By Rhiannon McGrath
Vancouver’s Downtown-Eastside residents were shocked to hear at the end of 2025 that the long-running family-owned grocery store Sunrise Market was put up for sale for $4.5 million.
With Vancouver’s city council, led by mayor Ken Sim’s right-wing ABC Vancouver, gutting the long-held protections in the Downtown-Eastside Oppenheimer Official Development Plan against market housing, it is likely that one of the only affordable grocery stores in the impoverished area will be flattened and replaced by unaffordable condominiums.
Food monopolies like Loblaws and Sobeys continue to report record profits, while working people across Canada find it increasingly difficult to cope with ballooning grocery bills. With the sector lacking any incentive to stop squeezing its customers, the idea of publicly owned grocery stores is increasingly seen as the only logical answer to growing food deserts.
The Vancouver Food Justice Coalition has called for Sunrise to be considered as a “publicly owned food market, owned by all of us and no different than our publicly run community centres, schools or hospitals.”
In his winning bid for mayor of New York, self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani pledged city-run grocery stores in every borough. Around the world, from Mexico to Sri Lanka to various American states, publicly owned grocery stores are a common sight.
Since the news about Sunrise Market, Vancouver municipal political parties OneBC and the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) have endorsed using public funds to buy grocery stores to fight the cost-of-living crisis. In response, mayor Ken Sim said to CTV that “the city’s job is filling potholes… not selling tomatoes. This is a ridiculous policy that I do not support.”
In fact, most Canadian provinces already have precedent for stable, profitable, publicly owned businesses: the provincial liquor store. Crown Corporations like BCLiquor and Ontario’s LCBO operate thousands of retail stores, serving millions of customers every year. Provincial liquor store employees are members of their provincial public sector unions, better paid and protected than many retail employees. In 2025, the BC Liquor Distribution Branch reported $3.9 billion in revenue despite the global recession and US tariffs interrupting supply chains.
Provincial liquor stores act in competition with privately owned shops, pushing prices down in the form of “below government rates” sales pitches. In Perspectives Magazine, Canadian SHIELD Institute Director Vass Bednar credited Saskatchewan’s publicly owned Sasktel for the province having Canada’s lowest telecom rates, in another industry strangled by unchecked monopolies. Bednar recommends Ontario develop “an LCBO for groceries” in tandem with the existing Ontario Food Terminal to provide a provincial food distribution service.
Provincially owned grocery stores using this model could not only solve affordability issues in areas like Vancouver’s Downtown-Eastside, but also resolve food deserts in Canada’s north, where heavy government intervention is already required to maintain access to nutrition. A large country-wide buyer could prioritize bulk purchases from local food suppliers, encouraging the local food industry, reducing emissions resulting from transportation, and fighting the dominance of large corporate monopolies.
Whether it involves provincial takeover of the Sunrise Market as it is, or developing a new system of crown corporation grocery stores, government intervention through some degree of public ownership and operation is necessary to fight the market driven affordability crisis in areas like the Downtown-Eastside.
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