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.

Canadian workers are among the most restricted by non-compete clauses in a new survey of 15 countries by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Thirty-nine per cent of Canadian employees are definitely or probably bound by a non-compete clause that prevents them from working for a firm or organization in the same field, according to surveyed employers. That’s higher than the average 30 per cent across the OECD countries covered by the report and trails only Sweden, at 41 per cent. Poland ranks lowest at 15 per cent.

Employees surveyed confirmed this high prevalence of non-compete clauses, the report says, with 41 per cent responding that they were definitely or probably bound by such clauses, compared to an OECD average of 36 per cent. South Korea, Japan, Switzerland and France placed higher than Canada by this measure, with Poland again ranking lowest at 27 per cent.

The report, which is part of the OECD’s larger Employment Outlook 2026 published Tuesday, links non-compete clauses and other forms of post-employment restraints, including non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), to declines in competition and productivity that are taking place broadly across the OECD.

“While the use of such restraints was originally justified on the basis that they protect legitimate business interests such as trade secrets, there are concerns that they are increasingly being deployed to stifle job mobility and competition,” the report says.

“The evidence… while preliminary… suggests that such clauses tend to reduce productivity growth by impeding the forces of growth-enhancing job reallocation and knowledge diffusion – and wage growth – by limiting workers’ outside options.”

Canada’s poor productivity – a measure of how efficiently employees turn their work into valuable results such as goods and services, and a proxy for living standards – has received considerable attention in recent years.

A report by the Fraser Institute last year found that Canada’s productivity grew at less than half the rate of the U.S. between 1981 and 2024, with the gap especially widening since 2000. Bank of Canada senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers has called this situation an “economic emergency.”

Post-employment restraints and the role they play in competitiveness and productivity have caught the eye of governments in Canada as a result. Ontario, in particular, banned non-compete clauses for all workers except top executives in 2021, making it one of the most restrictive regulatory settings in the OECD, according to the report.

The Carney government also announced plans to restrict the use of non-compete clauses in federally regulated sectors including telecommunications, banking and transport this past May.

Despite the ban, companies in Ontario are still regularly inserting non-compete clauses into contracts, according to Peter Carey, a partner at employment law firm Levitt LLP in Toronto.

“Employers still put these clauses in on the chance that employees don’t know that they’re unenforceable,” he tells Do Not Pass Go. “The situation hasn’t really improved, people are still ‘chancing their arm.’”

The report notes that non-compete clauses in Canada have spread into parts of the labour market where the traditional justifications for them “appears weak or absent.”

Between 13 and 25 per cent workers with no access to confidential information said they had signed non-compete clauses, as did between 15 and 26 per cent of low-pay workers, or those earning less than $3,000 a month.

Other types of restrictive clauses are relatively common and rising in Canada. According to surveyed employers, 48 per cent of private sector employees are covered by NDAs, 28 per cent by non-solicitation of client clauses, 22 per cent by repayment of benefits or bonuses clauses, 26 per cent by non-solicitation of clients clauses, and 22 per cent by training-cost repayment clause. Except for the NDA percentage, all of those results rank higher than the OECD average.

The survey also raises concerns about no-poaching agreements and wage fixing, both of which became illegal in Canada in 2023. While employers weren’t asked directly if they engaged in these practices, they were surveyed on whether they were aware of them happening in their industry. Forty per cent said one or both were in fact happening.

“This does not imply that 40 per cent of firms engage in these practices themselves, but high reported awareness suggests that such practices may not be isolated occurrences, particularly in service sectors,” the report says.

Check out the report here.

Legal action followed, which the two sides settled in April, only for Ubisoft to then close its Winnipeg studio in June, laying off a further 65 employees.

Those layoffs – more than 45,000 globally since 2022, with 8,200 so far this year including Microsoft’s news this week of an additional 3,200 Xbox cuts – are what’s driving the unionization push, not just at Ubisoft but across the industry.

Employees at U.S. studios owned by Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax Media and Sega of America have all unionized recently. Last year, workers in the United States and Canada partnered with the Communications Workers of America to announce the United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433, marking the historic launch of an industry-wide labour movement.

In this episode, Ubisoft Halifax lead programmer and union leader Jon Huffman takes us behind the scenes of the studio’s move to get organized, and he explains how consolidation and financialization are forcing workers across the industry to finally fight back.

Check out Huffman’s new independent games studio, Phantom Rowboat.

The hot, dog days of summer are here, which usually means things on the news front slow down. That certainly looks to be the case with competition-oriented news, if the somewhat abbreviated roundup below is any indicator, but the reverse will soon be true in these parts.

I’ve been working hard behind the scenes on setting up the business that will (hopefully) sustain Do Not Pass Go as a viable and growing entity for years to come. It’s exciting stuff and I can’t wait to share all that info very shortly.

The other good news related to that is that I’ll soon be able to once again shift my full attention to the whole point of what we do here, which is investigations and breaking news. So if you bear with me just a little longer, I can guarantee that the news flow here is going to accelerate, the dog days of summer be damned.

And one last bit of housekeeping: I’ve got a few discounted tickets left to the Rogers v. Rogers one-man play at the Canadian Stage Theatre on Nov. 20, where I’ll be recording a live podcast with playwright Michael Healey and reporter/author Alexandra Posadzski. I’m opening that up to all subscribers, not just paid, so if you’d like to join us, head to the theatre’s page and input DONOTPASSGO as the promo code.

Now, onto our regularly scheduled news…

The CRTC is taking its disagreement with BELL, ROGERS and TELUS over new wireless fees to the next level by initiating a “show cause” proceeding in which the companies will be required to prove that their charges aren’t illegal.

