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.

It’s no accident, according Eemaan Khan, a Canadian expat working as a strategy director at ExecCap Advisors in Chicago. It’s the product of a lack of competition across sectors, which is allowing providers to get away with charging exorbitant prices on thoroughly mid products.

The concept is known as “premium mediocre,” coined by management consultant Venkatesh Rao in 2017, and refers to products, services and experiences that use marketing, aesthetics and false luxury to make average, everyday things premium.

Canada – and Canadians – are particularly ripe for it, Khan recently wrote on his Make Canada Think Harder newsletter, because of a conditioned aversion to risk and failure. It’s a feedback loop that prevents competition from happening, which in turn keeps pricing going up and acceptable standards on what we’re being sold going down.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go to discuss premium mediocre and how Canadians can shake their penchant for accepting middling results at high costs.

Check out Khan’s newsletter here.

For Stefan Kern, there’s a terrible irony to Tony – the new biopic film about late celebrity chef, TV host and writer Anthony Bourdain – being pulled at the last minute from an independent cinema in downtown Toronto.

“He was punk rock, he was the champion of mom and pops, he was very anti-establishment,” says Kern, director of operations and exhibition for Imagine Cinemas. “He chastised a lot of major chains and corporations for being soul-less and not having the same care and love put into their products as the independents, and that’s exactly us.”

In light of that, Imagine dropped the gloves last week by sending customers an email informing them that screenings of the film at its Carlton location in Toronto were being cancelled just four days before it was set to open due to a last-minute change of heart by distributor A24.

“Unfortunately, A24 has made the decision to withdraw Tony from our location due to antiquated clearing practices, ones that still exist in Canada because of the hegemonic theatrical exhibition market share that exists in this country,” the message read.

The email from Imagine, a family owned chain based in Windsor, Ont., that has 11 locations in Ontario and British Columbia, went on to urge customers to file complaints with the Competition Bureau about unfair business practices in theatrical distribution in Canada.

Speaking with Do Not Pass Go, Kern succinctly expanded on the message. “This is a unique Canadian problem,” he says. “There is severe market concentration.”

Independent theatre operators are often careful to avoid explicitly naming the source of this problem for fear of retaliation, but Imagine’s customer communications makes the culprit plain enough: Cineplex.

With more than 150 theatres across the country and about 75 per cent of the box office share, the company is one of Canada’s truest and – as one distributor has put it – “absolute” monopolies. It is the “hegemonic theatrical exhibition market share” referred to in the email.

As a number of independents have told Do Not Pass Go, the company holds immense sway over what films are shown where and when by maintaining and enforcing so-called clearance zones, or geographic areas around its locations. Competing theatres often aren’t allowed to screen a film until a nearby Cineplex is done with it.

The practice is a holdover from an earlier era of film exhibition where several large competing chains existed, each of which would sign up exclusive rights to releases. According to the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors (NICE), which represents 140 independents (but not Imagine), Canada is the only country in which clearance zones are still applied.

These restrictions are seriously affecting more than two-thirds of members, NICE says. And what makes matters worse is that the zones are not officially defined and are instead arbitrarily decided and enforced by Cineplex.

For its part, the company denies such accusations and says distributors make their own decisions, as is the case with Tony and the Carlton in Toronto.

“We didn’t make a complaint,” says Michelle Saba, vice-president of communications at Cineplex. “It is up to film distributors to decide where they play their films. Cineplex does not own the rights to the movies that appear on our screens. We license them from distributors to play in our theatres.”

But distributors are also subject to retaliation by the chain, according to NICE. If Cineplex requests a film be pulled from an independent and the distributor doesn’t follow suit, its films may end up blocked from Cineplex theatres in response.

“It’s not written down anywhere, no cinema can look at a map and see what other cinemas are in their zone. Everything is quite amorphous,” says NICE director Sonya William. “Is there a smoking gun, was there a phone call, is there an email? People have figured out over time that writing this stuff down is maybe not a good idea.”

Jaime Panoff, head of international publicity at New York-based A24, did not return requests for comment.

What makes the Tony situation disheartening for Kern is the fact that Imagine has an existing relationship with the film’s director, Toronto native Matt Johnson, who attended several screenings of his previous film, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, at the Carlton last year.

The theatre posted among the best box office results in North America for that film, he says, which was distributed by Elevation Pictures and recently won Best Motion Picture at the Canadian Screen Awards.

“It was such a cultural moment, with that film set in Toronto,” Kern says. “The whole city came down for his film.”

A representative for Johnson declined to comment.

The Competition Bureau says it is aware of the issues raised by Imagine, but a spokesperson declined to comment on whether the agency is examining them.

Tony is the fifth film from rising star Johnson, who also directed BlackBerry (2023), a humorous telling of the Canadian smartphone pioneer’s rise and fall. Tony, meanwhile, focuses on Bourdain’s early days as an apprentice chef in Provincetown, Mass.

Before he took his own life in 2018, Bourdain was an ardent supporter of independent businesses – especially restaurants. In a 2011 interview with the Harvard Business Review, for example, Bourdain lamented that many U.S. cities lacked the sort of independent street markets found across Asia.

“I don’t understand why we don’t have that in the States,” he said. “It would be good for business, good for the economy, good for our health, and a great alternative to the usual suspects.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🏈 SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT

• Fans of the ROGERS-owned Toronto Maple Leafs were angry this week as ticket prices for the upcoming season were announced, and not surprisingly, they’re going up. What surprised – and upset – fans was that the increase comes after the team posted the fifth-worst record in the NHL last season. As the Toronto Star notes, prices for seats with obstructed view at a mid-week game against non-marquee teams start at $127. Rogers’ MAPLE LEAF SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT says the new prices are only two per cent higher than last year’s, which is lower than the national inflation rate. That said – if fans are mad now, it might be a case of you ain’t seen nothing yet…

• The Los Angeles Times has a worthwhile feature story on the accelerating trend of PRIVATE EQUITY purchasing interests in sports franchises. While such investment can lead to spending on venue improvements and better player contracts, the article also notes that it tends to lead to higher ticket prices as the firms look to extract big returns. With ROGERS cementing full ownership of MLSE and therefore all of Toronto’s major teams last month, the cable giant is now shopping around a stake in its sports division. The company reportedly has a long list of potential partners, with private equity among them.

• Speaking of ROGERS, there’s continuing confusion among concert-goers between the two Toronto stadiums bearing the company’s name. Fans continue to show up for shows at the downtown Rogers Centre, where the Blue Jays play, rather than the new-ish Rogers Stadium in the north of the city. As some affected fans say, the similarity in names is leading to frustrating last-minute travel across the city and missing opening acts. Even The Beaverton has chimed in, with the parody site posting a story about how the Rogers Centre has installed detailed directions to Rogers Stadium outside every gate. Our suggestion: fresh off finally getting rid of the hated statue of company founder Ted Rogers in favour of Jays great Joe Carter, the company should bring back the name that fans originally selected for the downtown stadium – SkyDome. Heck, at this point we’d even settle for Rogers SkyDome.

🛒 GROCERIES

• Canned vegetable giant NORTERA’s attempt to acquire B&G’s FOODS’ Canadian brands, which include Green Giant and Le Sieur, is a “merger to monopoly,” according to documents filed with the Competition Tribunal. The combined companies would have a share of more than 90 per cent of canned vegetables sales to retailers in Canada and more than 80 per cent of frozen core vegetables, with internal Nortera documents showing planned price increases shortly after the deal closes, according to an affidavit from Serge Moresi, vice-president of competition modelling at consulting firm Charles River Associates. A separate affidavit from Jacqueline Byers, a manager of competition law with the Competition Bureau, says that “all other suppliers of branded core vegetables in Canada have insignificant sales” compared to the two companies. Canadian households spent $255 on canned vegetables and other vegetable preparations in 2023, up 14.8 per cent from 2021, and $97 on frozen and dried vegetables, up 27.6 per cent, according to the document. Both affidavits were filed to support the Bureau’s challenge of the transaction, which Quebec-based Nortera says is needed to help preserve Canada’s long-term food stability.

• Grocery giant LOBLAW flip-flopped on labelling out-of-country produce this week, with the company reversing a move to ditch signs after a backlash from customers. The company initially decided to cut back earlier this month after receiving fines from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for some signs being “misleading.” But with heightened trade tensions with the United States, customers have been vocal about wanting the signs back – and wanting them to be accurate. The company on Tuesday said it is planning to restore the signs, as well as the “T” labels on U.S. products that are affected by tariffs.

💾 BIG TECH

• The huge news of the week, besides the ludicrous supposed renaming of Lake Ontario, is that META has settled a lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states over the company designing platforms intended to addict young people to them. Meta has agreed to pay $18 billion (U.S.) and change features on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, such as daily two-hour usage limits and a block on night-time activity. The company must also implement better age-verification tools to prevent kids under 13 from making accounts. There is already considerable debate about what these changes mean, especially in light of regulatory efforts either in place or under way in a number of countries – including Canada – to effect the same results. Reactions so far range from beliefs that the settlement is a major turning point in how the attention economy works to arguments that the result actually helps Meta by costing it little and slowing down competitors even more.

✈️ AIRLINES

• Flight attendants at WESTJET this week ratified a new collective agreement with the airline, with more than 90 per cent approving the deal. The agreement will give workers a 13-per-cent wage hike this fall, followed by a further 2.75-per-cent increase in January and 2.5-per-cent improvement in 2028. The airline’s attendants went on a one-day strike earlier this summer over unpaid hours on the ground, which followed a similar-but-lengthier labour action last year by their counterparts at AIR CANADA.

