Ban Surveillance Pricing Now
By Jenny Kwan, MP
Canadians are continuing to be gouged at the checkout—and most don't even realize how. The tech billionaires are conspiring with the grocery barons to pull the wool over the eyes of working Canadians and seniors living on fixed incomes. While families struggle with grocery bills and rent, retailers are quietly deploying a new tool: surveillance pricing. Your phone, your browsing history, your postal code, your past purchases—all of it gets fed into algorithms that calculate not the cost of a product, but what you specifically might be willing to pay for it. Honestly, it’s sick, twisted and totally unacceptable to Canadians when they find out about it.
Two people buying the same box of crackers might be paying two different prices. The only difference? What the computer thinks it can get away with charging each of them. This isn't some far-off dystopian scenario. It's happening right now. And it should make all of us angry.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents thousands of grocery and retail employees across the country, has already sounded the alarm bell. Their members are seeing these systems roll out in real time—pricing infrastructure designed to maximize extraction from customers, with no transparency and no accountability. These companies think they can do whatever they want if the government is willing to look the other way.
Think about what this does to the basic premise of shopping. You can't comparison shop if the price changes depending on who's looking. You can't make informed decisions if the numbers on the shelf are shifting to your data profile sitting in the cloud. The fundamental trust that holds markets together starts to erode.
It will be working families, seniors on fixed incomes, people in rural or underserved communities—anyone the algorithm identifies as having fewer options will be exploited. That's not a market - it’s price gouging, plain and simple. If Canadians knew this was on the menu, they could rightly reject it.
Manitoba's NDP government, under Premier Wab Kinew, has already moved to ban these practices—the first province in Canada to do so. Regulators in the U.S. and Europe are examining similar measures. The Competition Bureau here should be paying close attention.
The NDP believes Ottawa needs to act before this becomes the new normal. That's why our new leader, Avi Lewis, has called on the federal government to prohibit surveillance pricing, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores. If the government doesn’t act quickly, it will be too late to do anything about it.
This isn't about being anti-technology. It's about setting a clear boundary: personal data should not be weaponized to squeeze more money out of people who are already stretched thin.
Canadians deserve to know that the price on the tag is the price everyone pays. Not a number reverse-engineered to their data and credit history, sitting somewhere in the cloud. The government has to set some guardrails on technological innovation to protect consumers. Left to their own devices and logic, corporate giants will always come up short when there is profit to be made.
The affordability crisis demands action wherever we can find it. Stopping surveillance pricing in its tracks before it takes root needs to be a government priority.
