It’s against this grim backdrop that a bit of positive news is brewing here in Canada. In 2024, the federal government enacted new legislation that makes it possible for business owners to sell their companies to trusts owned by their own employees. Earlier this year, the feds followed up by making permanent an incentive that exempts the first $10 million of such sales from capital gains tax.

We here at Do Not Pass Go firmly believe this is a rare good news story that relates to the two biggest challenges Canada is currently facing – sovereignty and affordability.

Employee-owned trusts, or EOTs, give business owners a new avenue to exit that isn’t selling to a competitor, often a larger one, or to private-equity firms that are usually in the process of rolling up and consolidating sectors. Selling to an EOT keeps more competitors in the market – which affects choices, employment terms and options, and prices – and it keeps businesses Canadian-owned.

So far, seven Canadian companies have converted to an EOT or declared their intention to do so. With the legislative and taxation runway cleared, many more are expected – potentially up to 100 per year.

Those companies, EOT proponents and the emergent supportive industry around them recently convened for the third annual employee ownership conference in Vancouver. We covered that conference here last week – check out that story – and in this episode, we dive deeper into how the EOT phenomenon arrived in Canada, what the potential benefits may be, and what their future holds.

The goal is as ambitious as it gets: to transform the Canadian economy.

We speak with Craig Busch, head of Barrie, Ont.-based waste bin manufacturer Busch Systems about becoming the seventh Canadian EOT, as well as two U.K. company founders – Robert Postlethwaite and Dr. Shelley Poole – about their respective experiences in selling firms to their employees.

Plus, Vancouver School of Economics professor Kevin Milligan weighs in, as does Jon Shell, vice-chair of Employee Ownership Canada and director of Aunty Combines Media, the parent company of Do Not Pass Go.

A small housekeeping note before we get into things – we’re tweaking our publishing schedule to be more in line with how you guys are reading, watching and listening. That’s why you’re seeing this round-up on Saturday, its new home. Podcasts are shifting to Tuesdays from Thursdays, with most Wednesdays featuring scoops and other good stuff for paid subscribers. With that, let’s get to it!

Among the headline news in a really busy competition news week was an odd judgment against Rogers, which got slapped with a $15 million fine plus legal costs by the Competition Tribunal for falsely advertising its wireless plans as “unlimited.”

The case was brought in 2024 by the Competition Bureau, which objected to the cable giant’s marketing of its “Infinite” plans. The agency maintained that the advertising was misleading, given that customers were having their connection speeds significantly reduced after hitting a set amount of data usage.

The Tribunal’s terse “information note,” released on Wednesday, does not provide details or reasons for the decision. It simply notes that Rogers’ constitutional challenge of the case was dismissed and that a more fulsome judgment will be released within 10 business days. Rogers must also publish a corrective notice.

“The Tribunal is working with the Commissioner and Rogers to identify confidential or competitively sensitive information in its confidential reasons that will be redacted from the public version,” the note reads.

The Bureau published a similarly short statement, noting that Canadians rely on accurate and truthful information when choosing services such as wireless plans.

“Misleading advertising can distort consumer choice, erode confidence in the marketplace, and disadvantage businesses that compete fairly,” said Interim Competition Commissioner Jeanne Pratt in the statement. “We look forward to the Tribunal publishing the details of its decision in the coming weeks.”

Rogers, however, stands by its advertising and is “considering next steps.”

“We introduced unlimited data plans in 2019 to deliver great value to our customers,” says a release on the company’s website. “These plans are commonplace in the industry and reflected a significant and positive development for consumers and small businesses.”

The company notes the Bureau was seeking a penalty of $135 million. The $15 million award is slightly more than the $13 million the agency was ordered to pay Rogers in 2023 for unsuccessfully challenging the company’s $20 billion acquisition of Shaw. In ordering the costs at the time, the Tribunal said the Bureau’s approach to blocking that deal was “unreasonable.”

Some consumer advocates say the judgment is important for ensuring proper information in the marketplace, but also warn that regulators and policy makers will need to ensure that Rogers doesn’t pass along the penalties to consumers in the form of price increases.

“Consumers should never be expected to bear the cost of penalties imposed on any provider, whether through higher fees or otherwise,” says Tahira Dawood, acting general counsel for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. “That is why scrutiny of new charges, meaningful competition and the ability to switch providers are so important.”

Other advocates say it’s difficult to determine whether the false advertising judgment is a win or a defeat for the Bureau without seeing the Tribunal’s reasoning. The Bureau reportedly asked for $15 million in an administrative penalty plus customer refunds, or $135 million if the Tribunal declined those refunds. But the Tribunal’s note makes no mention of refunds.

By comparison, the Tribunal in 2024 ordered Cineplex to pay $39 million in a drip-pricing case that similarly centred around the theatre company misleading consumers. In that case, the Tribunal also did not order customer refunds, calling them impractical.

“An administrative monetary penalty is paid to the Crown, so if refunds weren’t ordered, affected customers get nothing from the [Rogers] decision,” says Neil Hartung, a lawyer with the Consumers Council of Canada. “So, against $135 million sought and a penalty well below what was asked for, Rogers may be the one opening the champagne today, whatever the headline number says.”

☎️ TELECOM

Canada’s slow, resistant slog toward accepting shared networks as the future – and reality – of the telecom business took another step this week with BELL announcing it is selling off a minority stake in its cellphone towers to CAISSE DE DEPOT ET PLACEMENT DU QUEBEC.

The $2.5 billion sale gives Quebec’s pension fund manager a 49.9-per-cent stake in the tentatively titled TowerCo, with Bell retaining control. The company plans to use the sale process to pay down debt and expand its data-centre business.

Bell is the last of the big three wireless carriers to engage in such a sale, with TELUS and ROGERS doing the same last year. The Caisse was involved in both those deals, acquiring the same size stake in Telus’ towers and joining a consortium that includes Blackstone and the Canadian Pension Plan in the case of Rogers.

Most carriers in the United States, Europe and Asia have sold off their towers to third parties, who have then rented space on them to other providers. As a Caisse executive told The Globe and Mail this week, the pension fund’s plan is to “entice other service providers to hang their gear on what used to be Bell-branded towers.”

• Frank Brown, a concerned citizen from Aurora, Ont., has opened a petition with Parliament to cap telecom phone service wait times at 10 minutes. The petition, which is sponsored by Conservative MP Kathy Borrelli, representing Windsor–Tecumseh–Lakeshore, requests that Parliament direct the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to establish the maximum hold time as a “clear, measurable and enforceable customer-service access standard for telecommunications providers.” The petition needs 500 validated signatures before it can be presented in the House, and was just shy at 200 at the time of this writing. Brown had previously run a similar Change.org petition that drew nearly 1,200 signatures. The Parliamentary petition is open until Nov. 26.

• The Toronto Star has a story on Marina Pavlovic, the University of Ottawa law professor who is fighting an attempt by TELUS to make it harder for consumers to file complaints with the telecom industry ombudsman. Telus says customers should be required to show evidence that they have escalated their issues with providers to so-called “second-level” support before they can file complaints with the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications-television Services. But in her own filing to the CRTC, which oversees the CCTS, Pavlovic says consumers have no way of distinguishing between what level of support they are receiving. She wants companies to inform customers about the CCTS as soon as they complain. “The goal should be fewer unresolved problems,” she tells the paper. “Making complaints harder to file could reduce the count without resolving those problems.”

• Capping off a busy news week in telecom, the federal government also announced a “roadmap to improve competition and increase choice for Canadians.” The plan hinges on providing consumers with more choices and better prices while ensuring investment in high-quality networks. The document itself largely outlines already implemented measures, such as enabling large telcos to access each others’ networks on a wholesale basis and further funding for alternative infrastructure models, as well some aspirational efforts, including speeding up CRTC decisions and protecting consumers from rights violations. We’ll take a deeper dive into this roadmap soon… stay tuned.

• I try to avoid opinionating whenever possible these days, but I can’t always avoid others asking me to do so. This week I chatted telecom with broadcaster Lynda Steele on her new podcast, Change My Mind (see below), and penned an op-ed for the Financial Post on Meta’s proposed changes to its website scraping terms. Check ‘em out!

🇨🇦 SOVEREIGNTY

We’ve made an executive decision here to no longer treat sovereignty and competition as separate issues, because they really are one and the same. After all, Canada’s attempts to limit its exposure and dependency on an increasingly hostile United States is really just another way of saying the nation is looking for more choice – and therefore more competitors – for the things it needs.

In other words, Canada as a nation is learning what Canadians as a people have long been experiencing – a lack of meaningful choices when it comes to so many basic necessities is existentially problematic.

In that vein, Canada and the European Union concluded their two-day summit in Montreal this week with a joint statement to co-operate on a number of fronts – especially in trying to limit their reliance and vulnerability to U.S. tech firms.

The two jurisdictions announced they have concluded substantial negotiations on a digital trade agreement that sets rules for online commerce, an updated pact on policing anti-competitive behaviour, and a deal to facilitate European investment in Canadian resources.

“We are working toward the deepest possible partnership, short of accession, with Canada becoming the European Union’s first associate member,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said at a press conference on Friday (see video below).

Carney also said that he will begin negotiations for Canadian access to Galileo, the EU’s GPS satellite navigation system, to create an alternative to U.S. and Chinese-owned systems. Canada and the EU are also working to connect their payment systems to speed up financial transactions between the two.

The government also used the summit to announce that it is taking a $1.6 billion stake in Toronto-based AI company COHERE. The stake is part of $7 billion in new investment announced by the company, giving it a valuation of $36 billion – and thus making it Canada’s most valuable private technology firm.

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

• Delivery company DOORDASH has launched a $17 billion (U.S.) bid for rival INSTACART. The companies say the deal is slated to close in early 2028, indicating they expect to meet resistance from competition regulators, largely in the United States. Here in Canada, where both companies are active, the Competition Bureau also confirms it’s going to have a look at the merger. The Bureau and DoorDash are already at odds, with a case regarding the company’s alleged drip pricing currently in front of the Competition Tribunal.

• The Walrus has a particularly good piece on the dangers of consolidation in the farming sector. The story documents the rapid fall from grace of Saskatchewan’s mega-ag business MONETTE FARMS and how it is “sending shockwaves across the Prairies.” As farmer Kristjan Hebert puts it, farms are having to consolidate in order to keep pace with the growing leverage of similarly merging seed and chemical companies. “They’ve turned us into contract numbers everywhere: grain contracts, equipment contracts,” he says. “We’re not a farm anymore, we’re a number—until you get to a critical mass and can negotiate that. If we don’t, we lose extreme amounts of negotiating power.” And when farms merge, they inevitably bend toward a culture of nurturing the enterprise rather than growing food. Check out the piece, it’s a good read.

✈️ AIRLINES

The Competition Bureau believes that a code-share deal involving AIR CANADA and U.S. carrier UNITED AIRLINES will harm competition on 10 routes between Canada and the United States, leading to higher pricing.

The proposed arrangement would also contravene a 2012 consent agreement the Bureau reached with the airlines, which prohibits co-ordination on routes that connect Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver with Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, New York, San Francisco and Washington.

The Bureau filed its findings as advice with Transportation Minister Stephen MacKinnon, who is conducting an inquiring into the airlines’ coordination proposal.

The airlines have said that they plan to apply to the Competition Tribunal to have the 2012 agreement lifted if McKinnon approves their deal.

• Liberal members of the Standing Committee on Finance this week voted down a proposal that would require airlines including AIR CANADA and WESTJET to pay interest on compensation claims that are withheld to passengers. Ryan Turnbull, MP for Whitby, said it would be “redundant” to require interest to be added since the government has strengthened penalties for repeated offences. “That’s significant teeth in this legislation and enforcement powers,” he said. Consumer advocates disagree, saying airlines face no penalties for dragging compensation claims out. “The Liberals are unwittingly creating a positive incentive for airlines to refuse to pay passengers cash compensation that is owed to them, use it as an interest free loan, and then in two-three years eventually pay up,” says Gabor Lukacs, president of Air Passenger Rights. “From a consumer perspective, it is of course, also unfair – you have to pay interest on any arrears, and on your credit card balance, why should the airlines be treated differently?”

🥊 COMPETITION

The Competition Bureau has issued an open letter to the provinces urging them to take action against non-compete clauses in employment contracts.

As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported in a study this summer, non-competes are particularly prevalent in Canada, with more and more employers using them despite their questionable enforceability.

Ontario prohibits such clauses and the Canadian government has proposed similar limits in sectors that fall under federal regulation, but most of the other provinces have no restrictions.

“Governments can curb the unnecessary use of non-competes while preserving legitimate business protections and expanding employers’ access to talent,” said Interim Competition Commissioner Jeanne Pratt in a release.

“Doing so can strengthen competition for workers, support new business entry and growth, and help raise household incomes. We therefore encourage provincial and territorial governments to take coordinated action to limit the widespread use of non-compete agreements.”

None of this is surprising, according to Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In her new book – Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defense of Affordability, Dignity, and Democracy – she lays out how we got here.

In a nutshell, traditional neoliberalist economics that encourage market concentration and political subordination to those markets means economies are no longer working for the average person. This is a dangerous development, because it pushes people to extremist solutions.

Weber joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss where we’re at, and more importantly, how to course correct so that markets can once again work for people, rather than the other way around.

For more on her book, click here.

After a rough day at work, Aaron Schroeder went home and did some soul searching. He decided to put his long-simmering frustrations down in writing, which turned into an email to his team of 40 employees.

He told them what had been eating at him – that he believed there were two existential threats in the world: climate change and rising income inequality.

As the founder and chief executive of Brightspot Climate, a Calgary-based greenhouse gas consultancy, he was determined to do whatever he could to address both. His company was already working at the first problem, but his answer for the second was simple – he planned to sell the company to his employees.

“It was my Jerry Maguire letter,” Schroeder told a conference last week in Vancouver, referring to the 1996 Tom Cruise film in which the title character pens an analogous message to his sports agency co-workers after having a similar epiphany.

“I showed up at the office the next day and no one said a word – people were shocked,” he said. “They weren’t expecting to get that letter, but it started the conversation.”

Schroeder related the story as part of a panel discussion at the third annual Employee Ownership Conference, where 175 attendees were celebrating a major win from earlier this year.

