18% of Canadians Are Boycotting Loblaws. Where’s the Pressure Point on Climate Change?

The Loblaws boycott has been running for less than a month, but it's spreading like wildfire. Why is it doing so well, and what can the climate community learn from that?

left: A quiet Friday at 5 PM at the Loblaws on Lower Jarvis St., in Toronto/ r/loblawsisoutofcontrol. right: Coming soon to a Petro-Canada station near you?/ bobbsled/flickr

What would you boycott to help fight climate change?

And what are the answers to that question that will draw in a bigger wave of support than we’ve seen so far for the vast majority of climate programs, messages, and campaigns?

There’s been endless talk lately, and necessarily so, about the seething fury that so many Canadians (and people elsewhere) are carrying around about the economy, the affordable housing crisis, their own life prospects, and sometimes even about climate change. Lately, we’ve seen the messaging brain trust around Pierre Poilievre receiving a lot of credit for the three-syllable rhymes that seem to be tapping into that rage.

But the pushback is also rising up in a much more honest and constructive form. The r/loblawsisoutofcontrol Reddit group only launched its boycott of the Loblaws supermarket chain in May. (It seems a lot longer, doesn’t it?) By mid-month, nearly three-quarters of Canadians were telling the Leger opinion research agency they had heard of the boycott, and at least 18% of them were taking part. An earlier version of the wire story on the Leger survey said 40%, according to Reddit group participants.

By all measures, the Loblaws boycott has achieved a level of reach and prominence that climate hawks can usually only dream of. They’ve done it in less than a month, apparently with a spontaneous, all-grassroots effort.

Is there anything climate and energy communicators and campaigners can learn here?

And what kind of difference might it make if a wide cross-section of Canadians coalesced around a single target for a high-profile climate boycott?

Production Note: The Energy Mix is celebrating its first decade this month with a 10th anniversary website that includes a quick series of mini-games, plus a space to tell us what additional climate and energy news you’d like us to cover next. And there are fabulous prizes. Drop by today.

How Boycotts Are Supposed to Behave

I doubt Loblaws saw this coming. I would bet that organizers never expected the boycott to get so far, so fast. But it has indeed caught on like wildfire (oh, wait—the kind of wildfire we like), and just like a blazing crown fire, it now seems to be feeding on its own strength. Just the way boycotts are supposed to behave.

I can think of a few obvious reasons.

• It has a clear, simple target.

• It taps into a widespread sense that something is going very wrong.

• Posts on the boycott site are fresh, funny, snarky, and to the point, with lots of photos of half-empty Loblaws stores and intel from store staff. House rules call for users to be respectful, “keep things reasonably light”, steer clear of “off-topic politics” and COVID conspiracies, and stay on theme. (We’ll see soon enough whether the moderators think this post is close enough to theme…)

• It began with no obvious, entrenched opposition, though the big box grocery industry and its allies and paid spokespeople are doing their best to make up for that. A move we’ve never, ever seen from the fossil fuel industry, dontcha know.

• It’s showing potential to cross over the partisan and other dividing lines that needlessly drive us apart on climate change, energy, the green economy, and lately, so much else.

As of today, r/loblawsisoutofcontrol has 85,000 members (speaking of crown fires, yesterday it had 84,000), putting it in the top 2% of sub-reddits by size.

A few days ago, on the strength of a community vote, the site organizers announced they’re extending the boycott indefinitely, beyond the initial month. For the next few weeks, they’re gearing all efforts toward the last day of Loblaws’ second financial quarter June 15.

“Loblaw will try really hard to win back customers, but if history repeats itself as it always does, Loblaw leadership will raise retails to close the quarter and margin up which means more customers will say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH,” an organizer wrote earlier today. “Check produce, bakery, meat and grocery pricing.”

“Convince the folks on r/wallstreetbets to short Loblaws,” one group member responded. “That'd be a sinister hit to their share value.”

What Makes Boycotts Different

The breakaway success of r/loblawsisoutofcontrol points to a tone and arc that can give a boycott a different kind of energy.