• Europe, long singled out by passenger rights activists in Canada as the gold standard for consumer protections, has strengthened its rules. The EUROPEAN UNION has added a 30-day deadline for airlines to respond to passenger claims and set nine months as a filing deadline to replace a patchwork of limits across countries. Regulators also resisted efforts by airlines to weaken the rules and held firm on compensation levels, which range between 250 and 600 euros for delays of three hours or more. The new amendments to EU261, the passenger rights rules, also now ban hidden carry-on fees and introduce requirements that children be seated with family members, among other additions. Gabor Lukacs, president of Canadian advocacy group Air Passenger Rights, says Europe’s new measures only further highlight how deficient Canada’s protections are. “In Canada, the trend has been to empty passenger rights from any practical meaning,” he says. “The EU already had the gold standard of passenger protection, which lended itself for speedy determination of eligibility to compensation, unlike Canada, where determining the fate of $400 requires a full day.”

🛢️ RESOURCES

• Regulated utility monopoly ENBRIDGE had a busy week, with a $600 million (U.S.) acquisition of an oil business in the United States and a $2.7 billion (Canadian) venture capital deal to fund its Westcoast natural gas pipeline system. The U.S. deal will see the Calgary-based company acquire hundreds of kilometres of Houston-based Salt Creek Midstream’s crude oil pipeline assets near Texas and New Mexico, though observers point out that increasing cross-border political tensions could play a role in how this transaction plays out. The Westcoast deal, meanwhile, will see investment firms KKR and Apollo form a joint venture to fund expansion of Enbridge’s Aspen Point and Sunrise programs in British Columbia and Alberta.

🥊 COMPETITION

• Canada had fewer MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS in the second quarter of 2026, but the value of deals that did happen was up considerably, according to a report from investment bank Crosbie & Co. The overall number of transactions was down 12 per cent from the first quarter to 600, but their value rose 51 per cent to $114.5 billion thanks to a record 23 mega-deals accounting for $99.8 billion. The bank attributes the “unusually noisy” conditions to higher energy prices resulting from the Iran war, renewed inflation concerns and uncertainty around trade policy. “Macro uncertainty can make sellers hesitate to test the market, but we are definitely not seeing much impact on high-quality businesses,” said Crosbie managing director Sadat Mirza in a release. “Ironically, this environment can work in favour of high-quality sellers – with fewer deals in the market, they are attracting more attention and stronger competition from buyers.”

• The COMPETITION BUREAU is becoming more bearish, according to a new review by Torys law firm, with merger reviews getting longer and more complex. The enforcement agency’s new tone, in place since amendments to the Competition Act came into force in 2024, is resulting in increased litigation and greater deal uncertainty. “The Bureau clearly views the amendments as a green light to pursue a more interventionist approach to merger enforcement,” the firm says. “That approach is translating into longer and more burdensome reviews, heightened scrutiny of non-reportable transactions, and an increased willingness to litigate. For transaction parties, the result is greater execution risk and increased importance of identifying and assessing competition issues at an early stage of the deal process.”

🚨 COMING UP

Canada is a country where everything is expensive, but what we’re paying for is thoroughly meh. So says EEAMAAN KHAN, a Canadian expat and strategy director at ExecCap Advisors in Chicago. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Tuesday to discuss the concept of “premium mediocrity,” and how Canadians have been forced to accept it thanks to a highly concentrated economy.

The continuing problems suggest the pleas for improvement are not being answered. For its part, Bell – which holds a virtual monopoly over fibre and wireless networks in Yukon – says the economics don’t make sense. The regulator and feds don’t appear to be helping much, yet.

At a time when more eyes are on arctic security and wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, the ongoing connectivity crisis in the North can no longer be ignored – it’s a problem that needs to be addressed urgently.

Jennifer Gehmair, the Yukon minister of Economic Development, Tourism and Culture, joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how the competitive situation in the territories – or rather the lack of it – means that different solutions involving government and regulators are needed in everything from telecom services to grocery availability.

A battle over vegetables has erupted in Canada, and it’s another sign of potentially divergent priorities between the federal government and the Competition Bureau. The enforcement agency this week stepped in to prevent one company – Nortera – from cornering the market, despite government-imposed tariffs on foreign imports that are aiding the firm.

The Competition Bureau on Wednesday said it is challenging Nortera’s acquisition of the Green Giant and Le Sieur brands and businesses for an undisclosed amount from the Canadian subsidiary of New Jersey-based B&G Foods. The Bureau is also requesting that the Competition Tribunal prevent the companies from closing the deal, which was announced in October, until the case can be heard.

The Bureau believes the acquisition by Brossard, Que.-based Nortera, which is the dominant processor of canned and frozen vegetables in Canada and owner of the Arctic Gardens and Del Monte brands, would lead to higher prices for consumers, fewer choices and less competition in wholesale grocery supply.

The challenge comes amid an ongoing inquiry by the Canadian International Trade Tribunal (CITT), initiated by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne in March, that is looking into whether foreign imports of canned vegetables are harming domestic processors, including Nortera.

Champagne in June announced a 10-per-cent tariff on canned vegetables from a number of countries, effectively raising the price on many imports until the CITT concludes its study, expected in September.

In a press release at the time, Champagne said he was ordering the inquiry in response to a formal request from the Canadian Association of Vegetable Growers and Processors, a lobby group that appears to have come into existence just this year.

The group registered its first ever communication with a designated public office holder on Feb. 9, with a further seven following after that. Half of the total were with Finance department officials and one with the Prime Minister’s Office, with “international trade, imports and measures applicable to vegetables” disclosed as general details of the meetings.

The group does not publicly disclose its membership and does not have a website. Alik Angaladian, a principal at public and government relations firm Maple Leaf Strategies who is the association’s registered lobbyist, said in an email that it is “the voice of Canadian vegetable growers, harvesters, employees, and processors from coast to coast to coast, working to protect and strengthen the sector from farm to consumer.”

She did not respond to a query about who its members are, or why it doesn’t have a website.

Nortera spokesperson Gabrielle Fallu confirmed that the company is a member of the association, but also did not respond to a query about other members or its lack of online presence.

Representatives for Champagne did not provide answers over why he initiated the CITT probe at the request of a new organization about which so little is publicly known.

“Any interested party can seek an inquiry, and the government refers the matter to the [Canadian International Trade] Tribunal, which examines the evidence on whether increased imports are seriously harming Canadian producers,” an official in his office said in an email. “The measure currently in place is provisional, pending the Tribunal’s findings.”

In its response to the Competition Bureau’s challenge, Nortera said its acquisition of B&G Foods Canada’s businesses is in Canada’s best interests.

“At a time when the Canadian vegetable industry is facing increasing pressure from imports, maintaining strong domestic production and processing capacity is critical to the long-term resilience of Canada’s food supply. The transaction would help preserve that capacity, support Canada’s food security and food sovereignty, and provide greater long-term stability for the farmers and local partners who underpin this supply chain,” the company said in a release on Wednesday.

“These objectives are closely aligned with the government of Canada’s recently launched National Food Security Strategy, which recognizes the importance of increasing domestic food production and processing, reducing reliance on foreign suppliers, and building a stronger, more resilient Canadian food system.”

The Bureau’s challenge of Nortera’s acquisition is not the first instance of the agency pursuing an outcome that potentially differs from the federal government’s industrial policy, which competition insiders say has shifted toward favouring large, national champions ever since relations with the United States soured under President Donald Trump.

The Bureau earlier this year also announced it was challenging Calgary-based Keyera’s acquisition of Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline’s Canadian natural gas liquids business on the grounds that it would reduce competition in the Alberta market and increase costs across the supply chain.

The government is seen as wanting that deal to go ahead. As Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Willis put it at the time, the “Competition Bureau seems to have missed the memo from the Prime Minister’s Office.”

As reported here last month, this divergence in priorities is seen as perhaps the main reason for why the government is dragging its heels in naming a new full-time Competition Commissioner.

Jeanne Pratt has been acting commissioner since Matthew Boswell stepped down early from the post in December. Boswell, who held the job for seven years, is considered to be the most activist commissioner to ever helm the Bureau, and current leadership – if the mounting challenges are any indication – is continuing in that vein.

In the meantime, consumers continue to struggle with runaway food costs. Canada consistently leads the G7 in food inflation, with a lack of competition throughout the system pegged by experts as a big factor.

According to Statistics Canada figures, a basket of frozen and canned green beans, corn, mixed vegetables, peas, and beans and lentils – the goods at the centre of the Bureau’s newest challenge – cost an average of $20.09 in June, 2026, up 39 per cent from $14.39 in June, 2017. That’s 7 per cent higher than the rate of inflation, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.

With food costs consistently ranking as Canadians’ biggest concern in polls, some observers say the government shouldn’t be pushing short-term industrial policy over longer-term competitive needs.

In the case of Nortera, the feds should be supporting the Bureau’s challenge over the company’s lobbying, says Regina Seibel, an assistant professor of economics analysis and policy at the University of Toronto who specializes in competition and market power.

“This is a super concentrated industry, we shouldn’t have even let it come this far,” she says. “From an economics perspective, this acquisition is unambiguously not good and the only reason to go through with it is either political or falsely applied industrial policy.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

💾 BIG TECH

• The big news of the week was certainly Canada’s trade deal with the United States, and while full details are not yet known, a congratulatory tweet by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer about how the two countries were in “digital trade alignment” raised sovereignty concerns on this side of the border. In interpreting what that message might mean in a Globe and Mail article, a number of competition and consumer advocates worried that it could result in concessions to Big Tech companies and cementing the positions of firms including GOOGLE, META and APPLE. Former BlackBerry co-chief executive Jim Balsillie told the newspaper that trade agreements with the U.S. have become a means of “regulatory remote control,” while Andrew Clement, chair of Canadians for Digital Sovereignty, said “‘alignment’ on digital trade is the polite word for adopting rules written for American platforms.” We’ll obviously have more on this as further details of the trade deal emerge.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• In the latest episode of the PARAMOUNT saga, the company this week asked the judge overseeing the antitrust lawsuits filed by U.S. states and the Writers Guild of America to require the plaintiffs to pay a $1.88 billion (U.S.) bond to cover its losses for delaying its $111 billion takeover of WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY. The trial in the lawsuit isn’t scheduled to begin until March, but Paramount will have to start paying Warner Bros. a “ticking fee” amounting to about $7 million per day beginning on Oct. 1 until the deal closes. Paramount wants the WGA and the 12 involved states to pony up for the bond, which it would pocket if it wins the antitrust case.

