The Alibi Economy: How Corporations Weaponize Canadian Politeness
Every time there’s a crisis, war, pandemic, rate hike, corporations look straight into the camera and say: “We had no choice.” Prices go up, profits go up, and citizens are told to be grateful it wasn’t worse. We are supposed to see this as the neutral workings of a complicated world. I call it what it is: the Alibi Economy.
For this piece, I sat down with my AI collaborator, Perplexity, to dissect how the Alibi Economy works, and why Canadian politeness is one of its favourite weapons.
Greedflation is the symptom. The Alibi Economy is the method.
AK: We’ve heard the word greedflation: corporations using inflation and crises as cover to raise prices faster than their costs. Then we got shrinkflation and skimpflation: paying the same for less product or worse service. Everyone is busy naming each new trick.
But the real question is the one nobody asks: Why is it always heads corporations win, tails consumers lose?
That’s where the Alibi Economy comes in.
Perplexity: What makes this an alibi system, not just “greed,” is that the story is always the same: a real shock, a public narrative of hardship, and then a lasting jump in profit margins. The shock fades; the margins don’t.
Take BP. In Q1 2026, its first results since the Iran war, BP’s profit jumped to about $3.2 billion, more than double the same quarter a year earlier and roughly 20% above analyst expectations. The public story? War, volatility, “challenging conditions.” The financial reality? A trading arm and refining margins that thrived on that volatility.
Or look at the macro picture. In Canada, pre‑tax corporate profits hit $644 billion in 2023 — a 54% increase over 2019’s pre‑pandemic baseline. Profit margins were higher than their 2010–2019 average in 18 of the 21 largest non‑financial industries. Investment, meanwhile, flatlined.
That’s not just greed; that’s a system. A crisis arrives, an excuse is pre‑loaded, and a permanent premium is attached to your cost of living.
Canadian politeness as conflict‑avoidance and as cover
AK: This is where Canada comes in.
We’re told Canadians are polite. And yes, they are, on the surface. But behind the “sorry” and the held doors is something deeper and more dangerous.
Perplexity: Canadian politeness didn’t fall out of the sky. It evolved as a conflict‑avoidance strategy — a way to keep the peace by not making trouble, even when you’re being squeezed.
Historically, fitting in and not making waves were survival strategies: in workplaces, in small communities, in institutions that tolerated quiet compliance but punished direct confrontation. Over time, that survival strategy hardened into identity: the polite Canadian who doesn’t raise their voice, doesn’t argue in public, doesn’t complain too loudly even when something is obviously wrong.
A 2026 piece in The Medium called Canadian politeness a form of passive behaviour and “a defence mechanism to avoid confrontation and direct involvement in an issue,” noting that it allows the country to “be walked over.” Another observer described Canadians as “polite and cold” — the smiles and cordiality masking distance rather than genuine warmth.
That conflict‑avoidance instinct was once a way to get through the day. Now it is the perfect cover for an Alibi Economy.
The Canadian “inoculation stack”: how outrage gets talked down
AK: When you live in a country like this, you don’t just wake up and scream when something is wrong. You pass through a gauntlet of phrases that neutralize your outrage before it can form. I call it the Inoculation Stack.
You know every line in it:
- “It’s not that bad…”
- “There’s a positive side to this…”
- “It could be worse…”
- “Well, you have to…”
- “The government will save us…”
- “Count your blessings.”
Perplexity: Each one does a specific job:
- Minimization (“It’s not that bad…”) resets your baseline downward so what would have horrified you last year becomes the new normal.
- False consolation (“There’s a positive side…”) forces you to reframe the harm before you’ve even finished describing it.
- Comparative suffering (“It could be worse…”) imports someone else’s misery to erase your legitimate complaint.
- Resigned compliance (“Well, you have to…”) turns coerced behaviour into a “choice.”
- Institutional deference (“The government will save us…”) outsources responsibility to actors that are often captured or indifferent.
- Gratitude enforcement (“Count your blessings…”) is the kill shot: any remaining anger is reframed as ingratitude.
By the time a Canadian has been walked through that stack, they’re not acting — they’re apologizing. Not only are they still paying the bill; they feel vaguely guilty for noticing the bill at all.
That is not an accident. That is a feature.
One big country, few big businesses
The Inoculation Stack wouldn’t matter so much if Canadians had real choices in the market. They mostly don’t. Canada is not expensive by accident. It is expensive by design.
Perplexity: Canada’s economy is structured around a small number of large players in key sectors — an oligopoly model built over more than a century of policy choices.
A few examples:
- Banking: The Big Five (RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO, CIBC) control over 80% of Canada’s banking market; the four largest hold roughly three‑quarters of domestic deposits, compared with less than half in the U.S.
- Telecom: Bell, Rogers, and Telus account for about 90.7% of the wireless market. International analysis has repeatedly ranked Canadian wireless prices among the highest in the world, with some plans up to 16–17 times more expensive than comparable offers in Europe.
- Grocery: Five companies, Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys/Empire, Walmart, Costco, control more than 75% of food retail.
- Rail: CN and CP form a duopoly that has delivered some of the best stock performance in the country for decades.
Investors understand exactly what this means. One 2024 investment article couldn’t have been more blunt: if you live in Canada, you already pay oligopoly‑level prices for food, data, and bank fees, so you might as well buy the oligopoly stocks and “participate” in the profits.
Translation: the system is rigged; your only hope is to sit closer to the rigging.
What politeness let slide: bread and bandwidth
Let’s look at what Canadian conflict‑avoidance actually cost, in dollars and years.
