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Is Loblaw Blocking a New Grocery Store in Your Neighbourhood?

How big chains use a little-known lease agreement to kill competition

The story we tell ourselves about capitalism is that it’s a free market system in which firms slug it out for the privilege to sell us an apple or a mid-sized sport utility vehicle. Doesn’t it sound nice? In this fairy tale, competition is the stuff of magic. It has a disciplining function, keeping the sellers sleek, honest, and incentivized to innovate. Prices go down, quality goes up. Everybody wins.

Companies throughout Canada use property controls to keep competing businesses from certain locations

By exercising this control, dominant firms shape both markets and the physical landscape

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In practice, capitalists hate competition. It’s too hard. For big companies, half of the job is limiting those who might compete, often through buying them out or finding ways to keep them from doing business. The easiest rival to beat is the one that never gets the chance to open its doors—or doesn’t keep them open for long.

To their discredit, governments, particularly in Canada, have historically been lousy at inducing market competition or preventing corporations from building oligopolies and monopolies. While Parliament updated the Competition Act in 2024, granting the Competition Bureau expanded powers that came into force in 2025, the pro-competition body has never successfully blocked a merger. Indeed, before recent changes to the act, the law allowed mergers to more or less produce market monopolies. The upshot for consumers is that we face higher prices, fewer choices, and a more displeasurable retail experience.

One of the most insidious anti-competitive tools is the property control clause. It’s a common barrier to competition used by companies throughout the country, especially grocery store chains, including Loblaw, everyone’s favourite everything company.

According to the Competition Bureau, property controls take the form of either exclusivity clauses or restrictive covenants, which have slightly different meanings in the law, but which amount to the same thing: they prohibit businesses from opening a shop at a competitor’s current or previous location.

A grocery chain might use property controls to insist that, as a condition of its role as an anchor tenant in a plaza, no other grocers may open nearby. But they might also limit other businesses unrelated to their core trade, such as dentists, bowling alleys, or arcades. After all, why should consumers be permitted to roll a turkey and then buy a chicken? More seriously, these clauses are about monopolizing destinations, not products. The less reason consumers have to visit competing centres—where they might spend money—the more valuable an anchor business’s location becomes.

If anti-competitive uses of restrictive clauses sound unreasonable, even rage inducing, the details of their use are worse still. Jacob Filipp, a marketing operations professional, maintains a personal website that tracks restrictive grocery covenants across Canada. Retailers on the list include Loblaw, Shoppers Drug Mart, Sobeys, and Save-On-Foods.

As Filipp’s database shows, covenant terms can limit competitors or otherwise unwanted tenants from operating within a radius of an........

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