• As part of its ongoing battle, PARAMOUNT late last week also said it had received regulatory approvals to proceed with the Warner Bros. acquisition in 68 countries, including Canada. That part is true, with the Competition Bureau quietly issuing a “no-action letter” on July 9. Among the objectors on this side of the border were the NETWORK OF INDEPENDENT CANADIAN EXHIBITORS, which represents 140 cinemas across the country. In April, NICE warned that the merger will consolidate as much as 40 per cent of the combined Canada and U.S. box office and requested that the Bureau conduct a full and rigorous review of the deal, paying specific attention to how it will impact Canadian filmmakers and independent theatres, as well as theatrical distribution. The organization also asked for legally binding conditions protecting fair access to content and fair dealing in contract terms should the deal ultimately go through. Bureau spokesperson Sarah Brown confirms that the agency is not taking currently taking action and declined to provide a copy of the no-action letter. “It is important to note that the [Competition] Act allows for a one-year period following the completion of a transaction during which we may bring an application to the Competition Tribunal challenging a notifiable transaction,” she said. “We are required by law to conduct our work in private, therefore I am unable to share additional information, nor can I share a copy of the no-action letter.”

🛒 GROCERY & RETAIL

• Sobeys and Longo’s parent EMPIRE is buying nine MORELLI’S pharmacies in Ontario. The pharmacies, started by Gerry Morelli in 1990, are already co-located in Longo’s stores, and will be rebranded under the chain’s name after the deal’s expected closing in 2027. Empire also owns LAWTONS DRUGS, which has 76 locations in Atlantic Canada, making it a primary competitor to LOBLAW and its SHOPPERS DRUG MART chain.

• In case you missed it, a British woman recently went viral for her discovery of a MARS chocolate bar from 1991, which she then compared to a current version. It’s a great example of shrinkflation, where the older bar – which she describes as “enormous” – weighed in at 56 per cent more than today’s offering. “(The) price of everything’s increasing all the time,” she said. “We’re getting squeezed and squeezed more.”

📱 TELECOM

• It’s not every day that a professional athlete in Toronto criticizes ROGERS – and there’s good reason for that – but TORONTO TEMPO player Marina Mabrey did it anyway. The New Jersey-born shooting guard put the cable company on blast this week for continuing internet problems in her Toronto apartment. “Someone please help me with Rogers WiFI. It literally doesn’t work and they never answer my calls,” she posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday. During a press conference on Monday, she doubled down and discussed how a Rogers technician had visited her home and supposedly fixed the problem, only to have it crap out again at a key moment of a basketball game she was watching. “I’m sick to death. I can’t order anything from Skims, Fashion Nova. I can order nothing,” she said. “I can barely FaceTime. I’m pissed. I’m about to tweet back at Rogers again.” Her critiques are notable because the Tempo, which play in the Women’s National Basketball Association, are one of the few professional sports teams in Toronto that aren’t owned by the cable and wireless giant. Not that the company didn’t have a chance – in 2023, MAPLE LEAF SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT minority owner Larry Tanenbaum advocated for the company to secure a WNBA franchise, but Edward Rogers opposed it. Tanenbaum eventually pursued and landed the team independently, and then shortly after sold his stake in MLSE to Rogers to give it full control and ownership over the Toronto Maple Leafs, Raptors, Argos, TFC and Blue Jays, plus the Rogers Centre and Scotiabank Arena. Mabrey’s critique is unusual given how unlikely it would be for a Leafs or Blue Jays player to criticize their teams’ owners on social media or live television.

• Speaking of ROGERS and its former MLSE partner BELL, both companies are once again rolling out price increases on services. Certain internet packages at Rogers went up $7 this week, while Bell is boosting some wireless prices by $6, starting in October. Which brings us to…

• The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has rejected attempts by BELL, ROGERS and TELUS to derail its probe of new wireless charges the companies recently ushered in to defray a ban on switching, set-up and cancellation fees, which came into effect in June. The carriers variously added charges for device set-up, ESIMs and shipping, which led to the regulator launching an investigation earlier this summer. Telus in particular wanted the probe to be split into separate parts and accused the CRTC of predetermined bias, with the other two supporting its positions. The regulator denied the requests, as well as some made by consumer advocacy groups such as the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications, which asked for a two-day oral hearing on the issue. The CRTC said a paper-based review would suffice.

• And finally on the telecom front, the CRTC also this week temporarily suspended its ban on the sale of locked phones. BELL in particular has been lobbying the regulator to allow it to lock phones that it sells to its network, ostensibly to combat theft and fraud. The company has been disobeying the ban, which was enacted in 2017 to make it easier for customers to switch providers, so the CRTC has opted to let wireless carriers lock devices for two days until it can reach a final decision. Carriers must also unlock purchased devices immediately if requested to do so by the customer, the regulator said. The CRTC is conducting a hearing into the issue, with public interventions due by Sept. 14.

🚨 COMING UP

Canadians in the provinces complain about their telecom services for a variety of reasons, but they may have it good compared to their counterparts in the territories. The Yukon government recently wrote to Bell, the CRTC and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Melanie Joly about doing something to fix the poor and decaying state of wireless service. JEN GEHMAIR, Minister of Economy, Tourism and Culture for the territory, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Tuesday to discuss the problem – and the responses she has (or has not) received.

That’s the premise of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, the latest non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow.

As it stands, he argues, the tech industry has been selling investors on the promise that AI will soon be able to replace vast swaths of human jobs, thereby saving employers untold millions or billions of dollars.

But in reality, AI’s capabilities have been hugely overstated while the resultant investment gold rush has irretrievably sunk billions of dollars and caused immense ecological harm via related data centres.

AI will be a useful tool, says Doctorow, a prolific science-fiction author, journalist, digital rights activist and credited coiner of the term “enshittification,” but policy makers and the public need to be able to see through the bubble being peddled by tech bros for their own interests.

He returns to the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how policy makers, investors and the public can best use AI, rather than have it use them.

Why do Canadians pay their phone bills a month in advance, rather than after the fact?

That’s what Stephen Lawton is asking in a submission to the federal telecom regulator. Lawton, a former senior customer service advisor in ROGERS’ office of the president, doesn’t believe there’s any good reason for the practice, and he’s asking the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to change it.

“Advance billing is the root cause of a large and recurring class of consumer harm,” he says in his filing. “A customer charged 30 days ahead for service they may cancel mid-cycle is exposed to overpayment, delayed refunds, and late fees on amounts never actually owed.”

That’s the exact situation Lawton found himself in a few months ago when he cancelled his partner’s service with Rogers’ Fido and moved it to Telus’ Koodo, which he details in both his filing and on his Substack, Canadian Snowman Says.

Rather than paying about $4.10 for the four days of service they had accrued, Lawton and his partner ended up being charged the full monthly amount of $42.38. With Fido not having inbound calling and a chatbot that would not provide access to human customer service agents, he was forced to file a complaint with the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television services.

The CCTS ultimately resolved his specific dispute, but told him that the CRTC handles general billing practices. After he inquired with the CRTC, the regulator told him that advance billing is a common industry practice and that he should file a formal complaint if he didn’t like it. So he did.

As luck would have it, the CRTC is in the midst of reviewing consumer protections. The regulator is taking public comments until Aug. 11, with a public hearing scheduled for Nov. 30.

Lawton, who is now retired, spent 18 years dealing with customer complaints at Rogers. The main point in his submission is that the CRTC has never actually considered whether the practice of advance billing by telcos makes sense – it’s simply accepted because everyone does it.

The practice originated with the original advent of the telephone more than a century ago, when governments allowed providers to bill in advance in order to raise working capital to fund network expansion. But that rationale hasn’t made sense for decades and isn’t found with other utilities.

“What is striking is how little the billing convention has changed and how completely its original justification has dissolved,” Lawton writes in his submission. “The carriers that bill 30 days in advance today are not undercapitalized startups, they are among the largest corporations in Canada.”

Lawton tells Do Not Pass Go that his filing has received considerable attention thanks to a recent Toronto Star article on it. When he submitted it to the CRTC’s review on July 15, it was only the 14th entry – that total quickly grew to more than 100 a few days after the article ran.

Lawton, who writes on Substack as “Stephen Gordon,” says that moving from advance billing to the post-paid system used by other utilities would be a win-win for both consumers and telcos. He says a large portion of CCTS complaints are rooted in consumers disputing advance charges. With carriers having to pay the ombudsman for every complaint received, they would lower their overall costs by stopping issues before they occur.