In 2024, the federal government introduced new rules that allowed for the formation of so-called employee-owned trusts (EOTs), complete with a capital gains exemption for owners on the first $10 million of a sale to such an entity. But that exemption was set to expire at the end of this year, until the government announced in April’s spring economic update that it was being made permanent.

EOT proponents were exhilarated with the news since it cleared the way – and created an enticement – for Canadian business owners to explore exit strategies that don’t involve being acquired and consolidated by competitors or private equity buyers.

Succession, Competition and Sovereignty

It’s a particularly poignant development given that Canada is facing a business succession crisis, with owners of up to three-quarters of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) planning exits over the next decade, representing $2 trillion of assets in play, according to Venture for Canada.

And it’s happening at a time when there is a major sovereignty push to keep Canadian businesses in Canadian hands.

So far, six companies in addition to Brightspot have converted to an EOT or have announced they are in the process of doing so: Toronto-based philanthropic consultancy Grantbook, Maple Ridge, B.C.-based social services provider Taproot, B.C.-based mapping firm Terra Remote Sensing, Toronto-based philanthropy-consulting firm KCI, Cambridge, Ont.-based transportation planning company Paradigm Transportation Solutions, and Barrie, Ont.-based recycling bin maker Busch Systems.

Around 20 more – many of whom were waiting to hear the fate of the tax exemption – are in the pipeline. Employee Ownership Canada, the non-profit advocacy group behind the conference, believes Canada will get to a rate of 100 conversions per year based on comparable numbers from the United Kingdom, where similar EOT rules were introduced in 2014. The U.K. has nearly 3,000 employee-owned firms, the majority of which are EOTs.

Schroeder said that selling his ownership stake to his employees via a trust, which Brightspot completed in April, has been transformative. Employees, who effectively get free shares in the company for as long as they work there and therefore earn dividends if it performs well, are more engaged, motivated and entrepreneurial.

“They’re stepping forward with ideas and suggestions. I anticipated some of that, but not to the level that we’re seeing,” he said. “That connection to the company is important to them and we’ll see [how it turns out] in the numbers.”

Speaking on the same panel, GeoRadar Group founder Will Meredith said his company’s conversion to employee ownership in 2021 has had similar effects.

The Burnaby, B.C.-based ground scanning firm’s move predated Canada’s establishment of EOT rules, so it converted to a more traditional structure where employees purchase ownership shares – known as as Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Nevertheless, the culture has similarly changed for the better and resulted in stronger growth and higher employee retention.

“It weeds out the people who are committed to your company versus those who aren’t,” Meredith said. “People seem to care more now.”

Lower Sale Prices and Delayed Payouts

ESOPs and EOTs each have their pluses and minuses. In moving to either, the owner first gets the value of their business assessed. If they decide to sell to employees, they may get a lower payout than they would if they sold to a strategic or private equity buyer, who often put premiums on taking out competitors.

When sold to an EOT, the new trust owner effectively takes on debt to finance the purchase, which the company must then pay off over time. That usually means the seller doesn’t get their payout up front and all at once, which they generally would if selling to a competitor or private equity.

Sellers can mitigate some of this by involving a minority shareholder, but the entire process usually appeals only to those individuals who are okay with continuing to be involved with their company for some time.

A direct ESOP sale can avoid the debt problem, but it raises the question of what happens to employees’ shares if and when they leave since they don’t automatically revert back to the company. Problems can arise, especially if a departure is acrimonious, which means that businesses choosing this route need to plan carefully.

ESOPs are also out of reach for certain types of businesses because of their very nature. Speaking on a different panel at the conference, Taproot CEO Michael Fotheringham explained how his social services company first chose the ESOP option, but with many of his 800 employees not being high earners, few could afford to buy stock, so take-up was low.

The company then pivoted to becoming an EOT, thus giving shares to employees for free. The conversion was important either way, he said, because of how active private equity is in acquiring health-care service providers, especially in the United States. Taproot celebrated its first “dividend day” last month.

“This was a way of keeping our culture and honouring our past,” Fotheringham said. “This gives our employees comfort that we’re here for the long term.”

The Mood is Changing

Gary Chung, managing director and head of middle market mergers and acquisitions at Bank of Montreal, told conference attendees that the mood among SME owners who are looking to sell is shifting away from simply seeking the highest possible price.

BMO has worked with ESOPs in the United States, where the bank has seen sellers looking for greater certainty – any deal with an outside buyer can fall apart at any moment – as well as a way to preserve their legacies. That same interest is showing up in Canada, with business owners contacting BMO looking to make the EOT transition, especially since the tax incentive was made permanent.

“People aren’t necessarily seeking that last dollar,” Chung said. “That is increasingly a more dominant thought. Five or six years ago the primary thing was: go get the highest number.”

The vibes at the conference – next year’s event is in Toronto – was thus jubilant, with attendees uniformly believing that a positive structural change in the economy is underway. More jurisdictions are embracing the concept of employee ownership, with Denmark and Slovenia recently enacting EOT rules. At least another three Canadian companies, meanwhile, are expected to convert by the end of this year.

Echoing Schroeder’s Jerry Maguire letter, GeoRadar’s Meredith said he believes employee ownership is an important part of the cure for the world’s current economic problems.

“If everyone owned a little piece of the business they work for, we’d be in a better position than we are now,” he said.

(Clarification added on EOT numbers in the U.K. and legislation status in Denmark and Slovenia.)

We’ll have more on employee ownership on next week’s Do Not Pass Go podcast.

🕹️ ENTERTAINMENT

The issue of employee ownership came into unfortunate focus this past weekend following the news that game giant EA is shuttering Edmonton-based BioWare.

The company, which was purchased in December by a group comprised of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, says it is going to focus on its biggest brands, which includes the Battlefield franchise and its various sports properties, such as FIFA. EA is laying off 400 employees, with 50 of those tied to BioWare.

The studio, which was founded in 1995, has produced some of the games industry’s most well-regarded franchises, including Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

NDP leader Avi Lewis condemned the news, blaming the shuttering on private equity’s playbook. He urged the federal government to help facilitate a sale of the studio to its employees.

“This is what [private equity] does. Buy up businesses, run them into the ground, and rip them apart for short-term profit,” he wrote on X/Twitter. “The developers at BioWare know how to run the studio. They know how to make the games we all love. They should be given the first opportunity — and the federal support — to buy it and run it themselves. And if we want to avoid the Mass Effect effect in Canada, we should be keeping private equity out, not welcoming it in.”

We’ll have more on BioWare shortly.

☎️ TELECOM

We’ve reported before on how telecom complaints have been skyrocketing, but it looks like we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.

The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS) reports it received “an unprecedented” volume of complaints for 2025-26, with 53,195 filed – 79 per cent higher than the previous year. The ombudsman accepted 41,235 of those, which was up by 74 per cent.

The organization warned that, although its resolution rate remains relatively high at 87.2 per cent, processing times are growing.

“This increase reflects unprecedented demand for our impartial, effective and free complaint-resolution services,” the CCTS said in a release. “While we continue to resolve most complaints early in our process, complaints requiring conciliation or investigation are taking longer than usual because of the significant increase in volume.”

Consumer advocates have been warning for some time that Canada’s telcos are slashing customer support in favour of artificial intelligence chatbots, which is leading to the steadily climbing complaint numbers.

“I’m expecting the next CCTS report, and several after, to be an absolute bloodbath,” Open Media director Matt Hatfield correctly predicted to Do Not Pass Go last month. “Big telecom companies are sharply slashing their customer service departments, replaced many agents with AI, and complaints were spiking before that took full force.”

The carriers, meanwhile, object to the CCTS even backstopping their dwindling customer support. TELUS, in its lobbying with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), believes the ombudsman is illegal and should be done away with.

“The CCTS’ authority is rooted in an unlawful subdelegation of powers from the Commission,” the company has told the regulator, which oversees the CCTS. 

• Telecom fee whack-a-mole was on full display last week with news emerging that ROGERS is adding a 1.6-per-cent processing charge to customers paying their bills via credit card. While Rogers says the practice is increasingly common among merchants, it’s hard not to connect it to a decline in the company’s latest wireless revenue numbers. Rogers last week said that figure was down one per cent for the third quarter, with average revenue per user (ARPU) down 2.6 per cent. The blame was laid squarely at the feet of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which in June banned service activation, modification and cancellation fees. “These fees… were initially designed to recover specific costs within our business, and so we’re now moving back to finding alternatives for covering those costs,” chief financial officer Glenn Brandt told investors during the company’s earnings call. Whack!

✈️ AIRLINES

Remember when Air Canada tried to get out of paying compensation to a passenger by claiming that its chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions? One would think the airline would have learned its lesson after a judge laughed the company out of court, but that doesn’t appear to be the case according to a story last week in the Toronto Star.

When retired teacher Michael Pogor recently booked a flight to Europe for himself and his family, he paid $56.75 for each of them to pick their seats. Except, when he checked his credit card shortly after completing the transaction, it turned out he had actually paid $91 for each.

When he contacted the airline, the explanation he received is that it was “dynamic pricing” that changed the seat cost in the few brief moments between selection and checkout.

Pogor got a refund after the Star story embarrassed Air Canada but, as air passenger rights advocate Gabor Lukacs told the paper, it’s clear the airline is still trying to blame the technology it uses “as a way of trying to make the passenger go away.”

• Speaking of AIR CANADA, booking a ticket with the airline over the phone now costs an additional $30 per person. The airline is trying to push people to book their flights online, presumably so they can emulate the telcos and eliminate their existing customer service agents. (WESTJET and FLAIR also charge for phone service.)

⛷️ SPORTS & LEISURE

The lawsuits involving Vail Resorts are piling up, with another shareholder action the latest to take aim against the Colorado-based ski resort company.

The new case is from company shareholder Thomas Stewart, who says eight directors and chief executive Rob Katz have allowed a ski pass price-fixing scheme to run unchecked, which has exposed Vail to other lawsuits.

This case, filed on Oct. 5, is the second shareholder lawsuit, with both claiming that Katz and the directors failed to prevent behaviour that led to a pair of antitrust claims being filed against Vail earlier this year.

Those lawsuits allege that Vail – which owns 42 resorts around the world, including Whistler-Blackcomb in British Columbia – steered customers to its Epic Pass by steeply raising prices on daily tickets. The suits also allege that Vail effectively conspired with its chief competitor ALTERRA to raise prices by publicly signalling their intentions to one another.

The class-actions are seeking restitution for consumers while the shareholder lawsuits – known as derivative actions – are arguing that Katz and the directors harmed Vail Resorts itself. The shareholder cases are seeking reforms to corporate governance.

The company has denied wrongdoing in each of the cases.

🛒 GROCERIES

Food insecurity continues to grow unabated in Canada, with food bank visits hitting a new record of more than 2.3 million in March, according to an organization that tracks such numbers.

The visit numbers were up 8.7 per cent from a year earlier, Food Banks Canada says in its latest HungerCount report, with nearly 10 million Canadians – almost a quarter of the population – experiencing food insecurity.

The report notes that food prices have increased by about 30 per cent since 2021, with other studies noting that Canada routinely leads the G7 in food inflation.

The Competition Bureau has launched several actions and reviews into the sector, after noting in a 2023 report that the industry is dominated by LOBLAW, METRO and EMPIRE.

“The Bureau agrees that Canada needs more grocery competition. The Canadian grocery industry is concentrated,” the watchdog said in its report at the time. “While this is not the sole reason grocery prices are high, more competition in the industry could drive down prices.”

🏦 BANKING

Canada’s financial services watchdog is warning that the country’s banks are charging unclear fees that discourage competition. While fees are typically small, they’re not always obvious and together can add up to large amounts, according to a review by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) released Friday.

“Canadians should be able to clearly understand what they are paying for,” said FCAC commissioner Shereen Benzvy Miller in a statement. “When fees make the full cost harder to see, it affects both affordability and competition.”

The federal government requested in last year’s budget that FCAC examine the structure, level and transparency of bank fees. The review’s key observations include:

• Point-in-time disclosures do not always help consumers understand cumulative banking costs.

• Consumers may not know the total cost of some transactions before completing them.

• Personalized, usage-based information could help consumers better understand and manage fees.

• Limited transparency around some fees, including foreign exchange costs and cross-border debit fees, may make comparisons more difficult.

FCAC said its findings provide evidence to help inform broader policy discussions “on transparency, comparability, switching and competition, including the potential benefits of consumer-driven banking.”

U.S. competition authorities had launched a wave of cases against dominant companies while their Canadian counterparts were celebrating hard-fought battles to strengthen laws and budgets with the intention of doing the same.

But then Donald Trump took office for the second time and that momentum stopped.

High-profile U.S. cases against the likes of Google, Facebook and Live Nation fizzled and the Paramount-Warner Bros. mega-merger went through, while the Canadian government pivoted to focusing on sovereignty.

With the U.S. mid-terms just a few weeks away and the Democrats looking to take back control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, it’s worth asking what sort of effect – if any – the impending flip will have on antitrust.

If Trump is reined in, will competition enforcement be back on the menu in the U.S.? And if Congress can staunch some of the hostility the U.S. is showing towards its supposed allies, can those countries – including Canada – get back to focusing on their own internal issues?

Here to answer those questions is David Dayen, executive editor of American Prospect and co-host of the Organized Money podcast.

David is an expert on U.S. antitrust and, while he’s not currently optimistic about the state of competition enforcement right now, he does believe that a Democrat win could blunt some of the current administration’s worst excesses.

A food fight has erupted in Montreal’s Jewish community, with a west-end deli owner accusing the city’s biggest kosher authority of running an anti-competitive monopoly that is allegedly driving up the cost of meat for consumers.

Mendy Boyarsky, who opened Aleph Meats at the Cavendish Mall this past spring, is asking the Competition Tribunal for leave to argue an abuse-of-dominance case against the Jewish Community Council, which operates the MK Kosher certification agency and brand.

In documents filed with the Tribunal, Boyarsky alleges that MK – “Montreal’s oldest and most well-known kosher certifier” – is using exclusivity arrangements to prevent retailers, banquet halls and other commercial operators from selling meat certified under standards other than its own. This “stranglehold” is allegedly raising prices and jeopardizing his business.