All three recently introduced new fees to coincide with rules that came into effect on June 12 that prohibit service activation, modification and cancellation charges. Bell has added a $40 device-handling fee, Telus is charging $15 for SIM cards and eSIMs (the subscriber identity modules needed to connect a customer to a network), and Rogers has a $40 setup charge, $25 shipping fee and an unspecified SIM fee.

The CRTC previously sent letters to the individual companies informing them of its belief that the charges were in violation of recent amendments to the Act, which are are intended to bar telcos from imposing fees that make it harder for customers to switch providers.

The carriers wrote back and stuck to their guns, each taking the position that the fees were for optional services that are exempt under the law.

A show cause proceeding effectively works like a court case, except that the defendants are presumed guilty rather than innocent until they prove otherwise. As per the regulator’s notice of consultation: “Based on the correspondence received to date, the Commission is concerned that the companies may be charging fees that appear to be prohibited under… the Act and that appear to be contrary to the Wireless Code and the Internet Code.”

The penalties for the companies if they are found guilty are significant, with fines of up to $10 million each. Relevant officers and directors could also face fines of $25,000 each.

The companies and members of the public have until July 30 to submit comments to the proceeding, with an Aug. 10 deadline for responses.

Show-cause proceedings aren’t common, with the latest – regarding wholesale wireless roaming on Bell and Telus networks – initiated in October, 2024. In that case, the CRTC was responding to complaints from smaller wireless carriers including Freedom Mobile that the two bigger companies were illegally limiting mandated network access.

Bell and Telus, who share a network, claimed that smaller carriers who signed roaming agreements with them individually were only entitled to roam on their respective portions of that network. In September, 2025, the CRTC ruled against the two big carriers and forced them to honour roaming agreements across their entire footprint.

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🏦 BANKING

• Speaking of charges, CIBC has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over non-sufficient fees (NSFs). The lawsuit alleged that the bank charged multiple NSFs on single transactions – so, for example, when a billing company tried to withdraw money from a customer’s account several times, the customer was hit with the fee each time. Koskie Minsky, the law firm behind the class action, alleged that CIBC had levied the multiple fees between Sept. 21, 2020 and May 31, 2024. The firm has also engaged in similar cases against BANK OF MONTREAL, TD BANK, SCOTIABANK and ROYAL BANK, with settlements already reached with the last three.

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

• Just a reminder that some Canadians may see some extra cash popping up in their bank accounts starting today with the federal government’s quarterly affordability benefit kicking in as of July 3. Lower-income households are to receive the CANADA GROCERIES AND ESSENTIALS BENEFIT in amounts ranging from $679 for a single individually annually to $890 for married or common law partners, with each eligible child under 19 also getting $234. The government introduced the benefit in January, boosting and renaming the previous GST/HST credit as a measure to help with the rising cost of groceries and other necessities.

• Petro-Canada and Petro-Pass gas station operator BVD PETROLEUM has agreed to sell an Ontario gas station and card lock facility, which is geared to transport vehicles, as part of an asset deal with CENOVUS ENERGY. BVD will sell the location to a buyer approved by the Competition Bureau to appease the agency’s concerns over competition between the Petro-Canada outlet and an Esso station on the Queen Elizabeth Way between St. Catharines and Niagara Falls. “Competitive gasoline markets are necessary to keep prices in check,” said interim competition commissioner Jeanne Pratt in a release. “This agreement will preserve competition for Canadians travelling between St. Catharines and Niagara Falls by ensuring that BVD’s acquisition does not eliminate important local competition.”

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• It was quite the week for SONY. First up, the company notified PlayStation users in the United Kingdom that it will soon delete 551 movies from user accounts due to licensing terms with content owner Studio Canal. Users who have previously bought the content, which includes films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo: First Blood and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, will no longer be able to stream it as of Sept. 1. As gaming sites such as Kotaku have noted, there was no mention of refunds or any other attempts to make good with customers, which again reaffirms “the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.”

• The PlayStation maker also announced this week that it will soon end physical disc production, with all new games selling as digital downloads only as of January 2028. Analysts point out that this was an inevitability, with approximately 80 per cent of game sales now coming digitally, but a good number of gamers are angry about SONY’s move nevertheless as it will eliminate the secondary used market. The news also doesn’t sit well given the above item, and because it closely follows word that the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 – expected to be one of the biggest game releases ever – is shipping without a disc. Even comedian and former Daily Show host Trevor Noah is mad:

• The PARAMOUNT merger with WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY saga marches on, with this week’s developments including news that the British government intends to challenge the $110 billion (U.S.) deal. Culture Minister Lisa Nandy says her opposition stems from concerns over a “sufficient plurality of views in news media” and a “sufficient plurality of persons with control of the media enterprises.” Paramount says it welcomes the opportunity to engage in constructive dialogue with “interested government bodies and relevant authorities.” Canada’s Competition Bureau is reviewing the merger but has not said whether it intends to challenge it or not.

🛢️ RESOURCES

• In last week’s roundup, we mentioned that the Competition Bureau was having a look at SATURN OIL & GAS’s $116 million takeover of fellow Calgary resource firm BURGESS CREEK EXPLORATION. It turns out the deal won’t be challenged, with the Bureau confirming that it issued an advance ruling certificate (ARC) – essentially, a notification that it won’t oppose the transaction – on June 25. Saturn’s operations are focused on Western Canada, particularly in Saskatchewan and Alberta, while Burgess Creek operates mainly in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

🚨 COMING UP

If you’ve got a pet – and you probably do, given that more than half of all Canadian households have at least one – you’re going to want to tune in to this Tuesday’s episode of the Do Not Pass Go podcast. EMMA HARRIS, co-founder and chief executive of Novel – a new veterinary clinic in Burlington, Ont. – joins us to talk about how private equity roll-ups are causing pet care costs to skyrocket and how independent operations are innovating to counter.