“It will result in fewer complaints, which is better for the carrier,” he says. “They’re not losing anything, they’re gaining something.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

✈️ AIRLINES

• Flight attendants working for WESTJET won significant new compensation this week following their one-day strike on Sunday. The Canadian Union of Public Employees, the union representing the strike attendants, announced that it had secured an 18-per-cent pay increase over three years and compensation for previously unpaid hours that attendants were working while on the ground, a key sticking point in the labour dispute. Staff will vote on the deal in September. Stories of passengers stranded by the brief strike and resultant disruption, meanwhile, made the rounds this week. An Ottawa resident, for one, told CTV that WestJet refused to book his family onto another carrier to get home from Cancun even though there was space on the flight, thereby violating Canada’s passenger rights laws that require airlines to do in the event of a disruption.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• The ongoing story of PARAMOUNT attempting to acquire WARNER BROS. is getting more chapters than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a swath of new developments this past week. First, a U.S. federal judge set March 2027 as the trial date to hear the antitrust challenges brought against the deal by a number of U.S. states. The date is seen as a negative for Paramount, which had been seeking to complete the merger this summer. The same judge, Araceli Martínez-Olguín, then also rejected a separate antitrust challenge brought by a group of consumers, ruling that they had not sufficiently established their standing in the case. She said that the consumer case had only established one “particularized injury,” a single price increase on the Paramount+ streaming service, but not the generalized competitive harms needed to be included in the case. The judge did leave the door open for the consumers to file an amended complaint. Lastly, U.K. regulators announced this week that they will not challenge the merger, with Paramount agreeing to concessions including promises to continue operating a local public service broadcaster.

• Speaking of streaming, a number of the big services are looking at launching free tiers given slowdowns in paid subscriber growth. DISNEY chief executive Josh D’Amaro said in an earnings call this week that the company is exploring an advertising-supported “free product” as a way to appeal to price-conscious consumers. That follows NETFLIX suggesting the same last month, with the streaming leader confirming it’s also looking at a free tier that doesn’t cannibalize its paid service.

🏦 BANKING

• After announcing that they were exploring a merger back in the spring, B.C.-based CASCADIA CREDIT UNION and GREATER VANCOUVER COMMUNITY CREDIT UNION this week announced that they are indeed going ahead with their deal. The two credit unions, respectively based in Summerland and Burnaby, are asking the B.C. Financial Services Authority for the go-ahead. The combined entities would have six branches, serve more than 20,000 members and oversee more than $1.3 billions in assets under management. The tie-up is the latest in a wave of credit union mergers across Canada, many of which are happening because of increased technology and regulatory costs. For more on the merger trend and the resultant risks to credit unions’ identity, check out our coverage in last week’s newsletter.

🥊 COMPETITION

• The COMPETITION BUREAU has issued a bulletin reaffirming its position on private right of access to the Competition Tribunal, which is a relatively new option for individuals, companies and organizations to launch legal cases against various abuses of market power by firms. The bulletin lays out the Bureau’s role in such cases, and how or when it may get involved. For instance, if a person or company applies to the Tribunal for leave to argue a case, the Bureau must notify the court within 48 hours whether it is conducting an inquiry into the matter itself or if it has discontinued an inquiry because of a settlement. The bulletin also affirms that the Bureau may participate in or support a private case, or that it can also overrule applications by launching its own investigation into a matter. Private right of access was introduced last year following amendments to the Competition Act as a way of taking pressure off the Bureau as the sole challenger of abuses of dominance. Three applications have been launched so far, which we’ve covered in depth here – against Google’s dominance of the search market, Apple’s app store commissions, and Live Nation’s business practices. The Tribunal dismissed the Google application earlier this year, with the other two still waiting for approval to go ahead.

🚨 COMING UP

We’re in the dog days of summer now, so we’re going to take a breather next week and return on Aug. 18. Novelist, journalist, activist and enshittification master CORY DOCTOROW rejoins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to talk about his latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late.

Over the past few years, a wave of consolidation has created sleep business juggernauts in both Canada and the United States. In 2012, manufacturers Tempur-Pedic and Sealy merged to become Somnigroup, before going on to acquire Mattress Firm – the largest U.S. sleep retailer – last year. Earlier this year, the Kentucky-based company announced a $2.5 billion (U.S.) acquisition of component maker Leggett & Platt, setting itself up to become a vertically integrated powerhouse with an estimated 40-per-cent share of the U.S. market.

Meanwhile in Canada, Sleep Country has been on its own acquisition binge. Aside from gobbling up a host of online bed-in-a-box sellers including Casper Canada, Endy and Silk & Snow, the Toronto-based company last year acquired the rights to Bed, Bath & Beyond, with plans to relaunch the brand. And just recently, the company paid $702 million to acquire Minneapolis-based retailer Sleep Number, marking its expansion into the United States. Sleep Country says the deal makes it the world’s second-biggest sleep-oriented company after, you guessed it, Somnigroup.

Nate Cangemi has more than 20 years experience in the sleep business and is the proprietor of Golden Dreams Mattress, an independent retailer based in Carslbad, Calif. He has been vocal of this growing consolidation on his social media channels, arguing that it is resulting in higher prices, homogenized choices for consumers and declining innovation.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how concentration and vertical integration is literally preventing people from getting a better night’s sleep.

Check out Golden Dreams Mattress here and on Instagram.

In Canada, credit unions have long been hailed as a more customer-friendly alternative to the big banks. But with these institutions merging at a head-spinning pace, some industry experts are wondering if they might be in danger of becoming the opposite of what they’re supposed to be.

The latest potential merger is between British Columbia’s Cascadia Credit Union and Greater Vancouver Community Credit Union (GVC), respectively based in Summerland and Burnaby, who announced a potential tie-up in late April.

In a press release at the time, the duo said they were looking into whether a merger would “create a strong credit union that can provide enhanced services and financial advice to all of our members for many years to come.” A Cascadia spokesperson told Do Not Pass Go that the two credit unions expect to issue an update on their process next week.

A combined entity would have more than $1.3 billion in assets, 20,000 members and six branches. Cascadia itself was formed last year as a result of an amalgamation of Summerland Credit Union, Osoyoos Credit Union and Revelstoke Credit Union. The proposed deal is also subject to a mandatory review by the Competition Bureau, which automatically looks at all mergers where the target exceeds $93 million in assets or revenue.

If it goes ahead, the transaction would be the latest in a recent flurry of mergers that includes fellow B.C. credit unions Prospera, Coast Capital and Sunshine Coast, which joined forces earlier this year, as did Kawartha and Libro in Ontario last October. Connect First and Servus, two of Alberta’s largest credit unions, merged in 2024, as did Windsor Family and Rapport in Ontario. The Rapport acquisition was Windsor Family’s third in Ontario since 2020, following deals with Education Credit Union and Healthcare Credit Union.

This recent wave of consolidation has brought the total number of credit unions in Canada to around 150, a number that has steadily shrunk from a high of around 5,000 in the 1960s. Not including Quebec’s Desjardins, which operates more like a bank, Canada’s credit unions collectively held about $330 billion in assets at the end of 2025. That was up 5.1 per cent from a year earlier, though the total is a comparative drop in the bucket compared to the $9 trillion-plus in assets held by the big six banks.

Credit union mergers can result in benefits for customers, otherwise known as members, in the form of new services and product offerings, lower rates and better branch hours, but complaints also frequently show up. These range from criticisms about new and different systems, hours or fees, to worse customer service or, as is often seen in online fora such as Reddit, the particularly damning accusation of the credit union “starting to feel like a bank.”

The critiques are sometimes warranted, industry experts say, as credit unions have frequently established themselves by prioritizing personalized customer service and community-building. Many are based in small towns, where they have historically been the only banking services provider, or are rooted in a particular ethnic or religious community.

When such institutions merge and adopt new management, policies or procedures, they risk running afoul of what originally made them appealing to members.

“Merging can negate or dilute what is the secret sauce of the credit union that caused you to join in the first place,” says Doug MacDonald, a Toronto-based credit union advisor. “There’s a community in there, there’s multi-generational service, there’s common goals, there’s support of those things. You might lose that if you were to join a larger credit union, and that’s always a balance.”

Despite that risk, the merger wave is happening for a variety of reasons, with ongoing technological change and increasing regulatory burden among the key factors.

Like banks, credit unions have been required to invest in a steady succession of technologies over the decades, from automated banking machines and online platforms to open banking. But unlike banks, many credit unions have lacked the size and scale to pay for these developments, as well as their associated regulatory compliance costs.

For much of the 20th century, credit unions managed to largely share these and other common costs through collective associations such as Central1, Alberta Central and Atlantic Central. These organizations provided their respective provincial credit unions with one-stop shops for technology and regulatory compliance, human resources, marketing, education and training, and many other services.

But, as some credit unions grew bigger, they inevitably wanted more control over how the associations were run, leading to a fracturing of collective efforts.

“They started wanting more say in the governance of the centrals and less of this redistributive pricing kind of thing, and then they started thinking, ‘Well, we can do a lot of this stuff in house,’” says Marc-Andre Pigeon, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan and the director of the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives.

“Now it’s like each credit union kind of has to fend for themselves, so they bring less of that collective weight to the market than they used to.”

Part of the problem has also been that credit unions have been hemmed into operating only in their own provinces, with regulations either preventing or making it difficult to expand into other parts of the country, either organically or through acquisition.

Only three – B.C.-based Coast Capital, New Brunswick’s UNI Financial and Prairies-based Innovation – have been operating under a federal charter. They were joined in April by a fourth, B.C.-based First West, which renamed itself Tru Cooperative to mark the status change.

Though the path to what’s known as federal continuance has been open to credit unions for more than a decade, the process has been too burdensome for many to bother. As Pigeon notes, First West’s conversion took seven years.

The federal government appears to have recognized this issue and, with its stated position of wanting to inject more competition into the banking sector, is making it easier for credit unions to grow – and merge.

Last year’s fall budget contained measures designed to streamline the process, much to the delight of the Canadian Credit Union Association, the industry trade group that lobbied for the changes.

“Consolidation is happening in our sector for a lot of the same reasons that it happens in other sectors of the economy,” says Michael Hatch, vice-president of government relations for the CCUA. “Our members in many cases need to achieve scale to efficiently cover some of these costs, and organic growth is often not sufficient to achieve the scale that they need.”