“The respondent’s control over the kosher meat market has kept prices artificially high in an era where Canadians are experiencing high food price inflation and where the Jewish community has faced issues of supply of kosher meat,” reads Aleph Meats’ memorandum.

“Accordingly, the applicant is not able to expand its business and is being directly and substantially affected by the respondent’s exclusionary and abusive practices.”

In an attached affidavit, Boyarsky says he’s able to sell products at lower prices than MK-approved competitors because he sources his meat from a supplier in Argentina and certifies it through KSR, a smaller agency that is not affiliated with the JCC.

But a special deal with the supplier that allows him to order relatively small quantities of meat will expire by June, meaning that he will need access to larger commercial customers if he is to continue his business.

With his filing, Boyarsky is availing himself of recently introduced amendments to the Competition Act that allow private individuals to argue against an alleged abuse of dominance on behalf of the public interest, as well as existing provisions relating to direct effects on their own business.

“It could be turned into a very lucrative business and at the same time, it could help the community dramatically,” Boyarsky told Do Not Pass Go in an interview. “If you go into the supermarket in Toronto or New York, you have 20 guys competing in the meat market. Everybody’s competing, everybody’s undercutting each other, but here in Montreal you have one player, that’s it.”

In its response filings, the JCC says Boyarsky has not produced evidence of exclusive agreements and that any omissions or blockages by commercial customers of his products are results of their own business decisions. Customers are free to sell meat certified by other agencies, but if they do, MK says it must conduct an inspection to ensure the products meet its own certifications.

“MK does not prevent merchants or restaurants from obtaining another kosher certification and MK does not withhold or cancel its certification of a restaurant or of a counter because that latter obtained another kosher certification,” the filing reads.

“We do insist that all products served in those places meet our standards for every product, and in some cases we recognise another kosher certification, and if not we carry out our own verication [sic].”

The organization says Boyarsky is effectively trying to acquire MK certification by sidestepping the official process.

“He wants to be in the MK section with meat that is not certified by the MK, that he never asked the MK to certify, that he never approached the MK to certify, and to go through the process, and wants to force the MK to accept his certification,” Rabbi Haim Nataf told Do Not Pass Go. “That’s unacceptable… he’s trying to impose judicially an MK acceptance [or] certification to KSR meat.”

The JCC’s filings also accuse Boyarsky of holding a grudge over a decision made by the organization’s Beth Din. The rabbinical court ruled against him last year in a financial dispute with another member of the community, and that is now driving the current action, the filings say. Boyarsky disputes the accusation.

“That’s nonsense,” he says. “Even if I did have a vendetta, which I don’t, if an injustice is being done, it should be rectified.”

Boyarsky’s affidavit contains transcripts of recorded phone conversations he had with two vendors in which he attempted to get them to sell Aleph Meats products.

“Given that we have an MK certification for my store… ugh… I can’t... I can’t bring in any other... ugh... any other stock, otherwise ... I risk losing my certification and then I’ll lose my clientele, who comes here only for the MK certification that I have,” IGA Van Horne representative Vacho Lavchev is quoted as saying.

“Dude, are you on crack?” Moishe Rosenblum, owner of deli and caterer Cité Cachère, is quoted as saying. “Like, you know that I’m under the ‘MK,’ so I cannot use or sell your meat and you know that.”

Lavchev could not be reached for comment, while Rosenblum declined to speak about the recording, which was made without his knowledge. (Phone conversations can be legally recorded in Canada as long as at least one party is aware that it is happening.)

The case is awaiting a decision from the Competition Tribunal on whether or not it will be granted leave to proceed.

🥊 COMPETITION

Appearing at the Canadian Bar Association’s fall conference last week, Acting Competition Commissioner Jeanne Pratt made an impassioned speech in support of anti-monopoly and anti-market abuse initiatives in a time of sovereignty building.

The address was something of a counterpoint to our podcast interview above, in which former commissioner John Pecman suggests closer integration between the federal government and the Competition Bureau, or even its subordination to cabinet ministers.

Pratt took aim at the school of thought that is pushing the government to favour big companies, even if it’s at the expense of more competitive outcomes.

“Against the backdrop of Canada’s economic challenges, there is an argument we increasingly hear: Canada is a relatively small economy. Our businesses compete against firms with access to much larger markets. We need more investment. We need big, strong companies capable of weathering the storm,” she said.

“And that leads some to ask whether, in circumstances like these, we should give greater priority to encouraging scale and national champions, and perhaps less priority to competitive domestic markets.”

That’s not the answer, said Pratt, who has been serving as the enforcement agency’s top cop since Matthew Boswell stepped down as commissioner in December.

“Competition is not just a priority for periods of economic growth,” said Pratt. “Competition is one of the things that makes our economy stronger in difficult times.”

The government officially closed applications for commissioner in April but has still not named anyone to the job full time. Pratt is widely believed to have applied for the role, but she has declined to comment on it.

Check out the full speech here.

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

Speaking of the Competition Bureau, its case against DoorDash kicked off at Canada’s competition court last week with the agency testifying that the food delivery company is engaging in illegal drip pricing.

Bureau representatives presented evidence showing additional fees being added at the checkout stage, with some of those charges being incorrectly identified as taxes.

The San Francisco-based company has countered by arguing that DoorDash customers are experienced online users who intrinsically understand that upfront menu prices generally do not include additional fees such as taxes and delivery charges, and that those are added on later.

The Bureau is asking the Competition Tribunal to order DoorDash to cease the surcharge practice, to stop portraying additional fees as taxes, and to pay a penalty. Hearings continue this week with final oral arguments to be made on Nov. 2 and 3.

The Bureau won a similar case against Cineplex in 2024, with the court ordering the theatre chain to pay $39 million. That ruling is still under appeal.

🍿 ENTERTAINMENT

Speaking of Cineplex, the theatre chain last week reported its strongest September box office results ever, with revenue topping $45 million for the month – a 120-per-cent improvement over the same period last year.

The take was buoyed by the continued strong performance of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, as well as the unexpected success of Resident Evil. Cineplex also attributed the results to premium formats such as IMAX accounting for more than half of third-quarter revenues, also a record, and noted that average box-office-per-patron exceeded $14 for the first time ever.

The company is unsurprisingly pumping up its numbers as it potentially searches for a buyer, but there’s a potential caveat to the results. Though Cineplex says in its press release that “moviegoers increasingly chose premium formats to enhance their theatrical experience,” attendees may not always have much choice between premium and regular tickets – especially when it comes to major releases.

For example, only premium advance tickets are typically available for Avengers: Doomsday, one of the upcoming holiday seasons’ biggest expected films:

When reached, the company – which accounts for around three-quarters of the box office in Canada – declined to disclose attendance figures comparing this September to last year.

• The battle over live event tickets is kicking into high gear in the United States, with a pair of high-profile lawsuits filed last week. First up are platforms including TICKETMASTER, STUBHUB, SEATGEEK and VIVID SEATS, who are suing the city of Washington, D.C. for putting a price cap on resold tickets. The companies say the cap, which limits resale prices to 10 per cent above face value, is unfair and could lead to increased fraud. They also say that forcing resellers to reveal the original prices of tickets is a violation of the First Amendment. This is interesting to watch in Canada, given that jurisdictions here are increasingly banning or putting caps on resale.

• On the flip side, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is suing California-based REPS & CO. for allegedly evading purchasing restrictions to buy millions of tickets to events that the broker then resold at big markups. In one example provided by the FTC, the company used 1,3000 accounts to buy 7,624 tickets to a single 2023 Beyonce concert in Kansas City, Miss., generating $833,000 in profit. The company had yet not responded to allegations as of Friday.

🏠 REAL ESTATE

A complex class-action lawsuit regarding real estate brokerage commissions has cleared another hurdle, with the Federal Court of Appeal last week rejecting a slew of attempts to throw out the case.

Toronto resident Mark Sunderland originally initiated the lawsuit in 2021 after he sold a property and paid a standard five-per-cent commission to the buyer’s agent. Sunderland alleged that a number of brokerage firms had conspired, agreed or arranged to maintain, increase or control the price for the supply of buyer broker services for residential real estate in the Greater Toronto Area.

He further alleged that certain other parties, including the CANADIAN REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATION, the TORONTO REGIONAL REAL ESTATE BOARD and several real estate franchisors, had aided and abetted those firms in connection with the conspiracy.

The Federal Court in 2023 struck out Sunderland’s claims against franchisors of the named organizations, such as CENTURY 21 and SUTTON, but allowed the suit to continue against the brokerages and associations. Both Sunderland and the defendants appealed, but the court has now upheld the earlier decision. The case has yet to be certified as a class-action and the parties could seek a further appeal with the Supreme Court.

• Meanwhile next door in la belle province, the Competition Bureau last week settled a dispute with QUEBEC PROFESSIONAL REAL ESTATE BROKERS over the organization’s misuse of property data. The agency found that the organization and its subsidiary Societé Céntris was abusing its dominance by refusing or omitting to make a real estate data feed available to its members and restricting how information could be used. The practices were impeding innovation and limiting competition in the real estate brokerage services market, the Bureau said. As part of the settlement, the organization has agreed to provide members with a feed that includes information on sale prices, listing history, property characteristics and other details.

💾 BIG TECH

And yet more news out of Quebec… this time around how iPhones can and can’t be used on TV. La Presse has a fascinating story about how the Radio-Canada production Antigang isn’t allowed to show criminals using the APPLE devices for fear of legal action by the company, which expressly prohibits such uses.

Apple also doesn’t want its iPhones shown to be hacked, used while driving or facilitating online harassment. Faced with what they believe to be a set of ridiculous demands, show producers say they have officially switched to Android devices.

So there’s a spoiler – if you’re ever watching a show or movie where you’re not sure who the villain is, just check out what kind of phone they’re using.

Earlier this summer, the Competition Bureau announced it was challenging an attempt by Quebec-based food processor Nortera to acquire canned and frozen vegetable brands Green Giant and Le Sieur from New Jersey-based B&G Foods.

The competition watchdog said the deal was a merger to monopoly that would give Nortera 90 per cent of the canned vegetable market and 80 per cent in frozen, which would lead to higher prices for consumers. The company said the deal was necessary to protect its business and Canada’s food safety against cheaper imports.

As reported here, Nortera managed to convince the federal government of that argument, leading to tariffs being placed on imports and a review of the market by the Canadian International Trade Tribunal. That body last month ruled that imports were indeed harming domestic processors, and that tariffs were justified.

Though Nortera and B&G abandoned their deal earlier this month, the case highlighted the differing priorities – and the growing conflict – between the Competition Bureau and the federal government.

On the one hand, the Bureau is applying new powers and funding that took years to acquire in protecting markets and consumers from abuses of dominance. On the other hand, the government is fighting a trade war and backing transactions that solidify sovereignty.

Former competition commissioner John Pecman – now an advisor at Fasken’s law firm – is among those who has recognized this growing disconnect in consumer and industrial policies.

In a new piece for the C.D. Howe Institute, he says the conflict isn’t necessary and that Canada will be better served by closer co-ordination between the government and the Competition Bureau.

Pecman joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how this could work, including the introduction of a mechanism that would allow cabinet ministers to veto merger challenges by the watchdog when it comes to sectors designated as nationally sensitive.

Read his intelligence memo here.

Have you ever seen a food item advertised in a flyer for one price, only to then see that same product selling for less at another store, or even in the one that offered the promotion in the first place?

That may be a phenomenon known as minimum advertised pricing – a situation where a retailer isn’t allowed to promote a lower price than one that has been agreed upon, or that is being forced on them by a supplier.

Minimum advertising pricing may be anti-competitive and contributing to higher food prices by preventing retailers from promoting better deals, which is why the Competition Bureau has launched an investigation into it.

Acting Commissioner of Competition Jeanne Pratt joined us last week to field some questions about minimum advertising pricing and its potential role in groceries, as well as other markets. Here’s an edited version of that conversation:

How do you define minimum advertised pricing and how can it be harmful?

Minimum advertised pricing policies restrict the ability of a store to advertise discounted prices, so that makes it more difficult for consumers who in the grocery industry use flyers, social media and a lot of other advertising to decide where they’re going to put their demand.

If a store can’t advertise that lower price, even though they might be able to offer it, we’re concerned that that will disincentivize that retailer from offering the lower price in the first place because they can’t use it to attract that demand.

Are these sorts of agreements typically imposed by the suppliers or do some of the larger retailers also have the ability to require them? How does this generally work?

That’s another question we’re looking to examine in depth. We’re aware that in some cases they can be imposed by suppliers or processors, but we’re also aware that they may be the subject of agreement between a manufacturer and a retailer. We really do want to want to see what are all the permutations of these over what products in the grocery store and who stands to gain and who stands to lose, but also how does that focus our attention on how that can impact the competitive process.

And this is happening, right? Just the other day I was in the market for a big can of powdered iced tea and I saw online that Walmart and No Frills were selling it for like $17 or $18, but Costco had it for $16. So I went to Costco and then they actually had it there for only $8. There could be many reasons for that, but does that hint at what we’re talking about here?

Yes, although I would say what we’re concerned about is that these minimum advertised pricings might actually disincentivize you getting that $8 price in the first place. That’s great that you were able to get an even lower price but you may not have gone to that store if it wasn’t advertised at the 16 bucks, right? So you may have missed out on that deal.

We’re investigating. We haven’t made any any findings, but it does lead to questions about whether that practice could soften competition between retailers because a lot of discounters, if they can’t advertise the price, they may not offer a lower price and that means that consumers are losing out on discounts and it means that we may be seeing that there’s less of an incentive to offer that lower price than the softening between retailers in terms of price competition overall.

The point of this really is to find out what’s going on. Find out how widespread this practice is, how many grocery products are covered by this practice and who may or may not be benefitting from these policies.

We also want to look into what the rationale for these policies is in the retail grocery industry. We do see these types of minimum advertised pricing practises as justifiable in cases where you might be buying really specialized photography equipment or stereo equipment or something where the manufacturer actually has to make an investment in training staff and making promotional products. That minimum advertised price may actually be justifiable where they have to support a level of service and training but we don’t see that kind of rationale applying to food in the grocery store.

Are there any other reasons why you’re focusing on groceries? The Bureau recently got a bunch of extra funding specifically to look at competition issues in the grocery sector – is that part of it?