Some of that was because many Canadians got spooked by Donald Trump’s 51st state rhetoric, so they rallied behind the Liberal party to prevent a Conservative win. But part of it was also because, as many within the NDP openly admitted, the party had lost its way - it was no longer representing the interests of regular Canadians.

At the same time, in Manitoba, premier Wab Kinew has been enjoying some pretty significant support. He’s regularly showing up as the most popular premier in the country in polls, an obvious beacon of success for the NDP in Canada.

That popularity is the result of his tackling the issue that is top of mind for the vast majority Canadians: affordability.

Since taking office in 2023, Kinew’s government has passed a raft of pro-consumer and anti-monopoly legislation. From taking on grocery chains and the restrictive land contracts that prevent competition, to banning surveillance pricing and giving farmers the ability to repair their own tractors, the province been on a mission to counter the effects of market concentration.

The federal party and Kinew’s counterparts in the other provinces have not only taken notice, but they’re adopting the same playbook.

This past spring in Winnipeg, Avi Lewis won the federal NDP leadership and has since adopted many of the same positions on a national level. He’s in favour of municipally run grocery stores, a total ban on surveillance pricing, and publicly owned telecom providers, among other measures.

In Ontario, Stiles is pushing a similar agenda. Her party has introduced bills on right to repair, cutting taxes on groceries and the establishment of programs to cut energy bills.

She joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on how the NDP is tying a hoped-for rebound to a focus on competition and affordability issues.

In case you missed it earlier this week, I’m pleased to be offering my first official perk to paid annual Do Not Pass Go subscribers in the form of discounted tickets to the smash hit one-man play, Rogers v. Rogers!

Returning to Toronto at the Canadian Stage theatre this fall, the show relates the cable empire’s sordid succession drama and merger with Shaw while hilariously excoriating the state of competition and power in Canada. See my review here.

Following the Nov. 20 performance, I’ll be joined on stage by playwright Michael Healey and Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, who wrote the book the play is based on, for a live podcast conversation about Rogers, the Competition Bureau, Edward Rogers’ love of McDonald’s meals, oligopolies and who knows what else.

Sign up for an annual subscription or upgrade an existing one to get a code for 10-per-cent off select tickets to this show. If you’re an existing annual subscriber, simply email me at peter@donotpassgo.ca to claim your code. Either way, act now – ticket quantities are limited:

Subscribe now

And now, on to our regularly scheduled programming…

In 2024, the federal government enacted rules enabling a new type of corporate structure in Canada – employee ownership trusts (EOTs). By allowing company owners to sell their operations to their employees, EOTs introduced a new alternative to being acquired by competitors or asset managers such as private equity firms.

A handful of companies have since made the leap, with their primary motivation generally being to stay true to their founders’ values and to avoid dramatic changes in operation. But EOTs’ secondary effect is that they preserve competition by keeping companies independent, thereby preventing further consolidation in their respective sectors. One downside to that for sellers, however, is that they may end up settling for lower buyout prices.

Recognizing that, and mirroring similar developments in other countries, Canada’s rules included a capital gains tax exemption for owners on the first $10 million of a sale to an EOT. But the exemption came with a catch – it was set to expire at the end of this year.

Proponents worried that the EOT concept would be dead in the water without this exemption, which is why they were ecstatic when the government announced its intention to make it permanent in the recent spring economic update. Last week, the feds did just that.

At the same time, another company has joined the ranks to become Canada’s seventh EOT. Founded in the 1980s, Toronto-based philanthropy-consulting firm KCI last week announced its conversion, with the company’s executive team owners agreeing to sell to their 50 employees for an undisclosed amount.

KCI got its process underway in plenty of time to meet the now-moot tax exemption deadline, but its principals are nevertheless happy to see the incentive made permanent. Chief operating officer Paul Koreen joined Do Not Pass Go this week to explain what this will mean for the company and its new owners.

Why did KCI’s executives decide to sell the company to an EOT?

We are a consulting practice that focuses exclusively on the Canadian nonprofit sector as our clients and we have two main streams of work: a philanthropic-focused side and an executive search and talent side. We work with all sub-sectors of the Canadian charitable sector, so health care, education, arts and culture, community service, some religious organizations.

This shift to broad-based employee ownership is really just the perfect match with our values and core purpose as a business and who we want to be and how we want to live. Our core purpose is focused on better communities and improved lives and this is a piece of that for our staff. First and foremost, it fit with our values.

It was also a perfect fit for us in terms of ownership succession planning. In a small- to medium-sized professional services firm where you have a longer history, there’s always transitions of leaders that has to be sorted out. This is an elegant solution for us because, when everybody’s an owner and then when you depart, that role concludes.

We feel like also it’s a unique differentiator in our marketplace. It’s a great recruitment and retention piece for our employees. The opportunity to be a part owner is a cool and an exciting aspect of being an employee at KCI.

Has your field been consolidating?

Yes. You do see that, particularly if you take a more of a North American-wide view. There are a number of firms like ours that are U.S.-based and that do some work in Canada, and among those we have seen consolidation. I’ve been at this for many years, so throughout history there’s been some other instances of a U.S.-based firm acquiring a Canadian firm.

For us, this was less of a what-we-don’t-want-to-be view and more focused positively on what we do want to be. Being a proud, independent Canadian employee-owned firm is what we’ve always been, so this was an opportunity to expand that to all of our team.

When you sell your company to your employees, you’re also making sure it’s staying Canadian-owned, right?

Yeah, exactly. It’s making that decision even more firm. That, for the long term, this is our plan, and now we’re even more deeply committed to that.

One of the downsides of a company going the EOT route is that the owners may be accepting less for their company than if they sold to a competitor or even private equity. You’ve talked about the values of KCI, so was it a case of values trumping value?

That maybe wasn’t top of mind in the decision-making process. Of course it’s a transaction like any other sort of business sale transaction, so there has to be an appropriate valuation undertaken, but there wasn’t a lot of deep dwelling on whether there might be a better deal out there somewhere else. I think really, just as you eloquently said, values trumped value for us.

