much money those eligible can expect...
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More than one quarter of Canadians received government payments this week to buy the most basic necessity, food. If anything speaks to a failure of the Liberal government to make life better for Canadians, it is that 11 million people, in a country of 40 million, received a grocery rebate payment.
It should be shocking to all that the government feels that 27.5% of the population is deemed in need of help to buy groceries. The figure is actually higher when you consider that many of those receiving the payments have children or other dependents.
“Inflation in Canada fell to 3.4 per cent in May — down from 4.4 per cent in April, and down from a high of 8.1 per cent last June,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said while making her announcement of the grocery rebate Wednesday.
What Freeland didn’t mention was that while core inflation was down in May,
Statistics Canada still shows that food inflation at 9% on average with some key items even higher. Cooking oils and edible fats were up 20.3%, bakery products were up 15% and cereal products up 13.6%.
To make matters worse, mortgage costs were up 29.9% in May compared to a year earlier.
More than a quarter of the Canadian population needing help to buy groceries is not a sign of success.
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