With the runway now clearer for inter-provincial growth and mergers, the already rapid pace of consolidation may speed up even more. That’s only going to further sharpen the focus on credit unions’ main selling point – that they’re not big banks. As observers point out, if they are to indeed function as viable alternatives, they will to need to remember what differentiates them in the first place.

“The challenge for credit unions is how do they get to be big enough to succeed effectively, but also be different in terms of, ‘I got your back,’” Pigeon says. “There’s something lost in that process. It’s an identity thing.”

And now, onto the rest of the competition news…

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

✈️ AIRLINES

• It’s possible this news item is irrelevant by the time you read it as negotiations are ongoing, but as of early Friday afternoon WESTJET flight attendants are scheduled to go on strike. The union representing the attendants issued their 72-hour notice on Thursday, meaning a strike could begin as soon as the clock ticks over into Sunday. The main issue in dispute is attendants wanting to be compensated for currently unpaid hours that they spend on the ground. Their counterparts at AIR CANADA went on strike over the same issue last summer and ultimately won concessions from the airline, though not before the federal government unsuccessfully tried to force them back to work. As documents turned up by Do Not Pass Go in April showed, Air Canada used scare tactics on the government during that labour dispute. Regardless of how the current dispute turns out, we’ll be looking into whether WestJet tried the same.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS

• Big news in the ongoing WARNER BROS. saga as PARAMOUNT late last week agreed to delay its $111-billion (U.S.) acquisition of the studio to as late as June 2027, in order to deal with legal challenges. The announcement follows a judge issuing a temporary restraining order last week in response to a group of U.S. states challenging the mega-merger, which they say will harm production and output in the news and entertainment industries. Paramount had said it was confident the deal would close by the end of September, after which a “ticking fee” comes into effect. The company will be required to pay Warner Bros. a $7 billion breakup fee if the deal falls apart.

• As if to pour vinegar on the wounds of those people upset by the recent demise of free Hockey Night in Canada on CBC, ROGERS this week announced a deal that will see Wednesday-night national games broadcast exclusively on AMAZON’s streaming service. Prime Video will also carry select Stanley Cup playoff series in additional to at least 26 regular season games, with Rogers’ Sportsnet retaining the majority of the rest. The deal, which follows Rogers’ recent cementing of full ownership over Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment and which further fragments games across several paid services, runs through the 2037-38 season.

• The so-called NETFLIX tax appears to be dead, according to court documents unearthed by The Wire Report this week. Back in May, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s implemented a levy on foreign streaming companies including Netflix, AMAZON and APPLE, that would see 15 per cent of their Canadian revenue go to funds supporting local content production. The ruling would have increased the existing 5-per-cent levy, which the streaming companies have been fighting in court since 2024. The federal government nixed that ruling in June, instead promising additional public funds for Cancon production while also stating that the streaming companies’ contributions “won’t be zero.” However, in a letter sent by the government to the Federal Court of Appeal dated July 17, it looks like those contributions will indeed be nil. “We are instructed to inform the court that the government’s intention is to eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to replace those contributions,” said letter from the attorney general’s office.

📱 TELECOM

• Speaking of the CRTC, the regulator has temporarily suspended deadlines in its investigation of new wireless fees being charged by BELL, ROGERS and TELUS. The regulator launched the probe, known as a show-cause proceeding, a few weeks ago after the carriers refused to scrap the new fees, which they introduced last month to coincide with a ban on charges that are designed to prevent or discourage customers from switching providers. The CRTC had written to the companies to inform them of its belief that these charges, which range from device handling to SIM card fees, were in violation of the rules. Submissions and interventions were due by July 30, but the regulator on Wednesday temporarily suspended the deadlines. The CRTC could not say why it went with a suspension rather than an extension, but explained that it needs to consider procedural request from relevant parties. “Once those requests have been addressed, the CRTC will establish new deadlines, giving all parties sufficient time to consider the determinations and prepare their submissions,” spokesperson Mirabella Salem says. “The CRTC expects this to result in only a short delay before the revised deadlines are announced.”

💾 BIG TECH

• This happened last week but we missed it in the roundup, so it’s incumbent to mention it here because it’s big – the European Union has hit GOOGLE parent Alphabet with a 890-million-euro ($1.4 billion Canadian) fine for favouring its own services and preventing other apps from steering users to money-saving alternatives. Roughly half the penalty was issued for Google preferencing its own shopping, hotels, transport and sports services in search results. The remainder was for restrictions on the Google Play app store, which prevent developers from directing users to cheaper offers on rival app stores or websites. Google reacted angrily and said it may fight the findings in court. “To comply, we are having to strip away real-time search features Europeans love like instant pricing and direct availability ‌for hotels, flights, and restaurants and dismantle safety protections on Google Play,” the company said in a statement. “This isn’t fair competition, it’s product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants, with European businesses and consumers taking the hit. Regulation should improve products, not make them worse.”

• It’s not every day that we hear of an antitrust ruling out of China, much less a massive one, but lo and behold local travel website operator TRIP.COM GROUP has been hit with a 5.2-billion-yuan ($1 billion Canadian) fine for monopolistic behaviour. The company, which runs Ctrip, Skyscanner and other brands in the country, was found to have restricted competition through exclusive partnerships and funnelling traffic to specific hotels. The company also prevented some hotels from working with other platforms and required them to list their lowest prices on its outlets. In stark contrast with Google’s reply above, Trip.com said it “sincerely accepts and will resolutely comply” with the findings.

🛒 RETAIL

• Big Cannabis is getting bigger, with Edmonton-based SNDL this week announcing that it had completed the acquisition of some assets belonging to SURTERRA HOLDINGS, a U.S. company with operations in Florida, Texas and Massachusetts. The acquisition, made under Surterra’s foreclosure, gives SNDL a 249-store cannabis retail network – the largest in the world – and “represents a defining milestone in our strategy to become a leading vertically integrated North American cannabis company,” according to a release. SNDL, which is also involved in liquor retail, owns cannabis retail brands including Spiritleaf, Value Buds and Cost Cannabis.

🚨 COMING UP

Think you’re safe from monopolies while you sleep? You may be in for a rude awakening. Lexington, Kentucky-based Somnigroup has been on an acquisition spree over the past few years and is on the verge of becoming a vertically integrated giant with interests in nearly every part of the sleep business. Meanwhile, Toronto-based Sleep Country has been on a similar acquisition tear and is now expanding into the United States. Independent mattress retailer NATE CANGEMI joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Tuesday to talk about how this growing duopoly is leading to higher prices, homogenized choices and worse sleep for consumers.

A steady stream of surveys are finding that public trust in news outlets is on the decline. A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, for example, found that only 37 per cent of Canadians trust the news overall, which was down from 55 per cent a decade ago.

Many of the news media’s problems are self-inflicted, but some of them are also the product of forces we talk a lot about here – corporatization, consolidation and, yes, enshittification. It’s just another industry that has problems stemming from giant companies extracting profits at the expense of everything else.

Tara Henley is a journalist who went viral in 2022 after she left CBC and criticized the institution for how far it had strayed from objectivity. She has spent the past few years focusing on these issues through her Substack, Lean Out.

Now, she has focused all of that research and commentary into a new book, The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity, which covers both the internal and external failures that are showing up as these concerning survey statistics.

Her book is a sober diagnosis of what has gone wrong, as well as a plain prescription for how the news media can restore the public’s faith in it. She joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to talk about the trust spiral and how to reverse it.

Check out Tara’s Substack here and her new book here.

Grocery giant EMPIRE’s announcement this week that it is dropping exclusive property agreements and controls is being met with skepticism among critics who say such contracts are stifling competition and are raising prices for consumers.

“Pinky promises don’t hold up in court,” says Jacob Filipp, who tracks grocery store covenants in Canada, including Empire’s. “Trusting a corporation to do what they say, that’s not the way to solve a regulatory or competition problem.”

The Stellarton, N.S.-based company on Tuesday announced it will no longer enforce restrictive covenant interests on any of its properties, including those previously sold, and will not introduce any on new locations. The company also says it will not enforce exclusivity clauses or radius restrictions, which prevent specialty food retailers such as butchers or bakers from opening near its stores.

Empire owns more than 1,500 grocery locations across Canada, including the Sobeys, Safeway, Farm Boy, IGA and Longo’s brands, among others.

Property controls are common in the industry, with restrictions also typically preventing new grocery stores from opening on the site of another that has closed or moved, often for a significant period of time. As Filipp explained on a recent episode of the Do Not Pass Go podcast, some clauses extend well beyond grocery retail, such as billiard halls or arcades being prohibited within a specified radius of a store.

In its statement this week, Empire admitted its move stems from regulatory and legal heat. The Competition Bureau is investigating property controls while Manitoba, which banned them last year, announced in April that it intends to bring court cases against the company.

“While these arrangements are not inherently anti-competitive, we recognize the increased scrutiny in this area and the importance of ensuring they are used appropriately,” the company said. “We have engaged constructively with various stakeholders, including the Competition Bureau, and that dialogue has helped inform our ongoing practices in this area.”

But, Filipp adds, the company has not said it will legally amend its property contracts to remove restrictions and exclusivity clauses, only that it will not enforce them. Empire did not return requests for comment on whether it will in fact change its contracts.

The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project welcomed the company’s promises to refrain from enforcing its contracts, but also believes that stronger assurances are required.