Does this change anything for the company itself or for the employees?

There’s a great phrase that came from our friends at Grantbook, which also became an employee ownership trust, and that was, “What changes? Nothing and everything.”

It really is that. In terms of how we approach our work together as a team, nothing changes. We all still have our roles to play. This doesn’t obviously mean that suddenly everybody became the boss or everybody’s reporting to everybody somehow. It doesn’t change the structure of how the business operates.

The part that changes is the philosophical sense of ownership of the firm for all of our team. That’s maybe philosophical to start with, but as this transition unfolds over the years ahead, that becomes real as well – that there’s an opportunity for our team to, in a real way, share in the future success of the firm.

Do you think you would have gone ahead with this if there had been no tax incentive? How vital was that to the decision?

That certainly was a meaningful element for us, that when we think of the other transition opportunities available to departing shareholders in a firm like ours, this tax incentive approach is certainly superior from a financial perspective.

When I do that list of pieces that came together nicely for us, that would be on the list of one of the things that made this compelling for us in total.

Check out our podcast episode on EOTs.

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🛒 RETAIL & GROCERIES

Last month, we brought you the news of a potential tire battle in Ontario. ALL STAR TRANSPORTATION AND TIRE RECYCLING, an independent hauler in the Hamilton area, is seeking permission to argue an abuse-of-dominance case at the Competition Tribunal against Oakville-based recycling management firm ETRACKS TIRE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS. The Tribunal hasn’t yet agreed to hear the case, but the early back-and-forth is noteworthy with eTracks accusing All Star owner Scott Cavanaugh of using artificial intelligence in drafting his response to a motion. Cavanaugh immediately fired back and denied doing so, but the Tribunal nevertheless this week decided to “remind parties to exercise caution if and when using AI. All parties, including self-represented parties, who sign and/or file a document with the Tribunal have full responsibility for its accuracy and reliability, must verify all AI-assisted content, and remain accountable for all representations made.”

The Competition Bureau is moving ahead with an investigation into property controls used by EMPIRE, parent company of Sobeys, Farm Boy, Safeway and other grocery chains, to limit competition in the market. The Bureau says it has obtained orders from the Federal Court that require the company to produce documents and testimony on those controls, which are real estate contracts that can block competitors from setting up shops near Empire operations or otherwise restrict land uses. This week’s order expands an earlier record production requirement for Halifax to nationwide, the Bureau says.

The government of MANITOBA this week introduced new measures to combat runaway grocery prices, including a nutritious food basket tracker, investment in Harvest Manitoba’s Food Transformation Centre and unit pricing measurements that will attempt to address the shrinkflation problem. The Transformation Centre, which is receiving $2.5 million, will aim to reduce waste through processing food donated by producers into meals and products for families.

📱 TELECOM

The ongoing “coffee badging” saga at BELL continues, with 46 employees filing a wrongful termination lawsuit against the company. Bell recently cut the workers, saying they had violated the company’s code of conduct by manipulating their attendance records through various means, like swiping their badges at the office just before midnight and then again shortly after to create the impression that they were in for two days. But a lawyer for the workers says he has acquired an internal mass-layoff document that includes instructions to fire approximately 30 employees per office to meet targets set by management. Bell says it plans to vigorously defend itself from the claims.

The CRTC sure is writing a lot of letters to telcos lately, all of them in relation to new fees and price hikes. This week, the regulator wrote to ROGERS again, this time asking the company to explain new $5 wireless price hikes. Scott Hutton, the CRTC’s vice-president of consumer, analytics and strategy, wants to know if the increases are being made to customers on committed terms and whether they are part of the minimum monthly charge key contract term. “The minimum monthly charge is a key contract term that cannot be changed by a service provider during the commitment period without the account holder’s or authorized user’s informed and express consent,” he points out in the letter. This latest correspondence follows several other letters to Rogers, BELL and TELUS about new charges the trio recently brought in to offset prohibitions on fees designed to discourage customers from switching providers. All three companies insist their new fees – including device handling and SIM card charges – are above board. The CRTC has not yet said whether it will take action against the telcos for them.

Speaking of letters, the Yukon government has written to the federal government, the CRTC and BELL asking that, for the love of all that is holy, can they please do something about the territory’s poor wireless service? The letters detail significant coverage gaps, instability and signal degradation during peak usage periods and emergency events, according to the Canadian Press. The territory is asking both the CRTC and Innovation, Science and Economic Development to use regulatory levers to force better investment into infrastructure and resiliency. Bell, meanwhile, says it has spent more than $20 million on its wireless network in the territory since 2019. “Wireless expansion in rural regions is a challenge for private investment alone and we are open to partnerships with territorial and federal governments,” the company said in a statement. The latest letters follow similar complaints by Yukon Premier Ranj Pillai two years ago to Bell about poor service.

And speaking of long-running stories, outgoing TELUS chief executive Darren Entwistle takes one last swing before he retires to another country at Canada’s foreign-ownership restrictions on telcos. Entwistle tells the Globe and Mail that Canada should “let free market forces reign” when it comes to the current rules that prohibit foreign entities from owning more than 46.7 per cent of large telecom firms. The Telus boss has long advocated for removing these limits, with some supporters noting that they are an impediment to competition. It’s worth noting that they’re also the biggest obstacle to Telus selling itself to a foreign buyer and making its insiders, including the already extraordinary wealthy Entwistle, even richer.

