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The Competition Bureau has alleged that bread wholesalers Canada Bread and Weston Bakeries — the latter sharing owners with Loblaws — conspired with major supermarket chains to inflate the prices of various bread products from late 2001 — when Buttigieg was 19 — until 2017.

According to a 2017 court document prepared by the bureau to obtain search warrants, there were no price increases in 2003, 2008, 2009 or 2014.

Buttigieg’s work with McKinsey, one of the world’s premier consulting firms and often associated with autocratic regimes and other controversial clients, has generally become a hot issue in his campaign.

Releasing relatively little information about his work there, Buttigieg said he was impeded by a non-disclosure agreement he signed with McKinsey. But this week he announced the firm had agreed to waive the NDA and let him identify his clients.

Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post/File

He joined McKinsey’s Chicago office in 2007 after graduating from Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar.

In his book, Buttigieg says he got involved in the Loblaws project because he admired the man heading it — Jeff Helbling, now a vice president of Amazon — despite a lack of interest in matters grocery.

His said his mission was to build models of how much it would cost to cut prices on various combinations of tens of thousands of items across hundreds of stores throughout Canada.

“By manipulating millions of data points, I could weave stories about possible futures, and gather insights on which ideas were good or bad,” he wrote. “I could simulate millions of shoppers going up and down the aisles of thousands of stores, and in my mind I pictured their habits shifting as a well-placed price cut subtly changed their perceptions of our client as a better place to shop.”

U.S. media reports suggest that Buttigieg talked more proudly of his McKinsey stint during his first, unsuccessful bid for public office, to be Indiana treasurer in 2010. But, amid a spate of bad press for the consultancy, he has tended to shy away from the topic on the presidential trail.

In his book, he says being a consultant failed to furnish “the deep level of purpose that I craved,” but that he eventually found it in politics and the military.