You may have noticed over the last few months that the Bureau’s been focused on food and that’s really because Canadians are facing significant affordability challenges in food. There may be a number of factors that are contributing to that, but we want to make sure that competition is doing its job to ease affordability pressures.

That’s why we’ve done things like our study on “behind the price tag,” because we recognize that the cost of food and the price of food starts much further up in the supply chain than what’s reflected at the checkout. We’re doing that work to see if all along the food supply chain, are there areas where competition isn’t working well or are there barriers to competition working well?

You may have also noticed we took action on property controls, which was another barrier to competition in the grocery sector that we identified. I don’t think it’s any secret, it’s a priority for us because it’s a priority for Canadians and and we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to ease those affordability pressures by doing our jobs to make sure competition can do its job to offer the benefits, which is lower prices, better quality and some innovation along the way.

Some independent grocers are concerned about this investigation. They figure that if these pricing agreements are banned, it’ll actually benefit the large retailers as they’ll be able to advertise prices that the smaller guys can’t match. How much of that are you taking under consideration?

As noted, we’re looking for information, so we haven’t made any findings. We really want to get information from everyone. But I would say too that our job is not to protect independent competitors, our job is to protect the competitive process and make sure that it’s working well and the benefits flow through to the consumer. This is exactly the kind of information we’re seeking to collect so that we can understand why these policies may exist, how widespread they are, who benefits and whether and to what extent they may be softening competition in retail grocery prices.

Is there a timeline on this investigation?

It’s a priority for us in our annual plan. Anything related to food affordability is going to be a strategic priority for our organization so we are going to try and go as quickly as we can. That being said, it is an investigation and it will depend on how the investigation unfolds and what pace the facts come in.

🥊 COMPETITION

A little known but potentially important piece of legislation is currently winding its way through the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy. Senators and witnesses last week debated Bill S-239, or the “Canadian Prosperity Act,” which seeks to make federal and provincial governments answerable to recommendations put forward in industry inquiries conducted by the Competition Bureau.

As the Bureau notes in its submission to the committee, “there is no requirement for governments or regulators to respond to recommendations arising from these studies, leaving uncertainty about whether recommendations have been considered or why they may not have been pursued.”

A case in point was the Bureau’s first such inquiry last year into the airline industry, which featured 10 recommendations including encouraging new airlines to enter the market by removing barriers that limit smaller airports from competing with major hubs, requiring the publication of deeper industry data, and lowering foreign ownership restrictions on airlines. As we noted here back in November, that report seems to have been ignored by the government.

Bill S-239, sponsored by Senator Marty Klyne, would require a federal institution to respond to such recommendations within 120 days of their publication, while provincial counterparts would have the option of responding – though the competition commissioner could publicly note if no response was received.

The bill has passed through two readings at the Senate and continues to be considered in committee.

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

Few things get people madder than messing with the price of their hamburgers. Just days after Reuters reported that MCDONALD’S was using surveillance pricing to charge customers differently - and the company denying it – a class-action lawsuit has been filed in Chicago.

The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 2, alleges that the burger chain is breaking the law by allowing independent franchise locations to swap non-public price and sales data.

“McDonald’s has built and for years deployed its own information-sharing pricing platform, which draws on data from its millions of daily transactions to set menu prices across thousands of U.S. restaurants,” the filing reads. “The result is algorithmic price-fixing aimed at customers who are already stretched thin.”

As with its quick rebuttal of the Reuters article, McDonald’s swiftly responded to the suit by saying it does not use AI to set menu prices. “Optional tools are available to franchisees to help them make the best decisions for their businesses and customers, but these tools do not automate, coordinate or fix pricing in any way,” the company said.

• Speaking of the quick-serve food market, STARBUCKS is reportedly exploring a takeover of CHIPOTLE. The Financial Times reported on Thursday that the coffee giant is looking to combine forces with the burrito purveyor in an attempt to shore up profitability at both businesses. The connective tissue in such a deal would be Brian Niccol, who left Chipotle to take the chief executive job at Starbucks two years ago. Starbucks didn’t deny the report on Friday, but said it was focused on executing a turnaround strategy. The coffee chain has more than 41,000 locations worldwide with more than 1,400 of those in Canada, while Chipotle has more than 4,000 globally, including about 80 here.

• The Competition Bureau scored a big win last week with NORTERA announcing it was scrapping a deal to acquire canned and vegetable food brands from B&G FOODS. The Bureau this summer filed an official challenge of the Quebec-based company’s planned purchase of the Green Giant and Le Sieur brands from New Jersey-based B&G, saying it was a “merger to monopoly” that would lead to higher prices for consumers. Nortera, which already owns the Del Monte and Arctic Gardens brands, said it needed the deal to protect its business from cheaper foreign imports. For more on this, check out the “Coming Up” section below.

• The Weston family, owners of LOBLAW and SHOPPERS DRUG MART, is expanding its retail empire into the United Kingdom with the purchase of pharmacy chain BOOTS. The $12.7-billion deal will give the family’s holding company, Wittington Investments, approximately 1,800 stores in the U.K. and Ireland, the No7 beauty brand and Boots’ franchise arm in Thailand. The deal is being backed by investment firm FAIRFAX, which owns SPORTING LIFE and SLEEP COUNTRY, which itself expanded into the United States this summer by acquiring retailer SLEEP NUMBER. The Boots purchase marks the Westons’ return to the U.K. after selling off the Selfridges department store chain in 2022.

🛢️ RESOURCES

• Another week, another flurry of mergers-and-acquisition activity in Canada’s resource sector. First up last Monday was CENOVUS announcing a $5.7-billion acquisition of ATHABASCA OIL, a deal the companies say has been sped up by several moves by the federal government. Among those was the feds designating a new oil pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia as the first national interest project, as well as the recently announced productivity mega-deduction that allows firms to write off up to two-thirds of capital investments. Cenovus believes the new measures will allow it to nearly triple Athabasca’s current oilsands production of 40,000 barrels a day by 2032.

• Over on the other side of the country, SUNCOR also on Monday announced that it is selling its stakes in three Newfoundland and Labrador offshore oil projects to U.K.-based ITHACA ENERGY. Calgary-based Suncor says the deal for its 48-per-cent interest in Terra Nova, 40-per-cent stake in White Rose and 38.6-per-cent share of West White Rose is worth $1.2 billion plus an additional contingent payment of $350 million, based on future oil prices. The company says that despite the sale, it is keeping its stakes in the Hibernia and Hebron projects near Newfoundland and Labrador.

• And rounding out the resource news, Halifax-based EMERA and Calgary-based CANADIAN UTILITIES on Tuesday announced that they were merging to form a new energy “powerhouse.” The new firm will be worth $72 billion and rank among North America’s largest utilities, setting them up to better compete with other, similarly consolidating companies, according to the executives who announced the deal. But some observers aren’t so sure, with The Globe and Mail’s analysis pointing out that the two firms’ main operations – in Florida and Alberta, respectively – don’t have a lot in common. “Is bigger actually better?” the paper asks. “So far, the answer’s pretty murky.”

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• Newly minted entertainment megalith SKYDANCE, of PARAMOUNT and WARNER BROS. fame, is going to be laying off employees soon, according to a company memo obtained by Variety. Chairman and chief executive David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kriez informed staff of the impending cuts in a memo sent out on Tuesday, just after the companies closed their $111-billion (U.S.) merger. “Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” they said in the memo. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.” The new company is carrying approximately $80 billion in debt and executives say they want to achieve $6 billion in cost savings within the first three years.

The comparison is apt, according to Cameron Fenton. In a recent investigation for The Walrus, the B.C.-based travel and outdoors journalist looked into Camis Inc., the “Ticketmaster of camping” that controls the biggest and most popular campsite reservation systems in Canada.

Besides this being a market dominance story, it’s also a sovereignty issue. Despite originating in Canada, Camis is now U.S.-owned and is pulling millions out of federal and provincial parks – money that Fenton says could be reinvested to meet growing demand.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to explain why it may be time to repatriate Canada’s camping booking systems and break one company’s dominance.

Read Fenton’s article here.

Canada’s small- and medium-sized business lobby and the federal government are in disagreement over the state of entrepreneurialism and red tape in the country, with internal official documents pouring cold water on claims of a crisis.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents more than 103,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), shared its “Canada’s Entrepreneurial Drought” report with Innovation, Science and Economic Development officials both before and after the government’s spring economic update on Apr. 28.

The report noted that Canada is experiencing a sustained period of business exits outpacing starts, making for “one of the most challenging environments in decades.” Exit rates reached 5.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2025 while entry rates fell to 4.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of the year, marking some of the highest closure rates and weakest startup activity outside the pandemic, according to the report, which was released publicly on Apr. 15.

CFIB representatives met with ISED officials including assistant deputy minister for small business and tourism marketplace services Etienne-Rene Massie on Apr. 30, two days after the economic update, to discuss the report and to make a swath of recommendations on how to reverse the trend.

In briefing materials prepared for the meeting under the heading, “Question: Is Canada experiencing an entrepreneurial drought?” ISED pushed back on the CFIB’s numbers. While acknowledging that business exits have exceeded entries since early 2024 and that the difference increased in 2025, the notes highlight that CFIB was using “an experimental data set from Statistics Canada” to come to its conclusions.

“Amid economic fluctuation, there has actually been an increase in the number of small businesses since 2019 according to figures published by Statistics Canada,” read the notes, which were acquired by Do Not Pass Go through an access-to-information request.

“While recent tariffs are creating economic uncertainty for entrepreneurs and dampening investment, the overall impact remains contained amid resilient domestic demand and government support.”

In their presentation, CFIB officials identified three priority areas for government action: reducing the cost of doing business by lowering tax burdens that would then improve access to financing and government programs and procurement processes; cutting red tape by removing regulatory burdens that would streamline internal trade; and responding to the evolving labour market by protecting access to temporary foreign workers, supporting workplace development and smoothing business succession.

Those priorities were supplemented by 16 specific recommendations:

• Increasing remission thresholds for GST and payroll deductions.

• Simplifying work-from-home reporting.

• Simplifying the disability tax credit form.

• Reinstating payroll services exemption.

• Extending excise renewal periods.

• Removing internal barriers to the movement of food.

• Exempting more drivers under the Electronic Logging Devices mandate.

• Amending flight duty time limits.

• Exempting SMEs from some import systems.

• Improving Canada Revenue Agency customer service.

• Simplifying the tariff remission process.

• Reducing application and information requests in the child care sector.

• Providing clearer guidance on fish medicines.

• Clarifying animal health care regulations.

• Removing barriers for SMEs applying for federal procurement under the Buy Canada First initiative.

• Reducing paperwork for doctors.

ISED’s briefing notes contain a rebuttal list of “concrete actions” the government has taken to help SMEs diversify their markets and remain resilient, including:

• The Regional Tariff Response Initiative, which is providing $1 billion over three years to support SMEs affected by tariffs.

• Information, tools and support via Global Affairs Canada to help businesses navigate U.S. tariffs and export duty-free under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement.

• Export Development Canada’s $5 billion Trade Impact Program to help businesses diversify away from U.S. markets.

• The Business Development Bank’s $500 million Pivot to Grow program that provides loans to SMEs affected by tariffs.

• And Farm Credit Canada’s Trade Disruption Customer Support, which is a $1 billion investment to provide financing for farmers affected by tariffs.

An email after the meeting from Massie to Michelle Auger, the CFIB’s director of national affairs, trade and marketplace competitiveness, highlighted the gulf between the organization’s requests and ISED’s responses.

“It will be interesting to see if the [disability tax credit] changes help reduce the paperwork burden identified in the list (trying to find some victories wherever we can),” he wrote.

The CFIB has been busy on Parliament Hill since the spring economic update, logging at least 49 communications with public office holders, including meetings with ISED Minister Melanie Joly, Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne and Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu.

In an interview, the organization’s director for Alberta and inter-provincial affairs Keyli Loeppky expressed frustration that the government hasn’t take the same measures to reduce red tape and regulatory burdens for SMEs as it has for large businesses.

“Government hasn’t taken any concrete steps in order to do things like improve government customer service,” she said. “Take a look at government forms and wait times and how long it’s taking to get back to the everyday individual or the small business owner. How long does it take to get someone on the phone at CRA?”

In an emailed response, ISED said last year’s budget introduced measures to modernize government services and procurement processes, streamline construction processes and ease the regulatory burden on financial institutions to unlock more private capital.

The President of the Treasury Board, Shafqat Ali, also launched a government-wide review in July 2025, aimed at eliminating outdated and overly complicated regulations that raise costs, reduce productivity and stifle economic growth.

“The review promoted innovation and better service delivery through modern tools and clearer, faster approvals,” said spokesperson Cheyenne Daly.

“In response to the review, ministers with regulatory responsibilities conducted reviews within their portfolios and released public progress reports within 60 days, to share early achievements and describe next steps. Across these reports, ministers identified approximately 500 recent achievements and forward-looking actions to reduce regulatory red tape.”

ISED also pointed to the recently announced Productivity Mega Deduction, which expands business’ ability to write off up to two-thirds of capital investments as a measure that will help entrepreneurs.

But nearly a third of SMEs are struggling financially and aren’t in a position to invest in capital and productivity measures, according to the CFIB.

“These measures won’t help them,” said vice-president of national affairs Jasmin Guénette in an interview. “Reducing the regulatory burden is the fastest and cheapest way to help businesses grow, expand and thrive.”

SPONSORED BY PLAN INTERNATIONAL CANADA

Proof She Exists

One in five children worldwide doesn’t officially exist.

Globally, nearly 150 million children under age five remain unregistered. Without proof of her identity, a girl can be denied education, health care and protection, putting her at greater risk of exploitation, abuse and exclusion.

On October 11, International Day of the Girl, Plan International Canada is making the invisible visible. It’s a day we helped establish at the United Nations over 15 years ago, and a reminder that before a girl can access her rights, she must first be seen.

A birth certificate is the first step. But being seen also means having your voice heard and your potential recognized.

When girls can shape their own futures, everyone benefits. Families are healthier, economies grow, and communities become more resilient.

Watch the six-minute film: I Have a Name.

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

DO NOT PASS GO CELEBRATES ONE YEAR!