🏈 SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Ticket reseller STUBHUB took a drubbing this week across a number of jurisdictions, starting with the U.K. The country’s Competition and Markets Authority on Tuesday fined the company 900,000 British pounds (about $1.2 million Canadian) and ordered it to refund more than 50,000 fans after finding the company guilty of not showing buyers the full price of their purchases at the time of booking, a practice known as drip pricing. Next up was a report by CBC here in Canada on Wednesday, which found that StubHub had cancelled thousands of World Cup tickets purchased on its site, leaving buyers frustrated and angry. Though experts say such cancellations happen regularly with concerts and that the practice is only now receiving scrutiny because of the FIFA tournament, a number of class-action lawsuits and regulatory complaints about the company are already underway in the United States as a result.

The federal government made waves earlier this month when it overruled the CRTC on new regulations that would require streaming companies such as NETFLIX, AMAZON and DISNEY to pay 15 per cent of their Canadian revenues into funds reserved for producing local content. While the feds said the contributions would inevitably lead to price increases for consumers, many observers believed the abrupt reversal was an attempt to appease the United States in ongoing trade negotiations. Either way, the Toronto Star reported this week the government isn’t going to axe the CRTC’s required contribution entirely. While Culture Minister Marc Miller has not yet issued an official policy direction to the broadcast regulator, his office made it clear to the newspaper that the “charges for companies that earn more than $25 million in Canadian revenue will not be dropped to zero.”

🏦 BANKS

The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada has fined ROYAL BANK $4.25 million for failing to transfer amounts from deactivated credit card accounts to customers’ other accounts. That violation of the federal Bank Act led to affected customers getting inaccurate credit card statements, with some incurring additional charges, according to the regulator. Nearly 228,000 accounts were affected between 2001 and 2024. In addition to the fine, the bank has refunded $22.4 million to customers and made a charitable donation of $299,000 to make up for those accounts that could not be located.

✈️ AIRLINES

Travel agents are having their commissions cut by AIR CANADA as the airline looks to lower costs that have been affected by rising fuel prices. The Association of Canadian Travel Agencies and Travel Advisors, which represents nearly 27,000 travel agents across Canada, says its members could see a loss of about a quarter of Air Canada-related revenue as a result. Agent commissions are typically between 8 and 10 per cent of a booking cost, with some telling the Canadian Press that the cuts by the airline are now going as low as 3 per cent. .

In yet another example of the many problems with dynamic pricing, CBC has a story about a Montreal couple who recently paid more through an AIR CANADA flight “sale” than they did prior to the supposed discount event. As the story goes, the couple had bought a return flight to Chicago only to see the airline announce a 25-per-cent discount sale. Being within their 24-hour free cancellation window, they scrapped their tickets and repurchased the same flight through the sale – only to end up paying $5.71 more. The issue, as the airline explained, is that there was a lot of interest in the sale event, which drove up demand and therefore the dynamic prices. The story is a great example of what constitutes regular and sale prices in an age where algorithms determine both, which we covered recently here in a podcast episode.

🛢️ RESOURCES

More merger activity is happening in Canada’s oil patch, with SATURN OIL & GAS taking over BURGESS CREEK EXPLORATION in a $116 million deal. Burgess Creek’s board has unanimously approved the aggregate cash offer from Saturn. The Competition Bureau is having a look the merger of the Calgary-based companies, as the combined entity’s revenues exceed the $400 million threshold that triggers a mandatory review.

🚢 SHIPPING

The Competition Bureau is also taking a look at a major $4.2 billion (U.S.) shipping merger between Germany’s HAPAG-LLOYD and Israeli firm ZIM, which was announced in February. The deal would cement Hapag-Lloyd as the world’s fifth-largest shipping company by capacity, which some warn would deepen the industry oligopoly. The Journal of Commerce reports that the industry has gone from more than 20 major east-west ocean carriers to just 10 over the past 25 years, with the top five controlling 64.5 per cent of global capacity.

🚨 COMING UP

There’s something going on with the political left, not just in Canada, but broadly. Looking down to the U.S., avowed democratic socialists aren’t just winning elections and primary races, they’re mopping the floor with their establishment competitors. This isn’t being lost on Canada’s NDP, either federally or provincially, with party leaders glomming onto the same playbook – one that focuses squarely on affordability and the competition issues behind it. Ontario NDP leader MARIT STILES joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast on Tuesday to discuss how the party is reinventing itself by focusing on the problems that matter most to voters.

Ever since I started this thing back in October, I’ve been promising paid subscribers something extra in exchange for their support. I’m therefore super jazzed to deliver the first in a series of perks, benefits and all-around goodies: ticket discounts to the smash hit one-man play Rogers v. Rogers, plus a live podcast taping!

The show returns to Toronto’s Canadian Stage (Berkley Street Theatre) from Nov. 8 to Dec. 13 following its sold-out run at Crows Theatre last winter. Written by playwright Michael Healey and based on the eponymous book by Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, Rogers v. Rogers is both the hilariously told story of cable scion Edward Rogers’ battle with his family over his father’s empire and a scathing indictment of Canada’s monopoly problems.

As I wrote in my review in December, stage veteran Tom Rooney delivers a you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it performance. Playing every character in this saga, including the main roles of Edward Rogers and Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell, he masterfully relates a deeply human story against the sobering backdrop of how power is concentrated in this country.

Following the performance on Nov. 20, I’ll be hosting Healey and Posadzki on stage for a live podcast conversation. We’ll go behind the scenes of the book and the play and talk about the competition issues at the heart of the story.

In partnership with Crows Theatre and Canadian Stage, existing and new subscribers to Do Not Pass Go’s annual plan (only $80 a year) will get 10 per cent off select tickets to this performance. Simply sign up and email me at peter@donotpassgo.ca and I’ll send you a discount code.

But you better hurry because ticket quantities are limited!

For more information on Rogers v. Rogers the play, click here. For more on the book, click here. For our podcast interview with Michael Healey, click here.

The irony is that same service might have taken only seconds to sign up for online in the first place. And it’s not just telecom, it’s widespread. Satellite radio, gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions – there are no shortages of businesses in Canada that purposely make it delightfully easy for customers to come on board, but dreadfully difficult to leave.