“The move is a good one by Empire but it doesn’t negate the need for the Competition Bureau’s investigation or provincial action against property controls,” says CAMP executive director Keldon Bester. “It will take actual transparency and accountability if this commitment is going to be worth anything.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

• Also in food news, a report on Canada’s new grocery CODE OF CONDUCT finds that there’s considerable mistrust between suppliers and retailers, with both worried about complaining about the other for fear of retaliation. “The concern most frequently identified by members relates to the potential impact that raising issues may have on ongoing commercial relationships,” the report says. “In particular, some members have expressed concerns regarding possible retribution, negative commercial consequences, or damage to important business relationships, even where the Code specifically encourages direct engagement between parties through designated Code Representatives.” It isn’t just suppliers reluctant to raise concerns with big grocery chains, the report notes, it’s also independent retailers who are afraid to complain about suppliers. The Code, which came into effect at the beginning of this year and includes 200 signatories from across the food chain, was established in response to suppliers complaints’ about fees from the big grocers. The report concludes that it’s still early days for the Code, and that the office that administers it will be focusing on growing awareness about how its tools and processes work with its signatories.

• Toronto Mayor OLIVIA CHOW has joined the growing list of elected officials and politicians who oppose surveillance pricing, which is individualized pricing set by retailers based on the data they have about a person. Chow introduced a motion on Tuesday, which passed, that will “identify all possible mechanisms for the city of Toronto to ban and regulate surveillance pricing that increases prices on groceries, including those sold online and delivered within the city, and report to the new term of City Council in the first quarter of 2027 with options for consideration.” Manitoba enacted a prohibition on surveillance pricing in June, while federal NDP leader Avi Lewis has called for a nation-wide ban. Chow’s move could bring her into conflict with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who opposes outlawing surveillance pricing. Ford has said that individualized pricing goes against his free-market beliefs and allows retailers to provide discounts to consumers.

• If you’ve heard the jingle, you know it well: “SLEEP COUNTRY CANADA, why buy a mattress anywhere else?” The Toronto-based retailer is working hard to answer its own question for consumers with, “Because you can’t,” with the acquisition this week of SLEEP NUMBER. The $702-million (U.S.) deal for the Minneapolis-based retailer allows Sleep Country to expand into the United States and gives it more than 800 locations. With brands and previous acquisitions including Dormez-vous, Endy, Silk & Snow, Hush, Casper Canada and Simba, Sleep Country says it is now the second-largest sleep-oriented retailer in the world, trailing only Kentucky-based SOMNIGROUP.

✈️ AIRLINES

• Air passenger advocates are warning that Canada’s broken airline complaints resolution system is about to get worse. In a video released this week, AIR PASSENGER RIGHTS president Gabor Lukacs criticizes the government’s recently introduced legislation, Bill C-31, which seeks to hand adjudication of complaints to third-party mediators that are picked by the likes of AIR CANADA and WESTJET. “On May 1, the government admitted Canada’s passenger rights system is broken. But instead of fixing it, the government is proposing to hand that broken system to the airlines themselves,” the group says in its post. “This is not a fix. This is the fox guarding the henhouse, legislated by the same government that let the hens get loose in the first place.” The complaint backlog currently sits at more than 97,000, with the problem being that the resolution process is too complex, according to Lukacs. Each complaint typically requires hundreds of pages of documents and therefore a full work day to resolve, on average, compared to just minutes in Europe where the process is based on publicly available data. The airlines and government have said that outsourcing the system from the Canadian Transportation Agency to third-party adjudicators will instead speed up resolutions.

📱 TELECOM

• The Competitive Network Operators of Canada, an advocacy group representing the nation’s smaller telecom service providers, is asking the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to reconsider the rates it has set for wholesale access to big companies’ fibre networks. The organization, which counts companies including Toronto-based EGATE and Woodstock, Ont.-based EXECULINK as members, has posted a breakdown of costs for its members versus the nation’s large telcos to illustrate its point. Consumers can sign up with BELL for a gigabit connection in Ontario or Quebec at $75-$85, for example, but a smaller provider that relies on wholesale access to Bell’s network has to pay more than $105 in costs alone, before adding a profit margin. Similarly, a gigabit connection in Alberta or British Columbia from TELUS can be had from the company for $85-$105 while an indie’s cost is $114. The organization says the CRTC’s access rates are killing competition. “When the incumbent’s retail price is lower than what we’re forced to pay them at wholesale just to compete, that’s not a market, that’s an error in the design of the regulatory framework,” says CNOC chair Paul Anderson in a release. “The CRTC was ordered to eradicate barriers to entry and competition for smaller independent providers. Instead its framework is threatening to eradicate them.”

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• The continuing PARAMOUNT-WARNER BROS merger saga had some plot developments this week. A California judge forced a 14-day pause on the $110 billion (U.S.) deal, while at the same time European Union antitrust regulators gave it the go-ahead. The U.S. decision came in light of a number of U.S. states challenging the merger, which they say will harm competition in film and television production and distribution and affect news coverage and streaming services. Paramount, which says it is on track to close the merger by the end of September, says more than 65 jurisdictions have either cleared the transaction or chosen not to challenge it. Canada is not one of those yet, with the Competition Bureau still reviewing the deal.

🏠 REAL ESTATE

• Prime Minister Mark Carney’s old employer, BROOKFIELD ASSET MANAGEMENT, made a big purchase this week alongside the CANADIAN PENSION PLAN INVESTMENT BOARD. The two paid $5.2 billion (U.S.) to acquire New York-based LXP Industrial Trust, one of the largest owners of warehouse and logistics facilities in the United States, with about 53 million square feet across 108 properties across the southern and midwest U.S. LXP now has 40 days to look for a better deal. Brookfield Asset Management is based in New York, but its parent Brookfield Corp. is headquartered in Toronto.

🚨 COMING UP

Trust in the news media is declining precipitously thanks to a confluence of factors. The destruction of its business model by Google and Facebook, consolidation under uncaring financialized owners, and self-inflicted wounds from an abandonment of standards and practices are all part of it. TARA HENLEY, writer of the Lean Out Substack and author of the new book, The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Tuesday to discuss what news outlets need to do in order to restore their readers’ faith in them.

The biggest name in ticket resale had issues before the World Cup, but the company is emerging from the event beset by problems of its own making. Texas and British Columbia are investigating StubHub for selling tickets that didn’t exist, consumers have filed class-action lawsuits in New York and Vancouver over the same reasons, and Ontario has added the company to its Consumer Beware List. Perhaps the most serious problem is the revelation that StubHub chief executive Eric Baker also runs a mass scalping side hustle through the website.

Many of the stories over the past few months, including the Baker bombshell, were turned up by CBC News investigative reporter Dave Seglins. His interest in the mess that is the ticketing business goes back nearly a decade further to a hidden camera investigation of a scalper convention in Las Vegas, where he and his colleagues caught Ticketmaster representatives not only encouraging mass resellers to use their platform, but recruiting them to do so.

That story figured into the recent U.S. antitrust case against Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, just as Seglins’ latest coverage has sparked the various government probes and lawsuits against StubHub.

No other journalist in Canada has covered this field as closely or with as much impact. In this episode, Seglins joins Do Not Pass Go to take us behind the scenes of the ticketing business, and to discuss why concerts and sporting events are deserving of serious attention from policy makers.

Check out the story on Eric Baker here, and the 2018 scalper convention investigation here. And here is the interview with Live Nation executive Dan Wall referred to in this episode.

PURSUIT, the Denver-based company that has drawn criticism for its monopoly over paid tourist attractions in Banff and Jasper, is expanding onto Vancouver Island with the purchase of a local whale-watching business.

The company on Wednesday announced a $24 million acquisition of Victoria-based Eagle Wing Tours, which serves about 50,000 customers annually.

Pursuit expects the deal to net annual earnings of $3 million to $4 million in its first full year, according to an investor document, with Eagle Wing Tours further benefiting from its marketing and commercial capabilities, additional resources and expansion to new audiences.

The deal also serves as a beach head on the island for Pursuit, with a “path for incremental growth investments and increased presence in [sic] region,” according to the document.

Pursuit’s purchase of the Jasper SkyTram last year drew criticism from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, as it brought the company’s share of paid tourist attractions in the two national parks to more than 90 per cent by visitor volume. Pursuit owns six of nine attractions in the parks, including the Banff Gondola, the Columbia Icefield Adventure and several lake cruises, among others, and is the third largest hotel operator.

CAMP noted in a December brief that Pursuit’s market power had allowed it to increase prices for attractions across its properties by 16 per cent year-over-year, with Banff and Jasper representing about 50 per cent of its annual revenue.

Eagle Wing Tours did not return a request for comment, but co-founder Brett Soberg told the Times Colonist this week that whale watching in Victoria has been experiencing contraction lately, with two operators going out of business in the past year. “There used to be 12 companies in Victoria,” he said. “There’s now only four.”

The other three operators – Prince of Whales, SpringTide and Orca Spirit Adventures – also did not return requests for comments on whether they had concerns over Eagle Wing Tours’ purchase, or if they have been approached by Pursuit in regards to an acquisition.

Pursuit says it has not approached them and that its focus is currently on supporting Eagle Wing Tours through its busy season.

“The acquisition aligns with Pursuit’s strategy of growing through organic investments and strategic acquisitions in destinations with strong, long-term visitor demand,” said chief operating officer Stuart Brand in an email.

“Over time, we can bring broader marketing reach, demand generation, commercial expertise and long-term investment. But just as importantly, this is an opportunity for us to learn from a team with deep expertise in marine interpretation, conservation and responsible tourism.”

Eugene Thomlinson, a travel industry expert and part-time hospitality professor at Royal Roads University, says whale-watching operators are indeed experiencing challenges despite a healthy and improving tourism market on Vancouver Island.

Gas prices, cost-of-living issues and a generally poor economic environment could be causing travellers to think twice about higher-priced activities.

“A lot of things have come together to hurt whale watching in particular,” he told Do Not Pass Go.

Pursuit’s entry into the region bears watching, he added, because of the company’s size and ability to cross-market with its own holdings and other tourism operators. As with Banff and Jasper, the company could try to corner the region’s tourism market.