Twelve months of breaking news and uncovering monopoly issues, expansion incoming, and The Hatchet’s Arshy Mann joins us for a competition state-of-the-union talk

🥊 COMPETITION

• Canada’s growing relations with Europe may be about to take an interesting turn as it pertains to competition regulation and enforcement. According to a leaked joint statement draft on the subject to be issued at this week’s summit between the two in Montreal, Canada and Europe are looking at closer cooperation and integration on antitrust issues: “We have concluded negotiations on a second-generation competition agreement that strengthens cooperation between competition authorities, to effectively address anti-competitive conduct and foster a more open, innovative and competitive marketplace for businesses and consumers.” The news has the pro-competition crowd excited, with the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project pointing out that this agreement is shaping up to be the first government-to-government cooperation initiative. “It won’t surprise readers that we’re thrilled with this development,” read the think tank’s newsletter this weekend.

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

• The COMPETITION BUREAU is investigating the use of minimum advertised prices by grocery chains, which are policies that can be imposed on retailers by suppliers or agreements between the two parties. These minimum advertised prices – which consumers often see in flyers or mobile apps – may be harming competition, the Bureau says, since they can prevent the retailers from selling products for even less. Smaller grocers, however, say that preventing such advertising policies could do more harm than good as it would give the large chains even more power to set prices. “The big guys will use power and leverage to push down the price on suppliers,” a representative of the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers tells The Globe and Mail. “An independent grocer can’t do that, we don’t have that power.”

• Fast-food purveyor MCDONALD’S found itself in the hot seat last week after a Reuters investigation found that the chain was using artificial intelligence to recommend different prices for menu items based on customers’ willingness to pay. U.S. franchisees interviewed said they were being pressured into adopting the technology, which turned up dramatically different prices for the same items at separate restaurants in close proximity to one another – a Big Mac at a location in Fresno, California, for example, was 20-per-cent more expensive than one at another location just two miles away. The company fired back after the report with a “separating fact from fiction” post on its website, where it denies using AI or dynamic pricing. Differentiated pricing between locations is a standard business practice, the company says, with factors such as “local costs, customer demand competition and economic conditions” playing roles.

🕺 SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT

• Say goodbye to PARAMOUNT and WARNER BROS., sort of, and say hello to SKYDANCE. That’s the official name of the about-to-be newly merged company, with the studios retaining their respective names as divisions of the combined entity. Chief executive David Ellison made the announcement Friday after getting court approval earlier in the week of a settlement with the 12 U.S. states that were fighting the $111-billion (U.S.) mega-deal.

• Cable giant ROGERS has completed its $4.35-billion takeover of MAPLE LEAF SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT, acquiring the 25-per-cent it did not own from minority stakeholder Larry Tanenbaum. The company says it will create a new business unit, Rogers Sports, to oversee the associated properties, which will include the Blue Jays, Maple Leafs, Raptors, Toronto FC and Argonauts. Rogers says its combined sports and media assets are worth $25 billion, with the company planning to sell stakes in them by the first half of next year.

• A U.S. court has tossed an attempt by TICKETMASTER and its parent LIVE NATION to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission’s scalping case against them. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong last week allowed the FTC’s lawsuit, which alleges that Ticketmaster has willingly turned a blind eye to large-scale usage of bots to inflate ticket prices on its platform, to go ahead under the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS). The suit, which seven U.S. states have joined, argues that professional resellers have used hundreds and even thousands of fake accounts to buy tickets for resale on Ticketmaster’s secondary marketplace. The company had argued, unsuccessfully, that BOTS applies to resellers themselves rather than they platforms they use.

🏦 BANKING

• Another week, another credit union merger, with members of the ACADIAN CREDIT UNION in Nova Scotia last week voting on whether or not to tie up with EAST COAST CREDIT UNION, iNOVA and TEACHER PLUS. The four-way merger would create a province-wide credit union network with 65,000 members, 400 employees and $2 billion in assets.

🏥 HEALTH

• It’s not every day that a de-consolidation takes place, especially in health care, but that looks to be the case with CANADIAN ORTHODONTIC PARTNERS selling off a host of clinics. The support organization continues to downsize, with law firm MLT Aikins announcing last week that it had successfully assisted in selling off 13 clinics to multiple owners across Canada. The transactions took place over the course of 2025 and 2026, with purchasers ranging from Alberta to the Atlantic provinces. Five of those Atlantic clinics were purchased by Fredericton, N.B.-based HATHEWAY GROUP. Canadian Orthodontic Partners is the parent behind the docbraces brand.

It’s hard to believe we’re already at this point when it feels like just yesterday that we thought it might be a good idea to shine a spotlight on Canada’s competition problems. But here we are. Woohoo!

It’s been an incredibly busy year, and certainly one with no shortage of news or issues to cover. This is our 126th post and our 53rd podcast, and we’re only just getting started. Literally!

In this week’s episode, we go over some of the highlights from the past year and share exciting updates on the future of Do Not Pass Go… you’ll definitely want to watch or listen for all the goodies, but here’s a bit of a spoiler: We’re growing fast and expanding soon, and we’ve got a rebrand in the works.

Plus, we’ve got Arshy Mann – co-founder of The Hatchet newsletter and podcast, whose monopoly series on Canadaland was one of the main inspirations for Do Not Pass Go.

He’s back for another state-of-the-competition-union conversation, where we cover everything from airport privatization to consumer protection to whether the federal Liberals have a governing monopoly in Canada. Check out this pulse-pounding, super special episode – and don’t forget to subscribe!

A coalition of natural resource and industrial goods producers has been pushing to limit shipping workers’ ability to strike, according to internal documents, with the federal government appearing to reciprocate with labour reform legislation introduced last week.

In a presentation to deputy Transport Canada minister Arun Thangaraj on Jan. 12, acquired by Do Not Pass Go through a freedom of information request, the Western Canadian Shippers’ Coalition (WCSC) said repeated port and rail strikes were costing Canada billions in economic losses and damaging its reputation as a reliable trading partner.

In response, the organization – whose members include Canpotex, Suncor, West Fraser Timber, Census, Nutrien, K&S Potash and Teck Resources, among others – recommended immediate “automatic essential service designation for rail/port based on economic thresholds,” along with complementary sectoral bargaining, works councils, better coordination with government and enhanced mediation measures.

Introduced last Monday, Bill C-39 – the Build Canada Strong Act – proposes sweeping reforms to the Canada Labour Code that reshape how the government can intervene to end or prevent strikes in federally regulated sectors, including transport.

Specifically, the bill rewrites and expands Section 107 to give the government more ability to shut down strikes or lockouts if they are deemed to be against the “national interest.”

Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu last week said the measures are intended to give the government better tools to resolve labour disputes that have a deep national impact and that don’t appear to have a resolution at hand. Labour unions, however, say they are a “fundamental attack” on the right to strike.

“If government can end a strike because it is having an economic impact, employers have less reason to compromise and reach a deal,” said Canadian Labour Congress president Bea Bruske in a statement. “That weakens collective bargaining before government ever uses the power.”

The WCSC says its members ship more than $150 billion worth of products annually and spend more than $6.5 billion on transportation costs. In its presentation, the group said the Canadian transport sector experienced 62 work stoppages in 2023-2024, costing the nation $54.6 billion, with daily rail disruptions amounting to $341 million. Canada’s strike rate amounted to 50 to 100 days per 1,000 workers, compared to one or two days in Austria.

The WCSC said its other suggested measures, such as the government-employer-union councils found in Austria and Ireland, prevent crises through dialogue between parties, and legal strikes with negotiated minimum service – as in France and Spain – balance worker rights and economic protection.

In briefing notes provided to Thangaraj for the Jan. 12 meeting, the government acknowledged that the group had been lobbying both the Transport and Labour ministries and had made at least three substantive submissions on labour last year. The notes said the two departments would continue “to flag both the immediate and complementary measures you are proposing.”

The WCSC presentation shows three major collective agreements with CN, CPKC and the BC Maritime Employers Association expiring soon, which means the proposed Labour Code changes could affect more than 11,000 employees – including railway yard workers, conductors, marine traffic regulators, ship and dock foremen, and others.

Bill C-39 also partially delivers another key WCSC request by extending so-called “interswitching,” which allows a shipper located on a single rail line to request that their freight be moved by a competing railway at a regulated rate.

The distance limit on this switching has typically been 30 kilometres from an interchange between two railways, but a pilot project initiated under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau extended the range to 160 km. That test expired in 2025, but Bill C-39 proposes to implement it for another 48 months, though the WCSC had asked that it be made permanent.

The group’s presentation also requested that Transport Canada take action against what it says are unfair surcharges and tariffs by the dominant railways, CN and CPKC – a total amounting to its members being overcharged $900 million between 2013 and 2022. It also asked for changes to a final offer arbitration (FOA) system used in disputes that they say favours railways, “to address CN’s and CPKC’s monopoly pricing and conditions.”

WCSC and CPKC did not return requests for comment. Transport Canada says it is aware of the shippers’ requests for action on surcharges and FOA, but did not elaborate on whether any measures are being considered or in the works.

“Transport Canada continues to engage with stakeholders on issues related to rail transportation and the efficient movement of goods across Canada's supply chains,” said spokesperson Sau Sau Liu in an email.

James Nolan, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who has written and advised governments on issues such as interswitching and railway surcharges, is not surprised that there is no apparent plan to tackle the WCSC’s monopoly complaints.

The shippers do indeed suffer from information asymmetry, he tells Do Not Pass Go, where the railways know all about their business but the same isn’t true in reverse, which complicates the arbitration dispute system.

“The government isn’t really sure what to replace [FOA] with. Do you force the railways to give away lots of information? It’s a very complex problem if you’re going to solve it that way,” he says. “[But] they’re like Ticketmaster with all the surcharges and fees.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

ILLEGAL, UNENFORCEABLE AND EVERYWHERE: CANADA’S NON-COMPETE PROBLEM

📱 TELECOM

• Ian Scott has landed at public relations and lobbying firm EARNSCLIFFE STRATEGIES, sources tell Do Not Pass Go. The former chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, whose term ended in 2023, is perhaps best known for his controversial meeting over beers at an Ottawa pub with BELL chief executive Mirko Bibic in 2019 while the company had an active appeal open at the regulator. The CRTC under Scott ended up largely reversing a previous decision on wholesale internet rates that Bell and other telco incumbents had challenged, which led to a host of independent service providers including Distributel, Ebox and Vmedia being bought up by bigger players. Earnscliffe lobbies government on behalf of many large companies, with current or recent clients including Honeywell, Eli Lilly and Bell. Earnscliffe did not return requests for comment over the weekend on what Scott’s role will be or which areas he’ll be working in. The firm’s representatives have met with government officials on behalf of Bell at least eight times this year so far, according to the federal lobbyist registry.

🏠 HOUSING

• The federal government last week introduced new measures and money to prevent rental housing from being scooped up and consolidated by developers and corporate property owners. The non-profit CANADIAN HOUSING ACQUISITION FUND will manage $1.5 billion and help community housing providers acquire and maintain so-called at-risk rental properties. The initiative could protect up to 7,000 properties in its first five years, the government says. Proponents are welcoming the move, saying it’s been “an uphill battle” to keep properties away from the private market. “What this fund does is it gives us access to a funding source that makes it much easier for us to go out there and buy a 30-unit building for what a private investor is trying to sell,” one housing expert tells the Toronto Star.

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

• The Competition Tribunal has ordered NORTERA to pause its acquisition of B&G FOODS CANADA’s Green Giant and Le Sieur canned and frozen vegetable brands until a legal challenge against the transaction can be heard. The Competition Bureau is arguing that the deal is a “merger to monopoly” that will give Quebec-based Nortera, which already owns major brands including Arctic Gardens and Del Monte, a 90- and 80-per-cent market share in canned and frozen core vegetables, respectively. Nortera is arguing that the deal is required to protect its business against cheap imports.

• It was a good week for the Competition Bureau, with the enforcement agency also scoring a win in its property controls case against grocery giant EMPIRE. The Nova Scotia-based company – which owns Sobeys, Farm Boy, Safeway and other chains – has agreed to stop using contracted property controls that prevent rivals from opening stores near its own operations. These restrictive covenants, as they’re known, have also been deployed to prevent food products from being sold at nearby dollar stores, gyms and other retailers, and have blocked new groceries from opening even after Empire stores have closed down or moved. LOBLAW and WALMART have also voluntarily agreed to drop their usage of these restrictive covenants, though its noteworthy that they haven’t done so in any legally binding way.

• And one last win for the Competition Bureau, with the agency announcing it had also reached an agreement with KALIBRATE, a British company that provides gas stations with market intelligence software. The company has agreed to stop sharing retailer-specific information that can reveal a competitor’s sales or pricing practices, and that it will only share aggregated data that does not identify retailers. Kalibrate has also agreed to share that data only after a time delay. The Bureau says its investigation of the company concluded that Kalibrate’s Market Intelligence product allowed competitors to access confidential and competitively sensitive information, which could result in coordination and higher gas prices for consumers.

• Related to the rental housing news above, food security advocates are calling on the federal government to implement similar safeguards for smaller grocery retailers. While the recently announced Food Secure Strategy promises money to smaller competitors and beefs up measures against abuse of dominance by large grocery chains, several loopholes exist. “The strategy must also have guardrails not only against large mergers, but consolidation of smaller players,” writes Food Secure Canada policy lead (and Do Not Pass Go podcast guest) Aaron Vansintjan in Policy Options. “If it hands out grants to small businesses that are then bought up by larger ones, that becomes another backdoor to funnel public money to the oligopoly that is contributing to the spiralling cost of food.”