As usual, Canada is lagging while other countries are moving to protect consumers from such predatory tactics. Fortunately, there’s a bright spot on the horizon, as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission recently announced new regulations that will force telecom providers to make it easy for customers to change or cancel their services online without having to call in to speak with an agent.

These so-called “click-to-cancel” rules are the first federal effort to address the scourge of consumer lock-in, but they aren’t coming into effect until April 2027 and they only apply to telecom companies.

Tahira Dawood, acting director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre consumer rights group, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss why Canada is so behind and why click-to-cancel rules are broadly needed throughout the economy.

Check out the Competition Bureau’s recent paper on dark patterns here.

The Competition Bureau isn’t taking a $2.5 billion (U.S.) merger between bedding giant SOMNIGROUP INTERNATIONAL and mattress component maker LEGGETT & PLATT lying down, with the enforcement agency adding it to its list of deal reviews.

Kentucky-based Somnigroup, the world’s largest bedding company, announced the all-stock transaction with Missouri-based Leggett & Platt in April. The combined company will operate 175 manufacturing facilities in 36 countries, with 36,000 employees.

“This combination is consistent with our vertical integration strategy, which drives innovation and value for customers while also enhancing shareholder value,” Somnigroup chairman and chief executive Scott Thompson said in a release at the time.

Somnigroup itself is the product of a series of mergers – bed makers Tempur-Pedic and Sealy in 2012, with retailer Mattress Firm added to the mix in 2025. That second deal was challenged by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on antitrust grounds, but the regulator failed to convince the court that the resulting vertical integration would substantially harm competition.

The company’s influence across the bed industry isn’t sitting well with some retailers, including Nate Cangemi, who owns Golden Dreams Mattress in Carlsbad, Calif. Cangemi has been critical of Somnigroup’s growth in numerous social media posts.

“This level of vertical integration doesn’t just reshape competition, it risks reducing innovation, limiting consumer choice, and destabilizing independent manufacturers who have served our industry for decades,” he wrote on LinkedIn when the Leggett & Platt deal was announced.

“Healthy markets require diversity, transparency, and the ability for smaller, quality-driven companies to compete on merit.”

The Bureau does not comment on active merger reviews, which it automatically initiates when the entity being acquired has $93 million in assets or revenue, or where the combined entity has assets or revenue more than $400 million.

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL

• If you listened to the above podcast on SURVEILLANCE PRICING, Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon’s comments on the subject this week following the federal government’s introduction of legislation to address the issue are definitely of interest. “It’s very easy to say just ban using personal information to give personal pricing, because we have to be super careful that we don’t want to penalize people who are members of a rewards program,” he told the Canadian Press. NDP leader Avi Lewis, who is calling on a full ban, pushed back on that, saying that “Minister Solomon’s comments about reward points are a red herring and they echo misleading talking points used by major retailers who are lobbying to stop a ban on surveillance pricing.”

• The COMPETITION BUREAU is wasting no time putting its new grocery funding to work, with the enforcement agency this week announcing a new investigation into competition across Canada’s food supply chain. The fact-finding project will focus on three key areas: how food is produced and processed, how it moves to retailers across Canada and retail pricing practices including loyalty programs, pricing algorithms, shrinkflation and skimpflation. The Bureau is seeking input from Canadians and organizations with experience in the food supply chain and is accepting comments until July 31, with a final report scheduled for the spring. Along with the Competition Tribunal, the agency got a new 10-year funding injection of $130 million last week from the federal government to investigate and combat anti-competitive practices in the food industry.

• Grocery giant EMPIRE is pushing into so-called discount stores, with a plan to open nearly 100 new locations over the next three years, with three-quarters of those being in the FreshCo brand. The company, which also owns Sobeys and Farm Boy, says the move reflects a growing shift by Canadians toward shopping at stores with cheaper prices. “More than 75 per cent [or our new stores] are going in discount because discount is a white space for us,” chief executive Pierre St-Laurent said during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “We have a lot of room to grow in discount without cannibalization of our network.”

📱 TELECOM

• More job cuts at BELL, with the company this week announcing it was axing nearly 700 workers as part of a reorganization effort. The company said back in the fall that it was looking to find $1.5 billion in costs savings by 2028, which suggests that further cuts could be in the offing. The news follows 4,800 positions eliminated in 2024 and 1,300 in 2023. Also this week, Bell announced a deal with COHERE that will see the AI company use its infrastructure and data centres.

• It’s a good, old-fashioned Canadian standoff with the nation’s Big Three wireless providers locked in a who-will-blink-first showdown with the CRTC over new fees. Last week, as a new law forbidding wireless service activation and modification fees took effect, the regulator sent letters to TELUS and BELL asking the companies to explain why they felt their respective new “device handling” and SIM card charges weren’t in violation of the Telecommunications Act. The companies this week responded with their own letters, with Telus reiterating its belief that a SIM card (the little plastic chip required to connect a phone to a network) is a product separate from prohibited activation fees. Bell also maintains that its handling fee applies to devices that customers have “explicitly chosen” to buy, so it is therefore exempted under the law. ROGERS, meanwhile, didn’t implement a new fee as fast as its cohorts but made up for lost time by introducing three of them: a $40 for device set-up, $25 for shipping and an unspecified SIM card charge. The CRTC sent Rogers a similar letter, threatening possible regulatory action. Telus did not return a query on whether it’s possible for customers to sign up for wireless service with the company without also getting a SIM card and why it therefore considers that SIM card to be an optional purchase. CRTC spokesperson Mirabella Salem says the letters sent by the regulators are the first step in assessing whether the carriers’ fees are compliant with the new rules. “CRTC staff will consider the explanations provided by Bell, Telus and Rogers and will determine whether further, more formal regulatory action is required to ensure compliance with this consumer protection,” she said.