“They already have a good database of people that buy their product, so they could use that information in further marketing,” he said. “If they haven’t already, they’ll be talking deals with cruise ships and tour companies.”

In a recent newsletter, CAMP lamented that its call for government action earlier this year regarding Pursuit, which also owns attractions in the United States, Costa Rica and Iceland and has history in Banff and Jasper dating back to the 1960s, has so far been ignored.

“Six months since we published [our] brief, nothing has changed,” the organization said. “Past acquisitions should be reversed and Parks Canada must be given a mandate to protect competition and Canadian ownership in our national parks.”

Check out our podcast episode on Pursuit’s operations in Banff and Jasper here.

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• Ticket reseller STUBHUB’s woes continue to deepen as a new class action has been filed against the company, this time in Canada. Vancouver resident Mark Gallagher launched the lawsuit on Wednesday on behalf of Canadians who had bought World Cup soccer tickets only to have those purchases cancelled by Stubhub at the last minute. Gallagher had bought two seats to a June 18 game in Vancouver for Canada and Qatar for $11,407, only to have the tickets cancelled hours before game time. He says he received repeated assurances that his tickets were real and would arrive before game day, and that he is now suing for punitive damages to force change at the company. “I just think the truth needs to come out on what’s really going on here,” he told CBC News. A similar class action has been filed in New York, while British Columbia has launched an investigation into the company. Ontario has also added Stubhub and fellow ticket reseller SeatGeek to its Consumer Beware list. For more on Stubhub, see the “Coming Up” section below.

• The $111 billion (U.S.) mega-takeover of WARNER BROS. by PARAMOUNT hit significant roadblocks this week, with 12 U.S. states and the Writers Guild of America both separately suing to block the deal. The states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, say the merger will result in higher prices for consumers, fewer movies and TV shows being made and lower quality of content overall, while the writers say it will harm wages and working conditions by creating a single employer with outsized power. Paramount has fired back by calling the the states’ lawsuit “one of the weakest merger challenges in modern antitrust history,” saying that competing studios have low barriers to expansion and that the transaction will actually increase competition for television and movie production. In Canada, the Competition Bureau is reviewing the merger while the Network of Independent Cinema Exhibitors, which represents 140 independent theatres, opposes it on the grounds that it would consolidate as much of 40 per cent of combined Canadian and U.S. box office revenues into a single studio.

• Of special interest to us here is the news that NETFLIX is getting into Monopoly – the board game (not necessarily the abuse of its own power). The streaming company has green lit a reality TV show based on the classic board game, with 12 players competing for a $2 million prize. Contestants will “be immersed in a life-size Monopoly Town Square where they’ll have the opportunity to earn money, buy properties, negotiate deals and hopefully stay out of jail.” The show will premiere in 2027 and the producers are taking applications for contestants. Sadly, it’s only open to U.S. residents (trust us, we looked into it). Check out one of our early podcast episodes on the lost origins and meaning of the board game.

• And speaking of NETFLIX, after losing out to Paramount on Warner Bros., the streaming company is now pegged as being after LETTERBOXD, the movie-rating-meets-social-network website that’s something of a sensation with film buffs. Founded in 2011 in New Zealand, the company grew to more than 10 million users before attracting the interest of Tiny, a Canadian holding company based in Victoria, B.C. Tiny, which proclaims on its website that “we buy great companies and leave them alone,” purchased a 60-per-cent stake in 2023 and has reportedly been shopping its stake in Letterboxd around since the spring. To say that users of the service are not impressed would be an understatement. As Salon reports, the service’s X account is being bombarded by messages such as “PLEASE. DON’T. SELL. OUT.”

📱 TELECOM

• The recent job cuts by ROGERS are worse than initially reported, according to a CBC report this week. Last week, the company made news for shuttering six local radio stations and cutting 230 related jobs, but Rogers has also been quietly laying off front-line customer service representatives, the broadcaster reports. While Rogers confirmed it is cutting a “small percentage of our workforce, including corporate and front-line roles,” a union lead says that possibly hundreds of people are being terminated, with customer service jobs being relocated overseas to Morocco.

• Speaking of customer service, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission this week issued a reminder about its ongoing review of the various codes of conduct that telecom companies are bound by. The CRTC is looking to unify four separate sets of rules – covering wireless, internet, deposits and disconnections, and television services – into a single code and is seeking input from the public on the process. The regulator is accepting comments until Aug. 11, with a public hearing happening Nov. 30.

✈️ AIRLINES

• Flight attendants working for WESTJET have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a strike, which could begin as soon as Aug. 2. Members of CUPE 8125, the union representing the attendants, voted 99.4 per cent in favour of authorizing the strike action, with the main issue being unpaid hours worked while on the ground. Air Canada flight attendants went on strike over similar disputes last year and, after disobeying a return-to-work order from the federal government, ultimately won concessions from the airline in a settlement. WestJet says it is committed to resolving the dispute before the union implements a work action.

• Speaking of strikes and AIR CANADA, the airline has avoided the possibility of another one by reaching a tentative collective agreement this week with its technical operations, logistics and supply employees. The four-year agreement will run until Mar. 31, 2030 and must still be ratified by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union.

💾 BIG TECH

• The board of PAYPAL says a $53 billion (U.S.) acquisition bid by STRIPE and private equity firm ADVENT is too low, according to reports. While the company has not yet formally responded to the bid, these reports say PayPal management wants a richer offer. Aside from the price tag, management is also concerned about the regulatory risk that such a deal – which would bring together two of the largest online payment platforms – might incur.

🥊 COMPETITION

• If you’ve got thoughts on how the Competition Bureau should go after CARTELS, now is your chance to have your say. The agency is inviting public comments on how it should take action against illegal business agreements until Sept. 13. Such agreements include bid-rigging, price-fixing, market allocation, supply restriction, and wage-fixing and no-poaching deals. The final rules will ultimately replace the Bureau’s existing Competitor Collaboration Guidelines and Enforcement Guidelines on wage-fixing and no-poaching agreements.

• Speaking of the COMPETITION BUREAU, it’s been a bit more active as far as merger reviews go so far in 2026 compared to last year. The agency completed 116 reviews through the first half of this year, compared to 105 in the same time frame last year, according to Blakes Competitive Edge report. The primary industries related to these reviews were manufacturing (21 per cent); mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (16 per cent); real estate and rental leasing (12 per cent); and finance and insurance (9 per cent). Forty-three transactions received Advanced Ruling Certificates representing clearance, 64 got a “no action” letter, four were completed via negotiated settlements – known as consent agreements – and one was abandoned by the parties.

🚨 COMING UP

As noted above, StubHub is in a world of trouble. From investigations by regulators to multiplying class-action lawsuits, the ticket-reselling site is being besieged on multiple fronts for its questionable business practices. Much of it is due to reporting by CBC investigative reporter DAVE SEGLINS, who has broken multiple stories including StubHub selling fake tickets and its chief executive officer Erik Baker operating a side business revolving around mass-scalping. Seglins joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this Tuesday to take us behind the scenes of the mess that is the live event ticket business. If you go to concerts or sporting events, you won’t want to miss this one.

A CBC investigation last year found that before 2010, almost all veterinary clinics in Canada were owned by the vets themselves. Fast forward to the present and more than half of emergency and specialty hospitals and more than 20 per cent of all clinics are owned by just six corporations.

As is the case with virtually every industry where consolidation is occurring, prices are going up – and dramatically so in this case.

A survey of pet owners last year by Gallup and PetSmart Charities of Canada found that more than half of respondents had declined recommended veterinary care or skipped a visit, with two-thirds citing cost as the reason.

Having to pay sky-high fees to get pets healthy, or worse, not being able to afford the cost of doing so, is often devastating to families.

The rolling up of the industry is getting a lot of attention as a result and it’s inevitable that regulators and governments are going to start investigating. Maybe some will take action. But in the meantime, some of those still independent vets are trying to disrupt this norm.

Emma Harris is the chief executive and, along with Dr. Brendon Laing, the co-founder of Novel, a new vet clinic that opened last year in Burlington, Ont.

As the name implies, they’re trying to do the vet business a bit differently, driven largely by the desire to make sure that pet care is affordable so that families don’t have to make that terrible decision of foregoing treatment with their fur babies.

Harris is also finishing up her PhD at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, where her thesis delves into the growing overlap of vet care and big business.

She’s the perfect person to talk about how private equity is driving up the cost of pet care but also investing in necessary advancements, and how disruption and better clinics may be the best counter to industry consolidation.

Check out Novel here and a Globe and Mail feature on the clinic here.

CORRECTION: A previous version of the show notes for this episode referred to Dr. Laing as Ms. Harris’ husband. They are not, in fact, married. We regret the error. An audio clarification will be made in the next episode.

It’s been almost seven months since Matthew Boswell, described by many as Canada’s most activist Competition Commissioner ever, stepped down early from his post – and nearly half as much time since applications to replace him closed.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government blasted out a flurry of legislation and announcements prior to adjourning parliament for the summer last month. Some, such as the National Food Security Strategy, squarely involved competition issues, but naming a new head of the Competition Bureau was not among them.

It’s a posting many are watching keenly, given that the government and its real intentions on the competition file haven’t been exactly clear. For every Food Security Strategy or declaration of hawkishness, there’s been a shuttering of the Office of Consumer Affairs or rubber stamping of mergers in the resource sector.

Who the feds pick is expected to send a strong signal on whether the PM wants the Bureau to continue in its recent activism vein, or if there might be a reversion to deferring to big industry.

Speaking with insiders in Ottawa and Toronto, you get the sense that the process is indeed moving slowly. One confirmed applicant for the job even told me that they have no idea what’s taking so long. No one seems to know what’s happening for sure, leaving only speculation to fill the void.