• The good news is that retail is getting more competitive in Canada. The bad news is that it’s mostly in the high-end. More than 20 international brands opened their first standalone stores in Canada in 2025, up from 15 a year earlier, according to Retail Insider. Fourteen of those 20 – including TOM FORD, AMI PARIS and MASON MARGIELA – chose Toronto for their first locations, with the upscale Yorkdale Shopping Centre playing an outsized role. On the flip side, Greek discount retailer JUMBO is opening soon on the site of an old Toys R Us store at Vaughan Mills in Toronto, with more stores planned across Canada.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• The PARAMOUNT-WARNER BROS. merger saga has finally drawn to a close… or has it? Last week started with the news that the U.S. states fighting the $111-billion (U.S.) mega-deal had come to a settlement with the companies, but it ended with a coalition of remaining opponents winning a last-minute delay. The “Block the Merger” group, consisting of entertainment industry organizations, advocates and creators, on Thursday won a motion to file briefs requesting a public-interest review, a decision that kept the transaction from wrapping up last week as Paramount had hoped. The mega-deal thus continues to be a political hot potato, with Paramount’s Trump-friendly owner David Ellison threatening to move the company out of California, not to mention having to pay a $1-million-a-day fee to Warner Bros. if the merger isn’t completed by Oct. 1. The settlement with the states does not require Paramount to split off any businesses but instead focuses on promises of movie output, independent oversight of CBS News and CNN, and spending guarantees.

• With a new boss taking over, CINEPLEX may be up for sale. The company last week announced its new chief executive Bill Walker, who previously led competitor LANDMARK CINEMAS, is undertaking a strategic review that will consider a range of options, “including but not limited to a potential sale of the company.” Cineplex, which has around 75-per-cent of the movie market in Canada, had agreed to be acquired by U.K.-based CINEWORLD back in 2019, but the deal fell apart as the Covid pandemic shut down theatres around the world. Movie theatre chains have only recently started to experience growth again, making the timing right for a potential Cineplex sale. Reports earlier this year pegged U.S.-based CINEMARK and REGAL CINEWORLD as potential buyers.

• Ontario has fined STUBHUB $20,000 for selling tickets above face value, contravening a law against doing so that came into effect in the spring. The fine is the second issued by the province, following a recent $25,000 penalty issued to fellow reseller SEATGEEK. StubHub continues to maintain that the province has not instructed the company on how it is to verify the face values of tickets on its platform. Despite the fines, both companies continue to list huge numbers of tickets to events well above face value. As of Friday morning, level 500 tickets to the Blue Jays’ final regular season game at the Rogers Centre in Toronto this past Sunday were starting at $113, for example.

• Speaking of tickets, the Federal Court last week tossed out a drip-pricing case against TICKETMASTER brought by B.C. student Kamaria Kuling. Kuling had argued that the additional, non-optional fees the LIVE NATION-owned company added to the base charge of a comedy show ticket she bought had amounted to illegal and deceptive drip-pricing. Judge Denis Gascon saw it differently. In his judgment, he ruled that the additional fees were above-board because they were displayed on the same screen, immediately above the base ticket price – thereby making them line items, rather than drip pricing. As legal firm Gowling puts in its analysis, line items are legal and not the same as drip pricing. This differs notably from the Competition Bureau’s 2024 court win against CINEPLEX over its $1.50 online booking fee. In that case, the theatre chain’s fee “was below the fold, invisible without scrolling or clicking, and the page design discouraged looking further,” Gowling says. The firm says Gascon’s ruling is “a critically important judicial interpretation of the Competition Act’s drip pricing provisions” that provides clear guidance to online merchants on how they should be designing their websites. Cineplex is continuing to appeal the $38.9 million in penalties and legal costs it was hit with, while the Bureau’s drip-pricing case against Canada’s Wonderland owner SIX FLAGS is ongoing.

🏦 BANKING

• The merger wave with credit unions continues hot and heavy, with B.C.-based TRU COOPERATIVE and Ontario’s LIBRO CREDIT UNION announcing a deal. The companies say the merger, if approved, would bring together two of the country’s largest cooperatives, serving 470,000 members with more than 2,200 employees and $33 billion in combined assets and assets under administration. We recently looked at why this merger frenzy is happening, with technological change and regulatory burdens the key reasons. New rules are also allowing credit unions to expand outside of their traditional provincial confines, a clear factor in this particular merger.

🛢️ RESOURCES

• It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve been following the sector, but Canada’s oil patch is heading towards its biggest year of deal-making in nearly a decade. The Financial Post reports that oil and gas producers have totalled more than $30 billion in mergers and acquisitions over the first nine months of 2026, putting the full-year tally on track to beat the record $53 billion set in 2017. The difference this time, analysts tell the paper, is that firms such as SHELL and TAMARACK VALLEY are making acquisitions from positions of strength, rather than merging out of necessity as they did in 2017. “Inflation and commodity pricing have simply made producing assets very attractive right now,” says one. “When corporate development teams run the numbers today, acquisitions look appealing and can pull forward returns for shareholders.”

🚨 COMING UP

Do Not Pass Go turns one this week! On Thursday’s podcast, we look back at some of the greatest hits over the past 12 months and spill the tea on what’s next (spoiler: expansion and lots of good things!). Plus, we’re joined by The Hatchet co-founder and Do Not Pass Go “grandfather” ARSHY MANN for a conversation on the State of Things.

Can you believe it’s been a year already? It’s true! Do Not Pass Go is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary – and we absolutely could not have done it without you, our beloved subscribers. Especially those of you who are paid subscribers – who are getting this update ahead of the official fête next week.

I’ve got lots of exciting news to share in …

Read more

Despite being unenforceable in many jurisdictions and even illegal in others, non-compete clauses that restrict workers from switching jobs or starting their own businesses are rampant – and they’re on the rise. And Canadians have it especially bad.

A study of 15 countries released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development this summer showed that Canada had the second highest prevalence of non-compete contracts, after only Spain.

And while such restrictions originally applied only to high-ranking executives who might possess trade secrets, these clauses are rapidly expanding down the corporate ladder to even the lowest-ranking employees. Court cases in Canada have involved everyone from seasonal window washers to tattoo artists.

Dan Andrews, head of the growth, competitiveness and regulation division in the OECD’s economics department and author of the report, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how these restrictions are holding back economic growth by depressing wages, innovation and business creation.

Check out the full OECD study here.

Loblaw has been integrating artificial intelligence into its business for several years including personalized product matching, according to an internal government document. The country’s largest grocer also tried to influence government policy on the technology with an attempt to join the national AI Strategy Task Force.

A briefing note, prepared for Innovation, Science and Economic Development associate deputy minister Mark Schaan, reveals that the company requested a meeting in October last year with ISED officials to pitch its participation in the task force – a group of experts convened to set national AI strategy.

The document, obtained by Do Not Pass Go through an Access to Information request, says a separate meeting to more broadly discuss the government’s AI strategy was proposed since the task force was already in motion. That meeting, to discuss “potential regulatory or legislative changes relative to data and privacy,” occurred on Oct. 29.

“Loblaw Digital has been integrating AI into its products for several years, through products like Garfielld, an internal large-language gateway internally [sic] at Loblaw for employees to play with conversational generative AI models,” the document reads. “Generative AI has also been integrated into operational efficiencies like finance automation and procurement optimization, and other Loblaw Digital offerings, including personalized product matching.”

Representatives from the Brampton. Ont.-based company, which operates more than 2,400 stores across Canada, have met with government officials and Members of Parliament to discuss “privacy and access to information” at least 17 times since that October meeting. One of those meetings, on July 6, was Cabinet-level with Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

Neither company representatives nor ISED officials, including Schaan, returned requests for further information on what was discussed at those meetings.

The briefing document also features a redacted section following the disclosure of Loblaw’s request to join the task force and the subsequent proposal for more broad AI discussions. ISED declined a request by Do Not Pass Go to remove the redaction.

“We will not be in a position to disclose that bullet as it contains sensitive information used to support the deputy minister in a strategic meeting with a stakeholder and includes advice resulting from discussions and deliberations on future policy development and collaboration between the department and the third party,” said ISED access to information advisor Jarret Anderson in an email. “Disclosure would impact ongoing and future negotiations.”

The use of AI in pricing is controversial, with an increasing number of jurisdictions enacting or considering limits on the practice. Earlier this year, Manitoba became the first province to introduce legislation that would ban so-called surveillance pricing, or the use of customers’ data to set individualized prices.

In a corporate blog post dated July 13, Loblaw said it does not use customers’ incomes, demographics, loyalty profiles, purchase or browsing histories, locations or AI-derived personal characteristics to charge individuals more for groceries. Its PC Optimum loyalty program is designed to provide savings as opposed to higher prices.

“While these concerns have emerged in other industries, this type of pricing does not exist in grocery,” the post reads. “Customers expect grocery pricing to be fair and consistent. If a retailer appeared to profit from timing, weather, demand spikes or customer urgency, trust would erode quickly. At Loblaw, we will never use this type of pricing, be it on shelf labels, online, or otherwise.”

Such statements aren’t necessarily satisfactory to regulators. With grocery prices having surged by 22 per cent between 2022 and 2025, compared to a 13-per-cent increase in other consumer goods, the Competition Bureau in June launched an inquiry into the food supply chain. The study is investigating numerous parts of the industry, such as processing, distribution and pricing – including loyalty programs and algorithms.

The Bureau says the probe will look into how customer and loyalty data combine with algorithms to influence prices, promotions, store-level prices and the effective prices that different customers pay.

The task force’s recommendations, returned earlier this year, informed the “AI for All” plan announced by the federal government in June. The strategy dedicates billions of dollars toward AI development but does not expressly put limits on surveillance pricing. The government has instead promised to address the issue by strengthening existing privacy laws.

The task force itself was criticized for skewing toward industry and advocating for rapid adoption of AI by businesses and government without sufficient safeguards for the public.

More than 160 academics, civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter to ISED Minister Melanie Joly and AI Minister Evan Solomon last October, “to protest and reject the deeply misguided and wrongheaded approach to public consultation demonstrated by the government’s 30-day ‘national sprint’ on Canada’s artificial intelligence strategy.”

Loblaw sparked controversy last week for deploying a night-time drone advertisement over downtown Toronto. The large-scale display had AI-powered drones showing messages such as, “Is that third coffee keeping me up?” to promote the company’s new President’s Choice AI chatbot.

The company said it obtained all the necessary permits for the display and that it was inspired by “many questions Canadians find themselves asking late at night,” but that didn’t stop the stunt from being heavily criticized.

“What dystopian hell are we in for now?” urban planner Sean Galbraith told CBC. “Do we not have enough advertising along the highways and such that we have to now pollute the night sky with more ads?”

The company also announced a partnership in May with Toronto-based technology firm Shakudo to “accelerate AI adoption to enhance its customer shopping experience and enhance its organizational capabilities.”

Loblaw also last week announced a deal with Markham, Ont.-based Eaigle to deploy the company’s AI gate-automation technologies at its distribution centres.

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🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

THE ANTI-COMPETITIVE BARRIERS HOLDING CANADIAN FILMS BACK

🛒 GROCERIES

• Speaking of large grocers, New Zealand’s National political party is making the break-up of one of its large chains a key part of its re-election platform. The centre-right party, which is currently leading the nation’s coalition government, says it will split FOODSTUFFS into several units to increase the number of independent grocery chains, subject to a six-month review by its antitrust agency, the Commerce Commission. The pledge comes in the face of runaway food prices, with other political parties either supporting the plan or critiquing it for not going far enough. If the effort goes ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time the country carved up a dominant company. Telecom New Zealand, the nation’s largest telco, decided to split itself into three separate companies in 2008 in response to public and government pressure over high broadband prices.

✈️ AIRPORTS & AIRLINES

• Canada’s AIRPORTS continue to be the hot topic after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a quasi-privatization plan at last week’s investment summit in Toronto. The controversial plan to sell off operations of the nation’s four major hubs – Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary – has drawn vociferous concern and commentary, forcing the government to promise blocks on “unjustified price increases” on airfares under the scheme. At the summit, Carney said that selling the concessions while retaining ownership would raise billions that could then be used to invest in and expand regional airports that could then provide more competition to the hubs. As we noted in our coverage from the summit, it’s still an open question as to why investors might want to buy such concessions knowing that the proceeds of doing so would go to funding their competitors. The additional promise of blocks on fee increases adds to the question.

• British Columbia sea plane operator HARBOUR AIR is buying PACIFIC COASTAL AIRLINE for an undisclosed amount, creating a single operator with up to 300 daily flights and a workforce of 900. The companies, both of which are based in Richmond, B.C., said the merger will allow them to navigate difficult weather conditions with a combined fleet of 40 float planes and 19 wheeled aircraft. Harbour Air chief executive Bert van der Stege says in a press release that he is looking forward to building “the leading regional airline group in Western Canada.”

🥊 COMPETITION

• The other big piece of news to come out of the investment summit was the PRODUCTIVITY MEGA DEDUCTION, which are new rules that will allow companies to write off up to 65 per cent of capital expenditures. This will cover spending on fibre-optic cables, mining property, oil and gas pipelines, software, research and development, computer equipment, aircraft and vehicles, patents, rail track, bridges and roads. Prime Minister Mark Carney touted the measure as lowering the marginal effective tax rate — a measure of tax on businesses used to compare competitiveness between nations — to the lowest in the G7. The news was largely cheered as a big step toward getting Canadian firms to re-invest in capital and thereby improve the nation’s productivity, a measure where it has been lagging peers for years. “This is a huge incentive for capital allocators to invest in productivity-enhancing tools and systems (something Canadian firms have been historically bad at),” reads the Canadian Shield Institute’s assessment. “Actual stuff that drives economic growth.”

💾 BIG TECH

• Canadian AI company COHERE last week confirmed it has reached terms to acquire German peer ALEPH ALPHA. The companies announced the planned merger back in the spring, with the joint entity valued at around $27 billion at the time. As BetaKit points out, Cohere and France’s MISTRAL are the only leading AI companies not based in the United States or China, which makes them appealing options to governments that are looking to avoid doing business with those two countries.

• In a ruling that was unsealed last week, the U.S. Federal Court rejected the Department of Justice’s request to break up parts of GOOGLE’s online advertising business despite the company being found to have illegally acquired and maintained dominant power in the market. The court instead is instead requiring Google to make its advertising products interoperable with rivals and to share data about its ads auctions with publishers. The DoJ’s request for measures to break up the company’s ad tech business were “neither realistic nor needed,” wrote Judge Leonie Brinkema in her 106-opinion. Google is set to fight a similar case in Canada at the Competition Tribunal early next year, with the Competition Bureau arguing that the company also abuses its dominance of the online advertising market. Google cheered the U.S. decision, but competition advocates here are not happy with it. “Canada should learn from the U.S. decision, not copy it,” said Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project director Keldon Bester in a release. “Interoperability, data access and rules against self-preferencing can help, but the Bureau should keep making the case for structural change. If one company still controls the tools publishers use to sell ads and the marketplace where those ads are sold, the underlying conflict remains.” 