• Hockey Night in Canada is officially leaving CBC starting next season, with NHL rights holder ROGERS moving games exclusively to its own Sportsnet TV channels and streaming service. The cable company first acquired the rights back in 2013 for $5.2 billion, then sub-licensed games to the public broadcaster. But, with Rogers’ new 12-year $11-billion deal beginning next season, the sub-licensing price tag likely got too rich for the CBC, which has been airing hockey games over the air for free for 74 years. While Sportsnet says that CBC hockey viewership is down 70 per cent from 2014, the switch also further cements Rogers’ domination of sports in Canada.

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT

• Rupert Murdoch’s FOX is buying ROKU for $22 billion (U.S.) to create the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing, after YouTube and Netflix, according to the two companies. But the deal also gives Fox and entry point into more than 100 million households worldwide via Roku’s streaming devices – set-top boxes, plug-in sticks and integrated televisions – as well the company’s advertising technology, operating system and content discovery tools. Roku’s platform is home to numerous apps that compete with Fox properties, but the company says it plans to continue allowing them.

• Movie theatre giant CINEPLEX is raising the price of its CineClub membership program to $10.99 a month, up from $9.99. The change was potentially telegraphed during the company’s recent quarterly earnings call, with chief financial officer Gord Nelson telling analysts that he’s expecting 10- to 15-per-cent box office revenue growth for the remainder of this year, and that “part of this would be pricing.”

• Speaking of CINEPLEX, the company could be affected by the latest rumours around NETFLIX reportedly looking to acquire film studio LIONSGATE. The streaming company denies it’s interested, but the studio being in play could affect a deal it signed with Cineplex in 2023. That deal, which The Globe and Mail reported at the time as sending “ripples through [the] Canadian film industry,” moved Cineplex down the road of vertical integration by giving it exclusive distribution rights over Lionsgate’s slate of films, which included the John Wick and Hunger Games franchises.

💾 BIG TECH

• If you need a new phone, computer or other gadget, you may want to buy it as soon as possible. APPLE chief executive Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal this week that imminent price increases for iPhones and other devices are “unavoidable,” thanks to shortages on memory chips that are causing costs to soar. “This is a hundred-year flood,” he told the paper in regards to the cost increases. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.” This likely isn’t just an Apple thing, because as the company’s prices go, so too do its competitors’.

• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has drafted a complaint against AMAZON that could lead to a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the company over allegations that it misled advertisers, according to a Bloomberg report this week. The regulator and multiple state attorneys general are looking into whether Amazon improperly disclosed ad terms and pricing, particularly with “reserve pricing” or the minimum cost that advertisers must accept before they can buy an ad with the company. Neither the FTC nor Amazon are commenting, but the investigation may wrap up as soon as this summer with either a lawsuit or settlement, according to the report.

• Credit card provider AMERICAN EXPRESS is buying online restaurant booking platform TheFork from TRIPADVISOR for $700 million (U.S.), the company announced this week. It’s an odd acquisition on its face, but Amex says that dining is one of the chief avenues for cardholder engagement and TheFork is the leading restaurant reservation platform in Europe, dealing with 50,000 establishments in 11 countries. The credit card company also already owns Resy, a similar reservation platform that caters toward higher-end restaurants in the United States.

🚨 COMING UP

Signing up for a service online is usually really simple, but getting out of it – not so much. Not only does Canada lack protections that allow consumers to easily get out of subscriptions – so-called “click-to-cancel” rules – it’s also behind peer nations in moving to implement them. There’s some light on this horizon, with the CRTC requiring click-to-cancel rules in telecom services starting next year, but other markets are still wide open. TAHIRA DAWOOD, acting general counsel for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre consumer group, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast on Tuesday to talk about why Canada is behind and why broad click-to-cancel rules are sorely needed.

Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, promises to ensure that Canadians’ “personal information is used responsibly, transparently and for appropriate purposes, including to address unfair uses of personal information such as inappropriate surveillance pricing.”

With more than 80 per cent of Canadians wanting a ban or strict regulations on surveillance pricing – where prices for goods and services are individualized based on the data that sellers have about buyers – the government’s move is timely and follows similar action in Manitoba.

But unlike the province’s ban, which was passed in April, critics are already warning that the proposed federal rules don’t go far enough and lack specifics.

The legislation appears to leave room for market segmentation and the preservation of merchants’ ability to offer discounts, which, as we’ll hear in this podcast episode, are hallmarks of a possible slippery slope.

Alec Opperman is a producer and strategist with More Perfect Union, an Emmy-award winning non-profit journalism project in the U.S. He recently produced a video on how surveillance pricing laws are getting watered down and neutered by lobbyists in the United States.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss these cautionary tales, and to highlight the warning signs of supposed bans that are anything but.

Check out More Perfect Union’s video here.

The Chamber of Progress, mentioned in this episode, has critiques of surveillance pricing laws – such as those Maryland tried to enact – on its website.

The federal government this week announced an amibitous $3.2 billion plan to bring grocery costs down by building new infrastructure and competition capacity into Canada’s food system.

The National Food Security Strategy, unveiled by Prime Minister Mark Carney Thursday in Toronto at the Ontario Food Terminal, aims to expand existing distribution facilities and create 20 to 40 new hubs across Canada to offer smaller grocery sellers “a viable alternative to major retail.”

“We are an agricultural superpower, yet for most Canadians, it doesn’t feel like that at the checkout counter,” Carney said. “We’re going to grow more at home, process more at home and feed more Canadians with Canadian food.”

The 10-year plan includes $1 billion for building and expanding food terminals and hubs and a $1-billion Agri-food Project Finance Fund that will provide seed financing for businesses to expand processing capacity. It also includes $750 million to expand year-round domestic production of fruits and vegetables through greenhouses, vertical farms and other indoor growing operations.

