There is a lot more to how you buy food then the stores alone. There is the distribution network that brings food to the stores. Without those, you’re just buying food from the existing grocery stores (who own the distribution) — and will likely need to charge the same prices.

And the Province setting up their own distribution is never going to be able to have the purchasing power of a national grocery chain, and won’t come close to something like Walmart. Everything they buy (either imported or local) will be more expensive.

So the only way to make it cheap would be to subsidize the pricing — and if you’re going to do that, why bother duplicating all of the effort of stores and a distribution network? We can subsidize people in need directly for much cheaper than it would be to setup all of that infrastructure and then offer the same sort of subsidy (that, or you could spend the same amount of money to just subsidize those in need even more).