When you join a boycott, you’re making an affirmative choice to assert your power, adding your voice to thousands, even millions of others who’ve decided to take action in a way that is manageable but meaningful—just by voting with your feet.

It’s widely participatory, even though the grocery boycott is tougher or impossible to join in on if you’re in a rural area with just one supermarket, or in an urban food desert that leaves you with no practical alternative to Loblaws or one of its affiliates. But the r/loblawsisoutofcontrol site and the Leger survey show that the boycott is still drawing enough support to make a very big splash that benefits everyone. We all gain, even if we can’t all step up.

And the boycott gives participants a sense that they can gain some control over a problem that is a major part of their lives and has felt totally beyond their reach. Just like climate change.

With food prices skyrocketing (getting a bit heavy-handed with the parallel here, but just like CO2 emissions), there’s a moral and practical clarity to a grocery boycott that brings people together, whatever else might otherwise drive them apart, reaching far beyond the regular networks and bubbles we usually live in. Where’s the climate, energy, or green transition target that will deliver the same intensity, unity, and common ground?

We saw some of that same dynamic taking shape with the first round of community conversations we organized through the Green Resilience Project, a Canada-wide outreach and listening project that Energy Mix Productions co-hosts with the Basic Income Canada Network. Just like the Loblaws boycott, the GRP works across community networks and around the usual obstacles and differences to search for common ground on practical, front-line solutions.

That first phase connected with more than 900 people in 33 communities in every province and territory but Nunavut. (Rankin Inlet was all set to host an in-person conversation. Omicron happened, so the conversation didn’t.) Across a widely diverse collection of participants, almost everyone saw what climate change was doing to their communities, and many of them had a clear idea of what to do about it. Except that the intersecting factors like precarious jobs and incomes, expensive food and housing, awful transit access, and more were leaving them without the wherewithal to take action, and pushing climate change farther down on their daily priority list.

What Would You Like to Boycott Today?

All of which leaves us with the same two questions that opened this post.

What would you like to boycott today?

And what’s the best boycott target to reach outside the usual bubble of climate concern and build a wide enough coalition to win?

• Petro-Canada gas stations are the retail arm of Suncor Energy, the biggest operator in the Canadian oil sands. Suncor CEO Rich Kruger defended his company’s pivot away from renewable energy and largely dodged questions on oil and gas companies’ liability for climate impacts in an appearance before a House of Commons committee last fall. Kruger bragged that Suncor would bring climate pollution from his company’s operations to net-zero by 2050 by relying on unproven, under-performing carbon capture technology that only has a chance with massive, permanent taxpayer subsidies. And he sidestepped the downstream or Scope 3 emissions that account for 80% of the climate pollution in a barrel of oil.

Would a Petro-Canada boycott be worth pursuing, based on a behaviour change that would be easy enough for many drivers to consider, even if it meant gassing up with Exxon or Shell instead?

• What about using a debit card rather than credit whenever possible, to deprive banks of the higher fee if they’re investing in fossil fuels? Shifting that one habit, some of the time or most of the time, would be easier than moving to another bank that still had a similar investment profile. No need to consider this one if you’re lucky enough to bank with an institution that is truly fossil-free, like Vancity, or pulling in the right direction, like Desjardins.

• What about abandoning cryptocurrency, for anyone who’s been diving down that rabbit hole, until one of the world’s sketchiest industries stops burning through as much electricity as a mid-sized country, running phantom fossil fuel plants, and trying to greenwash its emissions while straining power grids and appropriating valuable renewable energy supplies that are needed for other purposes?

A climate boycott would only work if it focused on a single, unified target and appealed to a wide cross-section of the population…so crypto might not be the best choice. With the Loblaws boycott, the company’s own behaviours made it an obvious focus, the decision came from the Reddit moderators, then everyone else piled in.

But here’s a chance to be a bit more participatory. We always look forward to comments on anything we publish here. Why not use the chat section on today’s post to pitch your own favourite climate boycott target?

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Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.

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