Need to Know: The Free Press is an independent media success story—but could it have happened in Canada? 

This kind of government intervention stomps out the cycle of creative destruction needed for innovation. By allowing an industry to adapt to new market landscapes, new competitors emerge and offer what the market is beckoning for. In the U.S., Bari Weiss and her team were able to do just that. The Free Press would never have climbed to such great success in Canada. The Free Press “treats its audience like adults.” They welcome disparate opinions and debate from people like Ben Shapiro and transgender activist Brianna Wu. Readers are encouraged to read opinions that enrage them and others that might buttress their pre-existing views. Either way, The Free Press wants its readership to be exposed to a buffet of opinions. Canadian regulators should follow suit: Treat Canadians like adults! Allow the ambitions of the new generation to challenge the existing media landscape. C-18 is a helicopter parent, smothering innovation, limiting news on social media, and suppressing journalistic entrepreneurship. Canada needs to get rid of it. Is Doug Ford really a “staunch fiscal conservative”? By Luke Smith, The Hub’s deputy editor No. State-run grocery stores are nothing but a silly Soviet fantasy By Dan Robertson, co-founder of ORB Advocacy and former CPC campaign strategist Most conservatives can agree that NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis is right about one thing: Canada’s grocery sector is too concentrated. Three companies control most of the market, and recent price-fixing scandals have eroded public trust. But his proposal for government-run grocery stores is a backward step toward bureaucratic inefficiency and reduced consumer choice. It revives a long-discredited idea: That government can out-shop, out-price, and out-manage the market. Running grocery stores is not like operating a public utility. It’s a brutally competitive, low-margin business dependent on efficiency, logistics, and constant responsiveness to consumer demand. To say the least, governments don’t do any of those things well. A state-run grocery chain would crowd out the very alternatives progressives claim to want, such as local co-ops, community grocers, and regional suppliers. Instead of empowering them, it would funnel capital and policy attention into a centralized bureaucracy that inevitably privileges uniformity over diversity and adaptability. And then there’s the cost. Launching and sustaining a national retail network would require billions in capital, ongoing subsidies, and an army of bureaucrats. State enterprises are notoriously prone to bureaucratic drag and mushrooming overheads. Even if prices were lower at first, taxpayers would pick up the difference. Politicizing food retail is dangerous. What gets stocked, who decides prices, which communities get stores—all would be filtered through partisan priorities. You may well ask, “Has command and control food retail been tried before?” Yes—disastrously. In the Soviet Union, the state controlled every aspect of food production and distribution. The result was perpetual shortage. Shoppers queued for hours only to find the shelves bare or stocked with goods nobody wanted. I doubt Lewis could find anyone who’s lived through that who’s anxious to repeat the experience. Lewis is right to take aim at corporate concentration. Canada’s grocery sector is a textbook example of an oligopoly. But his belief that the state can step into a retail supply chain and magically undercut private grocers is a fantasy. He should remember why those shops in Moscow were always empty.