Dressed in red suits and accompanied by masked elves, a group of Santas marched into a Montreal supermarket, loaded their bags with thousands of dollars worth of groceries and left. Now that’s a protest I can get behind! Via The Guardian:
The bandit Santas later released a statement saying the food would be distributed to the needy, and saying the Robin Hood-style stunt was intended to highlight the spiralling cost of living crisis that has pushed basic necessities increasingly out of reach for ordinary Canadians.
Roughly 40 members of a group called called Robins des Ruelles – Robins of the Alleys – participated in the robbery late on Monday.
The statement, released late on Thursday, and entitled “When hunger justifies the means”, said: “We are working more and more just to be able to buy food from supermarket chains that take advantage of inflation as a pretext to make record profits.
“There is no other way to put it: a handful of companies are holding our basic needs hostage.”
The group said the companies “continue to suffocate the population to siphon away as much money as possible”.
Metro, which owns eight major grocery brands in Ontario and Quebec, said in a statement that shoplifting was a criminal act and unacceptable. A spokesperson, Geneviève Grégoir, said price increases were influenced by factors include disruptions in the global supply chain, volatility in commodity prices, changes in international trade conditions – and retail crime.