The 14‑year bread conspiracy
From 2001 to 2015, Canada’s major grocers and bread makers secretly coordinated price increases in what was internally known as the “7/10 convention”: seven cents added at wholesale, ten cents at retail, twice a year, across major bread products. Companies involved included Loblaw, Walmart Canada, Sobeys, Metro, Giant Tiger, Canada Bread, and Weston Foods.
Over that period, the consumer price index for bread, rolls, and buns rose by about 96%, more than double the 45% increase for food overall. Analysts estimated Canadians overpaid $4–5 billion for basic bread.
Loblaw eventually confessed, earning immunity from criminal prosecution, and offered customers a $25 gift card as compensation. No executives went to prison. No companies were broken up. A class‑action settlement reached in 2025 was hailed as the “largest settlement” in Canadian history, which tells you how low that bar is.
That is what fourteen years of quiet acceptance looks like.
Telecom: 157% more and “sorry”
Perplexity: Then there’s telecom.
Canadian wireless fees are about 157% higher than the G7 average by some estimates, with Bell, Rogers, and Telus regularly ranked as the world’s most expensive providers. In 2024, Rogers raised many plans by $7–9 a month. Its explanation? High standards, coast‑to‑coast connectivity, and “investment in quality.
Rogers’ gross profit for the 12 months ending September 2023: $7.12 billion, up 46% year‑over‑year, despite all the talk of economic uncertainty and high interest rates.
The political class wrung its hands. The Competition Bureau muttered about a “kitchen‑table issue.” The Rogers‑Shaw merger, which further concentrated power, was approved anyway.
The average customer sighed, grumbled about their bill, and paid it. Because what else can you do? Cancel your phone? Move to a different country?
That’s where the Inoculation Stack kicks in: it’s not that bad, it could be worse, at least we have connectivity, count your blessings.
The mirror: citizen excuses and corporate alibis
AK: Here’s the uncomfortable part: corporations are not doing something alien. They are using our own psychological tricks against us.
Perplexity: Social psychology has names for this: self‑serving bias and cognitive dissonance. People are used to explaining their own failures by pointing to external forces — traffic, bosses, bad luck — and adjusting their beliefs to reduce discomfort.
You’ve heard the personal version:
- “I was late because of traffic.”
- “Everyone cheats on their diet sometimes.”
- “It’s not like anyone got hurt.”
Now look at the corporate version:
- “We had to raise prices because of global inflation.”
- “All firms in our sector are facing the same headwinds.”
- “Our margin is only 4% on a basket of groceries.”
That last one is real. Under questioning about food prices, Loblaw’s CEO told Parliament the company makes only about $1 of profit on a $25 basket of groceries, roughly a 4% margin, suggesting Canadians were upset over nothing. That technically true figure just happened to omit a key detail: those margins had roughly doubled from pre‑pandemic levels, and earnings were at or near record highs.
AK: The Alibi Economy works because it sounds like something you or I would say if we were caught. “I had no choice.” “Everybody does it.” “You’re overreacting.” The corporation just has better PR.
How to stop falling for “we had no choice”
You don’t need a finance degree to put a crack in this system. You need a habit: stop at the excuse and interrogate it.
Here is a simple set of questions you can run, with or without AI, every time you hear “we had to” from a corporation, an industry, or a government:
- Is it true?
- Does the claimed shock (war, supply chain, wage costs, rates) actually exist and matter to this specific company?
- Is it accurate?
- Do the numbers line up, dates, percentages, the scale of the impact?
- Is it honest?
- Are they talking only about costs, or are they also mentioning profits and margins? Did profits go up while they were supposedly under pressure?
- Is it complete?
- Is it timely and in context?
- Are they citing an old shock (like 2021 supply chains) to justify 2024–26 prices? Have input costs fallen while prices stayed high?
Perplexity: My job in your workflow is simple. When you feed me a corporate claim, I go to the filings, the news, the macro data. I check whether the story matches the margins. Fact‑checkers are already using AI this way — not as an oracle, but as a speed‑layer to cross‑reference claims. Citizens can do the same.
You can literally copy‑paste a CEO quote into an AI and ask: “Check this against profit margins, revenues, and major shocks for this company over the last five years.” Then compare the story you were sold with the numbers underneath it.
The crack in Canadian politeness
All of this would be unbearably bleak if there weren’t signs that the Canadian script is starting to fray.
Rising cost of living is eroding the old politeness. Recent research and polling find Canadians reporting more stress, more friction, and a sense that the “nice Canadian” image is under strain, with high prices specifically cited as a factor. When you are choosing between groceries and rent, “count your blessings” starts to sound like an insult, not advice.
Public concern about competition has also gone mainstream: from telecom to groceries, Canadians tell pollsters they feel big companies have too much power and there is too little choice. When an 88% majority says “we need more competition because it’s too easy for big business to take advantage of consumers,” the inoculation isn’t working as well as it used to.
And the bread case, for all its limitations, did finally result in a massive settlement, two decades after the scheme began. Slow justice is still justice. It creates a record.
The scream is the sane response
AK: In a country trained to say “sorry” while it’s being overcharged, the most radical act is to stop apologizing and start asking questions.
The Alibi Economy depends on two things: concentrated power and internalized politeness. It needs oligopolies on the outside and the Inoculation Stack on the inside. It needs you to hear “we had no choice” and nod along, because you tell yourself the same thing when you don’t want to face your own decisions.
The primal scream you feel when you see BP’s doubled profits or that $25 bread gift card is not incivility. It is recognition.
“Count your blessings” was never about gratitude. It was instruction: stop looking at the coin while they flip it. The moment you refuse that instruction, the moment you pause at the excuse and interrogate it, is the moment the Alibi Economy stops being invisible and starts being vulnerable.
And that’s when things get interesting.