📱 TELECOM

• The fight over new wireless fees in Canada is getting deeper and more mired in legal mud, with TELUS asking the courts to overturn a procedural decision made by the CRTC last month. As per a report from iPhone in Canada, the company is seeking leave with the Federal Court of Appeal to argue against a regulatory consultation on the new fees, which range from device handling to charges for SIM cards.

  The CRTC had earlier in the summer asked Telus, ROGERS and BELL to explain how these new charges can be considered to be exempt from a ban on service activation, modification and cancellation charges that came into effect in June. Telus replied by saying that the CRTC is biased and had already made up its mind that its SIM card fees – which it maintains are optional – are offside. It also wanted the consultation split into two parts – one to determine if it broke the rules, and another to assign penalties if so – and said the CRTC hadn’t clearly explained what the company was doing wrong.

  The regulator rejected those arguments and launched the consultation, which ultimately provoked the new court challenge.

  Consumer advocates are not impressed. “This Telus appeal is outrageous and should offend every Canadian,” says OpenMedia executive director Matt Hatfield, adding that the CRTC acknowledging that SIM cards are not optional and necessary to phones operating “is no more prejudging this case than if a judge acknowledged before a trial that the sky is blue, or the sun rises in the east.”

  “Telus’ actions here are profoundly bad faith, and an attempt to punish and discourage the CRTC from advancing the most basic consumer interests,” he adds. “We sincerely hope the court and the CRTC itself will take the temerity of these efforts into consideration in issuing their respective judgments.”

• Speaking of the CRTC, fellow Substacker and former ROGERS senior customer service advisor Stephen Lawton has an excellent three-part summary of the 140-plus submissions to the regulator’s ongoing consultation on combining its various consumer protection codes into one. Part one summarizes the positions of the big telcos, including his former employer as well as BELL and TELUS, while part two looks at the regional firms’ submissions, including SASKTEL, COGECO and QUEBECOR. Part three summarizes consumer groups including the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and indie competitors such as TEKSAVVY. It’s juicy reading for telecom nerds.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• The Competition Bureau’s case against Canada’s Wonderland began its hearing at the Competition Tribunal last week. The Bureau is arguing that the amusement park’s owner, North Carolina-based SIX FLAGS, is advertising tickets and other items at lower prices than what consumers actually end up paying online – a process known as drip pricing. The enforcement agency wants the Tribunal to order the park to stop the practice, pay a penalty and offer restitution to affected consumers. The park is defending itself by saying that all applicable fees are adequately disclosed and that forcing all-inclusive pricing could lead to higher upfront costs.

🚨 COMING UP

Canadian workers are among the most restricted by non-compete clauses in a survey of 15 countries released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development this summer. DAN ANDREWS, head of the growth, competitiveness and regulation division in the OECD economics department and author of the study, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Thursday to discuss how this may be leading to Canadian workers making less at their jobs than they should be.

In other words, if we’re talking about sovereignty – and Canadians making Canadian film is certainly part of that discussion – then we have to talk about independent cinemas and how important they are to the national fabric. It’s a poignant subject, with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s investment summit and the Toronto International Film Festival intersecting this week.

A new report by the Network of Independent Cinema Exhibitors (NICE) – an association that represents 150 theatres across the country – lays out the challenges that independent theatres are facing, and how they’re often coming into conflict with anti-competitive practices by Cineplex and large distributors.

From exclusive zones that prevent indies from showing movies to so-called clean-run demands that require them to play films for weeks at a time, these practices mean less room for Canadian-produced cinema at a time when demand for it may be at an all-time high.

NICE founder and director Sonya Yokota William joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss the barriers that are holding Canadian films back, and how they could be removed.

NICE’s report on “Market Access Barriers” can be found here, while the Canadian Movie Marketplace is here.

I’m back from covering the biggest event in town – Prime Minister Mark Carney’s global investment summit, not the Toronto International Film Festival, though your mileage may vary – and I’ve got a few competition-oriented takeaways.

I usually prefer to let others share their thoughts on news events like these, but I was up before the crack of dawn to get there and had dogs sniff my stuff for explosives, so I feel we can break with tradition just this once.

Airport privatization: This is perhaps the announcement that is getting the most attention, and deservedly so since it is the most controversial.

In his keynote address this morning, Carney said his government “will seek private investment through long-term concessions to operate Canada’s four largest airports,” which would be Toronto’s Pearson, Vancouver, Montreal-Trudeau and Calgary:

“Following best practice in other countries, the Government of Canada will retain ownership of the underlying land and assets, but we will unlock their true value, by bringing in new capital and expertise into their operations and growth.

“We will reinvest the tens of billions of dollars of capital we raise into the infrastructure that Canada needs for the next generation. That will mean investing in regional airports and providing better and more affordable regional and remote air connections. It will mean a better passenger experience…

“Canadian pension funds already invest successfully in many airports around the world. It is time to bring that same expertise home to more directly benefit all Canadians.”

During the “fireside chat” that followed his speech, Carney emphasized that these concessions are different from privatization. In a nutshell, concessions are management contracts that don’t confer ownership.

Read more

Quick scheduling note: This newsletter isn’t actually late! Rather, I noticed that publishing news and other good stuff on Friday afternoons probably wasn’t the smartest thing from a timing perspective, so I’m moving it to Monday mornings as of today. And, to avoid cluttering your inbox on successive days, I’m shifting podcast publication to Thursdays. And now on to our regularly scheduled content…

With Prime Minister Mark Carney hosting foreign investors at an elite two-day summit in Toronto this week and the development of what officials are calling a “unique” relationship with Europe, Canada is continuing to deepen its ties with the European Union.

But as the two jurisdictions move closer together on several fronts, including trade and defence, there’s at least one area where they are going in opposite directions: consumer protection.

For its part, the EU sees strengthening consumer laws and mechanisms as key to boosting market competitiveness and sovereignty in the face of an increasingly hostile United States and its dominant multinational firms. So far, Canada hasn’t acknowledged as much.

In June, for example, the EU bolstered existing click-to-cancel regulations, which require online sellers to make it as easy for consumers to terminate services as it is to sign up for them, with new 14-day refund rules. A month later, regulators added to airline passenger protections that are already considered to be the global gold standard by banning carry-on baggage and boarding pass printing fees, speeding up dispute processes and introducing the right to compensation for long tarmac delays, among other changes.

Canada, meanwhile, continues to lack meaningful online click-to-cancel measures and is in the process of controversially outsourcing airline passenger complaints to a third-party chosen by airlines. And, as reported here in May, the federal government is also shutting down the Office of Consumer Affairs, a department responsible for funding advocacy groups and their projects.

This divergence, Canadian consumer advocates say, highlights the federal government’s failure to acknowledge the role that such protections play in market competitiveness and sovereignty.

“Consumer protection remains an untapped opportunity for the federal government to deliver for Canadians,” says Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP). “In the case of the Office of Consumer Affairs there is evidence we’re going backwards.”

Europe’s new click-to-cancel enhancements require online merchants to add a prominent “withdrawal” button to their websites that allows consumers to reverse purchases and service contracts within 14 days.

The rules originate in Germany, where the Fair Consumers Contracts Act in 2022 gave customers the ability to easily cancel contracts and services they buy online. Courts have been strict in their considerations of potential violations since, particularly with U.S.-based tech giants.

Microsoft, for example, recently ran afoul of the regulations with its 365 service. The company did indeed have a cancellation button on its website, but a Munich court earlier this year found that requiring users to log in to terminate their service was too onerous since some may have lost access to their account. Microsoft was thus ordered to make it possible for subscribers to cancel without having to log in.

Satellite internet provider Starlink was also found to have violated the rules earlier this year by offering customers the option of deactivating their monthly payments rather than fully cancelling service. A Karlsruhe court ordered the company to be more transparent and to bring its processes into compliance with the two-click, full termination requirement.

Richard Glaser, an associate at the TaylorWessing law firm in Berlin, says the rules are so strict that competitors – not just consumers – can take violators to court.

“If you’re selling shoes and you see your competitors doing weird stuff, you can attack their [interface],” he tells Do Not Pass Go.

The EU is now adopting German-style rules because of the increasing use of dark patterns – deceptive design practices intended to frustrate and trap customers – particularly by large U.S.-based tech firms. This trend toward stronger protections is part of Europe’s larger move away from a reliance on American tech and companies.

“We were seeing, especially from U.S. clients, these kind of confirm-shaming customer experiences where you have a flow, like, ‘Do you want to cancel this contract? Do you really want to cancel this contract? And how about this survey? Can you please fill out this survey? But here’s a five-euro discount on our next product if you stay,’” Glaser says.

These sorts of practices are also rampant in Canada, but with the federal government largely absent on protections, the problem is being left to the provinces to handle.

British Columbia, for example, recently enacted click-to-cancel rules that require online sellers to make it easier for customers to terminate their services and subscriptions. But critics have pointed out loopholes, such as the fact that sellers are allowed to continue with multi-step retention efforts.

“When provinces do address the issue, they’re mirroring initiatives that started in Quebec and focus on contract terms and notification, not interface,” says Matt Hatfield, executive director of advocacy group Open Media. “This isn’t entirely wrong-headed, but is a very pre-internet way of thinking about the problem.”

On the federal level, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission earlier this year announced that click-to-cancel rules are coming to one of the markets where they are most needed – telecom services – but not till April, 2027, at the earliest.

Consumer advocates have warned that the long runway gives telcos plenty of time to lobby the CRTC and federal government into implementing weak rules. Given recent history, the companies are also likely to look for loopholes or simply ignore the rules entirely, as in the recent cases of bans on activation fees and phone locking.

The CRTC is currently in the third month of an inquiry into new charges for device handling, shipping and SIM cards introduced by BELL, ROGERS and TELUS to coincide with the activation fee ban that went into effect in June.

The regulator also this summer allowed the carriers to temporarily lock the phones they sell despite a ban on the practice being in effect since 2017. Bell had not been following the rules regardless and, along with the other two companies, successfully convinced the CRTC that locks were needed to prevent theft at stores.

Consumer advocates are therefore concerned about what shape the incoming click-to-cancel rules might take.

“A consumer’s practical right to cancel a service and stop recurring charges should be universal and easy to exercise,” says Tahira Dawood, acting general counsel for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. “We are not asking for anything extraordinary, only that consumers be able to exercise their choice to cancel a service freely and without unnecessary barriers.”

In the meantime, telecom customer complaints are exploding. The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) in January reported it had received 23,647 complaints for the year ended July 31, 2025, a 17-per-cent increase from a year earlier and a new record high. It was the third record in a row reported by the industry ombudsman – a trend that is expected to worsen.

“I’m expecting the next CCTS report, and several after, to be an absolute bloodbath,” Hatfield says. “Big telecom companies are sharply slashing their customer service departments, replaced many agents with AI, and complaints were spiking before that took full force.”

While Canadians lack the sorts of e-commerce protections that Europeans have, passenger advocates say the situation is even worse when it comes to airlines.

The government earlier this year announced a plan to shift responsibility for resolving passenger complaints away from the Canadian Transportation Agency to a third-party mediator chosen by airlines, including AIR CANADA and WESTJET. The system is being modelled on similar processes used in the United Kingdom and Europe and will speed up complaint resolution, according to the government. The current backlog of complaints sits at nearly 100,000.

But Gabor Lukacs, president of the Air Passenger Rights advocacy group, says that allowing airlines to choose the mediator is akin to putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

He also points out a key difference with the European system – that rulings by the Canadian adjudicator will be binding, whereas passengers in the EU are free to reject the third party’s findings and pursue other outcomes, including legal action. It’s a perverse system, he says, given that even the CCTS’s telecom decisions are not binding.

“In Canada, the trend has been to empty passenger rights from any practical meaning,” Lukacs tells Do Not Pass Go. “In sharp contrast, the EU has rejected the airlines’ lobbying efforts and shifted toward further strengthening of existing rights and addition of new rights.”

Ironically, Quebec just introduced a raft of new consumer protections, including click-to-cancel rules, a ban on fees for cancelling restaurant reservations and a prohibition on the resale of “ghost” concert tickets, among many others.

If Canada is intent on further aligning with the EU - whether it’s as an “associate member” or otherwise - consumer advocates say the federal government needs to strengthen consumer protection nevertheless if it’s serious about sovereignty. It needn’t be hard, with British Columbia and Quebec, historically the most European of the provinces, already serving as role models.

“[They’re] stepping up and putting their powers to use to make everyday life a bit easier for Canadians, and having the federal government move in the same direction would be a powerful combination,” says CAMP’s Bester.

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

✈️ AIRLINES

• Speaking of airlines, PORTER and TRANSAT have received government bailouts to cope with the skyrocketing cost of jet fuel, which hit a three-month high last week. Montreal-based Transat has acquired a $150 million loan, the maximum available through the bailout, while Toronto-based Porter has received $125 million. The bailout program was announced in June through the Canada Enterprise Emergency Funding Corporation and runs till November. AIR CANADA and WESTJET have said they don’t need the loans, which are repayable within four years, with the latter calling it “market-distorting.”

• And speaking of AIR PASSENGER RIGHTS, Lukacs’ group won a court battle in British Columbia last week that will allow consumers to take their disputes to the B.C. Civil Resolution Tribunal and bypass the backlogged Canadian Transportation Agency complaint system. The B.C. Court of Appeal overturned an earlier lower court ruling, which held that the Tribunal did not have the legal authority to hear airline passenger disputes. Lukacs told Global News that the appeal win gives passengers a speedier resolution option. The court’s decision may still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

🛒 GROCERIES

The Canadian International Trade Tribunal (CITT) says imported canned vegetables, mostly from the United States, are causing financial strain for domestic food processors and is recommending the government impose import limits and tariffs on them.

The CITT inquiry was ordered earlier this year by Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne after domestic processors, led by Brossard, Que.-based NORTERA, complained about an increase in imports eating into its market share. Champagne followed up in June by imposing 10-per-cent tariffs on imported canned vegetables, though some products from the United States, Mexico, Israel and Chile were exempted.

