Comment by jacquesm
8 hours ago
This was one of the more surprising things to me when I lived in Canada: that there is so much of this. Depending on which region you are in you will either have state monopolies on the strangest things and/or a couple of families that have their fingers in just about every pie. And don't get me started on the telecommunications sector.
I wonder if this is largely a function of geography and population. Do we see similar strange things in countries like Australia, Sweden, etc.? Kind of like a small town effect at the national scale.
Sweden has a fair amount of it - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget and (formerly) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoteket as examples.
And the Wallenberg family.
I think it goes back all the way to the founding days of Canada, essentially the Hudson Bay Company.
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