Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

Project overview

• Project Hammer compiles historical Canadian grocery prices from major chains and releases them publicly (e.g., SQLite dump) to enable academic and legal analysis and, ideally, increase competition and deter collusion.
• Some commenters are enthusiastic about the transparency and potential for consumer tools (price trackers, comparison apps, community buying, etc.).

Collusion vs. competition

• Several point to Canada’s proven bread price‑fixing scandal and coordinated “hero pay” and seasonal price freezes as evidence that grocers can and do collude.
• Others stress that similar or synchronized prices can arise from healthy competition, common suppliers, price‑matching, or shared cost shocks; correlation alone is not proof of collusion.
• There is concern that highly transparent, real‑time price data can actually facilitate tacit collusion: firms track each other and quickly match price hikes instead of undercutting.

Evidence and international parallels

• Examples cited from Austria and Norway show near‑simultaneous, identical price moves across chains; some see this as damning, others attribute it to shared suppliers or signaling.
• Norwegian and Austrian cases illustrate both explicit collusion findings and suspicion where proof is lacking.

Limits of price‑data analysis

• Antitrust practitioners in the thread argue that detecting collusion from price series alone is extremely hard; robust cases usually require internal documents, communications, or “motel‑meeting” evidence.
• Grocery markets have thousands of products, regional pricing, promotions, and volatile input costs, increasing false‑positive risk if one just hunts for suspicious patterns.
• They encourage treating the dataset as a “hammer” that enables hypothesis generation and public scrutiny, not as a standalone detector of illegality.

Canadian market structure & broader causes

• Many characterize Canada as oligopoly‑heavy (grocers, telecom, banks), with weak competition policy, frequent consolidation, and some protectionist or supply‑management regimes (dairy, poultry).
• Debate over food inflation: some emphasize rising gross margins and corporate profits; others point to monetary policy, fuel costs, war, COVID disruptions, and concentrated suppliers as primary drivers.
• There is broad agreement that grocers are part of the problem, but disagreement on how large a part compared with macro policy and upstream consolidation.