One thing is definite – the feds aren’t explaining themselves.

“The appointment process remains ongoing and an announcement will be made in due course,” says Hans Parmer, a spokesperson for Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Melanie Joly. The Governor in Council is responsible for naming the next commissioner on the recommendation of the ISED minister.

Part of the reason for the delay, as several sources mention, could be that the Bureau’s recent spate of activism may now be incongruous with Canada’s newly strained relationship with the United States.

During most of his seven years as commissioner, Boswell lobbied the previous Trudeau government – to much success – to amend Canada’s competition laws so that the Bureau would have more power to challenge and stop mergers and to intervene in abuses of dominance, among other things.

But Carney’s declaration of a “rupture” with the U.S. and push for larger sovereignty-building projects means the government may be returning to favouring a “national champion” philosophy.

At the very least, the government is increasingly looking like it wants more say over its agencies’ decisions so that they align with the politics of the current situation. A good example is the recent Online News Act boondoggle.

Originally instructed by the Trudeau government to make foreign streaming companies “pay their fair share” of cultural content production, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in May issued long-awaited rules that would have required the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Apple and others to pay 15 per cent of their revenues into relevant funding bodies.

But, as they did last year when they scrapped a digital sales tax on those same foreign streaming services, the feds quickly stepped in to quash that CRTC ruling in June.

Though they cited consumer affordability as the reason, it’s well known that U.S. trade officials – not to mention President Donald Trump – were not happy with what amounted to new taxes on American companies. At a time when Canada is trying to negotiate trade agreements and avoid antagonizing the U.S., the larger priority won out.

The CRTC did as it was told, but the government completely changed the task at hand at the last minute. The next competition commissioner may have to thread that same moving needle.

Calgary-based Keyera’s $5.3 billion recent acquisition of Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline’s Canadian natural gas business is a comparable example. While the Bureau announced in early May that it was challenging the deal, the transaction was ultimately allowed to close later in the month.

The Bureau could have used the same powers that Boswell successfully lobbied for to stop the deal, but chose not to. It also declined to explain why it took this route, but the fact that the acquisition involved an American company exiting the country while making a Canadian firm stronger – despite concerns about the harm to competition – hasn’t been lost on observers.

As one competition lawyer told The Globe and Mail, “The Bureau is now in the position of having allowed precisely what its advocacy said the law must prevent.”

This uncertainty over what the Bureau’s stance should be – activist or not – has resulted in fewer candidates putting their names forward, especially from private practice, according to several sources. They also say that private practitioners are concerned about their post-Bureau job prospects in industry if the commission is indeed instructed to maintain its activist bent.

Several private practice lawyers are understood to have applied nevertheless. Acting commissioner Jeanne Pratt – who took over when Boswell stepped down in December – is also widely believed to want the job full time, though she declined to comment when I asked her. Several sources have pegged CRTC chair Vicky Eatrides as interested, but she did not return a request for comment.

Not everyone is concerned with the lack of an appointment yet, since it is possible that a candidate may already have been selected and the government is merely waiting for the right time to announce it.

“I have noticed that under this federal government, appointments are often made when politically opportune,” says University of Ottawa law professor and competition expert Jennifer Quaid. “From that vantage point, late summer [or] early fall is a better moment to highlight this appointment to the head of an agency that plays a key role in supporting the economy, just as we get into the budget season.”

And now on to the rest of the news…

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

💾 TECH

• Related to this week’s podcast (above), MICROSOFT kicked off the week by cutting a whopping 4,800 jobs, or about two per cent of its global workforce. Much that number, or 3,200 jobs, are coming over the next two years from the company’s Xbox video games division, which is also going to experience some reverse consolidation as four studios – Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, Ninja Theory and Undead Lab – are being spun off. The company is blaming a “not healthy” games division and the need to cut costs overall as it spends billions on the artificial intelligence race. Ironically, that race is causing demand for processing hardware to spike and thus dampening consumer sales of computers and game consoles, which are both central to Microsoft’s and Xbox’s core businesses.

📱 TELECOM

• It was a busy week for ROGERS, which announced on Monday that it was buying the remaining 25 per cent of MAPLE LEAF SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT that it didn’t already own. The $4.3 billion deal with entrepreneur Larry Tanenbaum’s Kilmer Sports gives the cable giant 100 per cent ownership over all of Toronto’s major sports teams – including the Blue Jays, Maple Leafs, Raptors, TFC and Argonauts – as well as venues including the Scotiabank Arena and Rogers Centre, plus the Sportsnet broadcast and streaming network. The company now plans to spin off at least some of MLSE to investors, with The Globe and Mail reporting that a long list of partners have inquired about getting a piece, including billionaires, private equity managers, sovereign funds and even Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The purchase from Kilmer has not yet showed up on the Competition Bureau’s list of merger and acquisition reviews, though it surpasses the mandatory $93 million threshold for inclusion by a wide margin.

• Following the MLSE news, ROGERS on Tuesday shut down six local radio stations across Canada, cutting 230 jobs in the process. The affected stations were Sportsnet 650 and 1130 AM in Vancouver, Sportsnet 960 and 660 NewsRadio in Calgary, 96.7 NewsRadio in Halifax and 570 NewsRadio in Kitchener, Ont. The company said declining audience and advertising were responsible.

• And lastly, ROGERS is also significantly raising season ticket prices for some Blue Jays fans. A subscriber and friend of Do Not Pass Go writes that her seats in the 500 level are going up nine per cent next season, a steep increase from the three or four per cent in previous seasons. Attendance and therefore demand is strong this season but, as is always the case with season tickets, it’s bold to be raising prices – especially by a large amount – when the current team is objectively difficult to watch.

✈️ AIRLINES

• The Ontario Superior Court has struck down as unconstitutional a federal gag order on airline passenger compensation complaints. In his decision on Thursday, Justice Charles Hackland wrote that the Canadian Transportation Agency’s non-disclosure rules – which prevent passengers from publicly disclosing the results of their complaint mediation efforts – violate freedom of expression laws under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The government agency had argued that the process, which involves complaints resolution officers (CRO), required secrecy so that airlines including AIR CANADA and WESTJET could have more frank discussions with passengers. But advocacy group Air Passenger Rights argued that the complaints process closely resembles a court and CROs effectively act as judges, so it must be subject to the same transparency rules as an open court. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck,” Gabor Lukacs, head of the group, tells Do Not Pass Go. “This is great news for restoring democratic rights in Canada.” The CTA has 90 days to implement transparency changes.

• AIR CANADA will finally have a French-speaking chief executive, with current Scandinavian Airlines president and CEO Anko Van der Werff taking the reins in January. He’ll be replacing outgoing boss Michael Rousseau, who has faced criticism for years for his inability to speak French fluently, which is a problem for an airline based in Montreal. Here’s proof that the new guy can talk the talk. Now, perhaps critics can focus on the real issue, which is that neither head of Canada’s two major airlines – Van der Werff, who is Dutch, or WESTJET CEO and German native Alexis von Hoensbroech – are Canadian.

• Speaking of WESTJET, the airline’s flight attendants this week opened a strike vote that will continue until July 15. The main issue for workers is similar to what their colleagues at AIR CANADA struck over last year – unpaid time spent on the ground, which the Canadian Union of Public Employees union estimates at 35 hours each per month. The earliest a strike could happen under federal law is Aug. 2. Air Canada attendants last year won a victory of sorts in a settlement with the airline after defying a government return-to-work order. As we reported here in April, Air Canada used scare tactics to convince Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu to issue the order, warning her that flight disruptions from a possible strike would be worse than those that occurred following 9/11 and the Covid-19 outbreak.

👉 IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• The CBC continues its excellent reporting into STUBHUB, the ticket resale website that is increasingly finding itself at the centre of regulatory and legal trouble. In the latest bit of news, it’s revealed that the company’s chief executive Eric Baker is also part-owner and managing director of ANDRO CAPITAL, a fund that buys and then sells millions of dollars worth of tickets on the website. According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Stubhub has a deal with an affiliate of Baker’s fund to bankroll other mass scalpers to help them buy and post large numbers of tickets for resale on the site. The company is currently under investigation in British Columbia and Texas and the subject of two proposed class-action lawsuits in the United States for its recent cancellation of thousands of World Cup tickets.

GROCERIES & RETAIL

• If you bought beef in Canada over the past decade, you may soon be eligible for a payment under proposed class-action settlements. JBS USA, SWIFT BEEF, JBS PACKERLAND and JBS CANADA have agreed to pay $7.4 million in the settlement, with NATIONAL BEEF also on the hook for $495,000. Similar to the ongoing bread price-fixing scandal, the involved companies were accused in 2022 of conspiring to raise the price of beef in Canada. The settlements, which don’t include admissions of wrong-doing, need to be approved by courts, with hearings for all provinces except Quebec scheduled for Sept. 10. Quebec’s hearing is scheduled for Dec. 1.

• The Competition Bureau isn’t going to challenge the private equity takeover of PIZZA HUT. Stamford, Conn.-based LONGRANGE CAPITAL got the green light – at least in Canada – on July 2 for its $2.7 billion (U.S.) purchase of the pizza chain, with the exception of its operations in China, from YUM BRANDS. The Kentucky-based company put the underperforming chain, which has 620 locations in Canada, up for sale in November.

🚨 COMING UP

In light of the Microsoft Xbox news above, we switched gears this week to run a timely podcast interview with Jon Huffman, former lead programmer and union organizer at Ubisoft Halifax, in which we discussed the video game industry’s growing labour movement. This Tuesday, we return to our originally scheduled programming featuring EMMA HARRIS, co-founder of the Novel veterinary clinic in Burlington, Ont., to talk about the intersection of pet care and big business and the effects that private equity roll-ups are having on service prices. Don’t you dare miss it.