Nortera told the CITT inquiry that it would be forced to lay off employees and close plants if imports were allowed to continue disrupting its business. The Tribunal acknowledged that its recommendations, if adopted, could lead to higher prices for consumers, but that this was an acceptable trade-off for protecting domestic production. The Tribunal also looked at frozen vegetable imports but found no sufficient increases to warrant action. In a press release, Champagne said the 10-per-cent tariffs on canned goods will remain in place for 200 days or until they are replaced by “final safeguard measures.”

The CITT’s recommendations come shortly after the Competition Bureau announced a challenge of Nortera’s acquisition of the Canadian subsidiary of B&G FOODS. The Bureau says the deal, which would give Nortera control over brands including Del Monte and Green Giant, is a “merger to monopoly” where the company would have 90 per cent market share in core canned vegetables and 80 per cent in frozen. In an affidavit supporting the challenge, the Bureau’s manager of competition law Jacqueline Byers says Nortera’s internal documents show that imports are not posing a significant problem for the company: “Nortera’s share remains significant relative to imports in all categories, and in some categories it has grown.”

Market observers believe the CITT’s conclusions reflect trade restrictions imposed by other countries that led to China dumping its surplus canned vegetables into Canada. The Tribunal’s recommendations, if implemented by the government, will indeed lead to higher prices for consumers.

“If Nortera wins the merger challenge, we could effectively end up with a monopoly and no meaningful external competitive threat in the canned vegetable market,” says Regina Seibel, an assistant professor of economics analysis and policy at the University of Toronto.

• Food giants GENERAL MILLS and MARS are suing several top U.S. sugar producers, alleging that the companies have been engaging in a price-fixing conspiracy for years that has inflated the price for key ingredients in candy, cereal and many other products. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago, alleges that UNITED SUGAR, ASR GROUP and others shared confidential information with each other to illegally coordinate the prices food producers pay for sugar. United Sugar and ASR are also defendants in a related class-action suit in Minnesota, where they have denied the claims.

🏈 SPORTS

• Cable giant ROGERS angered hockey fans again last week with news of extra fees for those who want to watch Sportsnet’s national Monday night NHL broadcasts and who don’t subscribe directly to the company’s services. Fans who get the Sportsnet television channel through a provider other than Rogers will need to log in to the Sportsnet+ streaming service online using their TV subscription credentials and, if they want to watch the Monday night games, pay an extra $13 a month. The news sparked heavy criticism online, with suggestions that Rogers is violating federal laws against tied selling and CRTC regulations that prohibit telecom firms from giving themselves undue preference in services they distribute to competitors. The company says it is working with other TV providers to give viewers access to Monday-night games as part of their subscriptions.

🛢️ RESOURCES

• Consolidation in Canada’s oil patch continues its frenzied pace with TAMARACK VALLEY and HEADWATER EXPLORATION last week announcing a $10 billion merger. The combination of the two Calgary-based companies will create the largest publicly traded oil producer focused on Alberta’s Clearwater Formation, with non-core assets expected to be spun off into a separately listed company.

• Not to be outdone, Calgary-based ENBRIDGE also last week announced that it is acquiring Colorado-based TALLGRASS ENERGY’s crude oil business for $2.5 billion (U.S.). The deal will expand Enbridge’s U.S. liquids pipeline network with a majority ‌stake in the Pony Express Pipeline and other assets.

🚨 COMING UP

Making up just 1.7 per cent of the total box office take in Canada in 2025, it’s an understatement to say that Canadian films are under-performing at theatres. Why? Coinciding with the currently underway Toronto International Film Festival, the Network of Independent Cinema Exhibitors – a group representing more than 150 indie theatres across Canada – has released a new report that reveals some answers. Spoiler alert: it’s a competition problem. NICE founder and director SONYA YOKOTA WILLIAM joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Thursday to talk about how distributors and large theatre chains are holding back Canadian cinema.

But Gander is more of a canary than a goose, so to speak, in that it’s in the proverbial coal mine. With sovereignty being built into its technological infrastructure and operating ethos from the ground up, it’s an experiment into whether it’s possible to build a fully Canadian startup.

As Canada’s trade war with the United States heats up and lakes get renamed, it’s no surprise that all eyes are on Gander to see if it can successfully chart a different course.

Founder and chief executive Ben Waldman returns to Do Not Pass Go for our very special 50th episode to talk about the progress his team has made and what challenges remain. He also tells us why pet photos do better on Gander than contentious news stories.

And, as part of our 50th episode celebration, check out our special deal on tickets to Rogers v. Rogers, the hit one-man play based on the book about the cable giant’s succession drama and takeover of Shaw Communications.

The show returns to Toronto this fall and we’ll be recording a very special live podcast episode – with playwright Michael Healey and Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, who wrote the book the play is based on – on Nov. 20.

Head to Canadian Stage at this link and use promo code DONOTPASSGO for discounted pricing to the show and taping, but hurry as tickets are limited!

For Dima Doulov, his breaking point with concert tickets came last September when he was looking to go to the two System of a Down shows at Rogers Stadium, in the north of Toronto.

He bought a ticket to see the reunited 2000s-era metal band at their first show, paying $330 for floor admission next to the stage. When he got to the concert, he was surprised to see the same tickets were selling on secondary sites for around $9 just after the opening act had started.

The next day, he was equally exasperated – and feeling like he had significantly overpaid for his initial purchase – when he went directly to TICKETMASTER’s site and saw the same floor tickets for the second show priced at $130.

The wildly fluctuating prices on both the primary and secondary markets for the two concerts drove home for him the fact that fans are in a pricing game with sellers that they have no chance of winning.

“That was the moment when I realized like, ‘Wow, okay, something is up here,’” he says. “They were marketing the show, both shows, as completely sold out. But the first show was very clearly not sold out and then, the second day, something similar happened.”

The experience spurred Doulov, an avid concert-goer who has worked as a user experience designer for Canada Revenue, to create FaceValue Toronto – a website that aims to help fans decide on whether they should go ahead and buy tickets to shows early, or wait till later.

The site lists larger Toronto-area concerts with face-value ticket prices for different seat sections – as per the site’s name – along with analysis of a host of factors, including historical prices, fan sentiment about the artists, time since the last tour, proximity to nearby dates, and others. Listings then offer a verdict: buy or wait.

The verdict of “wait” for the Wu-Tang Clan show at the RBC Ampitheatre on Sept. 8, for example, was issued on Mar. 23, to coincide with tickets going on sale. The site’s listing says Ticketmaster sold discounted tickets to the rap group’s show during its “Summer of Live” promotion a few months ago, and prices have gone lower since. Thousands of tickets were still available as of Aug. 8, with the listing predicting “room for prices to drop further.”

Doulov’s intention is to counter some of the information asymmetry that consumers are dealing with. Ticketmaster, in particular, pressures fans into quickly buying tickets regardless of price using a variety of methods, including the use of long queues, dynamic pricing, inventory manipulation and fear-of-missing-out triggers.

This pressure is at the centre of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit in the United States, where Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation are facing accusations of using deceptive practices to artificially inflate ticket prices to “deceive” consumers out of billions of dollars. The company denies the charges.

Last weekend’s two Iron Maiden concerts at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto are a good example of these practices, according to FaceValue. In his post-event analysis on the site, Doulov points out that Ticketmaster listed the first show on Aug. 29 as sold out shortly after it went on sale back in October.

“But, as it turns out, it was a fake sellout with around 1,000 tickets available day-of for both shows,” the analysis says. “The day before the first show, GA Floor tickets became available for face value ($259.25). Once these went back up, they never stopped being available again, meaning the entire time it was ‘sold out’ between October 2025 and August 2026 was a lie.”

It’s the latest example of an increasing trend where additional shows that were planned all along are announced only after a substantial number of tickets are sold to an initial event at inflated prices. To Doulov, it’s clearly inventory manipulation.

“Tickets will often just get held back and the artists then announce added dates,” he says. “Ticket prices then fall dramatically, even for shows that are labeled as sold out.”

Some of FaceValue’s processes are automated, such as linking to Ticketmaster’s application programming interface for basic show information, but the site also requires a good deal of manual work. Doulov manually combs the company’s site for initial face-value ticket prices while his buy-or-wait verdicts, on which he claims a 95-per-cent success rate, are also products of his own analysis.

The process will need to be automated further before FaceValue can expand to other cities, he says, but the website is already his full-time job. He recently added Front Row, a paid tier that gives subscribers access to a Discord server where they can receive personalized advice.

Ticket market experts say FaceValue and similar efforts such as TicketData.com are natural responses to how opaque the buying process has become for consumers. Until governments and regulators take action to fix the market, they’re becoming necessary tools in correcting the information imbalance.

“I think more of this information is generally good for consumers,” says Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University. “The existence of services like FaceValue and TicketData tells you something important about the ticket market – consumers are hungry for information that the market itself isn’t giving them.”

Policy makers in Canada have so far done little or have been ineffective in efforts to address the issue. Ontario, for example, in May enacted a ban on selling tickets above face value, but the practice is still rampant. The province only issued its first enforcement fine of $25,000 on reseller SeatGeek this past week.

A case seeking the breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster brought by the Consumers Council of Canada, meanwhile, is still awaiting the go-ahead at the Competition Tribunal.

As an avid concert-goer, Doulov says he would welcome stronger consumer protection enforcement, but he’s not holding his breath.

“If at the end of the day it’s something that knocks out what FaceValue does, then that’s okay by me because it means that something has actually changed and it’s better now,” he says. “It’s still ultimately an uphill battle for ticket and concert information transparency, where people are left in the dark and having their emotions manipulated to get them to overspend.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🥊 COMPETITION

“What we’re not doing is theatre,” says Prime Minister Mark Carney. “We’re not hauling people in and wagging our fingers at them.”

That was the PM’s response to a question about competition this week at a press conference in Thunder Bay, Ont. A reporter asked if Carney was considering any “serious anti-trust” enforcement in response to significant concentration in several sectors of the economy, including banking and telecom.

Rather than performative “theatre,” Carney said his government is instead focusing on effecting structural changes aimed at improving competition on a broader level. The recently announced Food Security Strategy, for example, aims to expand wholesale food distribution so that smaller grocers have more choice and potentially better supplier prices that can then be passed on to consumers.

“The concentration there means our ability to offer cheaper prices is very limited, in fact it’s hindered,” Carney said. “We’re changing the wholesale sector… so that there’s more competition all the way through the food chain.”

Carney cited a similar approach in telecom, where his government last year upheld a decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that gives large telcos including BELL and TELUS wholesale access to each others’ fibre broadband networks.

Telus had appealed that ruling to cabinet and smaller wholesale-based providers warned that it would disadvantage them, but the government agreed with the regulator’s belief that it would increase competition.

“That has helped to contribute to the fall in broadband costs, still one of the biggest expenses that people have,” Carney said at the press conference.

The latest pricing figures, however, contradict the Prime Minister. The CRTC’s industry report released last month show that, while prices for lower speed internet plans have declined since 2021, “most of the faster speed plans (200 Mbps and above) have shown slight increases in price in more recent years.”

Statistics Canada, meanwhile, notes that “on an annual average basis, consumer prices for internet access services increased 2.9 per cent from 2024 to 2025, while the all-items Consumer Price Index increased 2.0 per cent over the same period.”

Carney’s comments on competition start at the 31:26 mark:

🛒 GROCERIES

• Speaking of smaller grocers, ALEPH MEATS is accusing MK KOSHER of anti-competitive activity. The Montreal-based butcher business says the dominant certification agency, run by the Jewish Community Council (JCC) of Montreal, is enforcing illegal exclusivity clauses on third-party buyers in the city. In its filing with the Competition Tribunal, Aleph says it “cannot sell its kosher products to most (if not all) large grocery stores, caterers and event venues servicing the Greater Montreal Jewish community, because the respondent, through formal contractual covenants (exclusivity clauses) with them or by way of informal threats, ensures that these third parties will not purchase any kosher product other than those with the MK Kosher Certification.” The JCC and MK have not yet filed response documents. Aleph’s filing is the fourth private right-of-access case since a law change last year made it possible for individuals and businesses to launch abuse-of-dominance actions at the Tribunal, rather than requesting the Competition Bureau to do so. The Tribunal earlier this year dismissed the first filing, a case against Google’s alleged dominance of the search market, and is still deciding whether to allow the other two – the Live Nation case mentioned above, and a complaint over Apple’s app store.

💾 BIG TECH

• U.S. regulators are again taking aim at AMAZON, this time accusing the tech giant of secretly overcharging advertisers on its platform. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states filed a lawsuit this week accusing the company of quietly increasing the prices advertisers paid through its ad auctions, affecting more then a million brands and sellers and resulting in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue for the company. In response, Amazon says the lawsuit is misguided and “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.”

• And on that very same topic, GOOGLE effectively won an antitrust case this week with the company avoiding having to split off its online advertising exchange. While the judge in the case last ruled that Google has illegal monopolies on the servers that host ads and the exchanges that sit between buyers and sellers, she this week declined to make the company sell the business, known as AdX. Instead, Google will make tweaks to how bidding data on ads is presented to publishers and bidders. As The Guardian notes, the ruling is the third time in recent years that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up a big tech firm, which is “likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry’s unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.” Canada’s Competition Bureau will take its crack against Google and its dominance of the online ad business in front of the Competition Tribunal, starting in January.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• In its defence of a class-action lawsuit in California regarding how it sells video games to consumers, SONY looks to be saying out loud the quiet part about digital goods. “In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game,” the company argues in its defence filings. The lawsuit, filed last year, alleges that Sony is violating state rules that require “clear and conspicuous” labels warning consumers that they are merely buying a license when they purchase a digital game, rather than actual ownership of the product. The defence statement is adding fuel to anger among gamers over the company’s recent announcement that it will end physical disc production in 2028.

🚨 COMING UP

This Tuesday we celebrate our 50th podcast episode! To mark the occasion we’re bringing back BEN WALDMAN, founder and chief executive of Gander Social, Canada’s newest – and most Canadian – social network. Waldman’s previous appearance on Do Not Pass Go back in January is our most-downloaded ever, and he’s back to fill us in on Gander’s busy summer. The social network (don’t say social media) officially opened to the public this past Canada Day and, as he tells us, the craziness down south only continues to drive interest in the new venture.