Notably, the Competition Bureau and Competition Tribunal are getting $130 million in new funding to investigate and combat anti-competitive business practices in the food industry. That new funding comes as a surprise to some, given that the government initiated 24 job cuts or five per cent of the Bureau’s workforce back in January.

Those cuts are coming largely from support staff, while the new funding looks to be going toward enforcement, according to a source close to the situation.

Consumer advocates are cheering the food strategy as it addresses several layers of competitive problems in the Canadian industry.

“These are important investments in the future of grocery competition in Canada and we’re very glad to see them,” says Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project.

“Funding to expand the infrastructure that allows independent grocers to compete, as well as additional resources for the Competition Bureau to protect fair competition in the grocery market are both welcome developments.”

Carney is, however, taking some heat over comments he made at the Thursday press conference in regards to household spending on groceries. While noting that grocery prices have risen 35 per cent since 2019, he said the average family of four spends $10,000 a year on groceries or $800 a month.

But, as Dalhousie University food researcher Sylvain Charlebois notes, that number is closer to $17,572, or $1,464 per month.

Writing on his Substack, Charlebois also points out that the government’s announcement isn’t so much a strategy as a “collection of investments,” with little explanation of where all the funding is going to come from.

“The government’s plan is a positive step. It demonstrates that Ottawa is paying attention to food systems in a way it has not for decades,” he says. “But food security cannot be purchased through government spending alone. It is earned through investment, innovation, productivity, and competitiveness.”

Aaron Vansintjan, policy manager at Food Secure Canada, is also cautious in his optimism about the government’s plan. While the development of new food distribution hubs that provide competitive alternatives for smaller grocers – including emerging municipally owned stores – is a positive step forward, he doesn’t see anything in the plan that will prevent profiteering by Canada’s large grocers.

The strategy also isn’t truly national because it doesn’t include income supports for especially needy families, including those with disabilities or children, or provisions for northern Canada, where food prices are exceptionally high.

“It’s a strategy that sees food as a subject of national security, but it doesn’t solve food insecurity,” he says. “I’m happy, but it’s half-assed.”

🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:

🏈 SPORTS & LEISURE

The World Cup is here and with it, continuing sky-high ticket prices. Attempting to get ahead of the, er, game, Ontario this week boosted the penalty for reselling tickets above face value to $25,000 from the previous $10,000, and yet… no one seems to be getting busted, still.

Ontario has also added STUBHUB and SEATGEEK to its Consumer Beware List, which names and shames companies that have not responded after two notifications of consumer complaints or that have been convicted in relation to the Consumer Protection Act or other acts of the ministry.

For their part, the companies say the province has not given them guidance on how they’re supposed to verify the face value of tickets sold on their sites.

“Over the past seven weeks, we have been seeking guidance on key details that are fundamental to compliance, such as what constitutes acceptable proof of a ticket’s original price,” StubHub said on Thursday. “We received partial answers to these questions today and are continuing to work with the Ministry toward full compliance.”

For more on this contentious issue, I reached out to Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University and an expert on competition and sports ticket resales. Here’s that conversation, edited for length:

What’s the big idea behind banning resale of tickets at a profit?

As soon as you have a very active resale market, you get big differences between what tickets are worth there and what they’re actually selling for in the primary market, and that creates rents.

Once you have these rents, there are incentives for resellers to enter and flood the primary market with ticket requests, which means fans don’t get to buy those tickets and have to go to the resale market.

The resale market often gets the price right and you just have to pay higher prices there. The benefit of buying in a primary market is that these tickets are potentially underpriced, but there’s going to be lots of people who understand that, and therefore you may not get a ticket in the first place.

The resale market creates a better allocation of tickets to those who value them the most, or have the highest willingness to pay.

That’s great if the only objective is to allocate the tickets to the people who are willing to pay the most, but it’s not particularly good if you’re also thinking that there may be other criteria for allocating tickets. You may want tickets to go to real fans or fans that create all the atmosphere in a stadium, or you want them to go to the most dedicated fans of an artist. Once you allow that resale market, it becomes much harder to pursue that second objective.

Even the most deserving fans, when they get tickets for $300 but can resell them for $3,000, might say, “Well, should I really go to the stadium or should I just pocket the profit?”

The other reason you might want to ban resale is that you’re concerned that fans are getting exploited by resellers or the resale market. That’s only the case if there is really a massive underpricing in the primary sales market to begin with.

That hasn’t been the case with FIFA because FIFA has been very aggressive with very high ticket prices in the primary market, including to some games that really do not have all that much demand and willingness to pay.

Going back to those two objectives, different types of events fall on different parts of the spectrum. For the World Cup, there are a lot of people who think the primary objective should not be profit maximization. In fact, FIFA is not a for-profit organization so therefore shouldn’t be maximizing profits in the first place.

If you ban resale entirely, the only people who will want to buy tickets are the people who actually will go to those games, and so then you’re really favouring that second objective, and that’s how it was for a long time. It’s also not too difficult logistically because, if you think about, airlines – there’s also no resale there.

If I buy a ticket on an airline, I can’t just turn around and say, “Oh, well, the flight’s more expensive now, I’m going to resell my ticket to somebody else.” Same thing with ski ticket passes, you can’t just transfer them.

But somehow with concert and sports tickets, we have decided that no, they should be transferable, and that of course leads to a real commercialization and financialization of that.

If a jurisdiction moves to ban the resale of tickets at a profit, what should the results of that be, in theory?

In theory, it should eliminate that resale market entirely. What is more likely to actually happen is that the resale market then becomes much more secret – we’re going into a black market where people are literally standing outside the arena or stadium and they’re just selling the tickets there.

It will also likely decrease the profits of the original seller because now you’ve basically shrunk the demand to only those people who really want to go to the game.

You might say that banning the resale market shouldn’t make any difference to the original seller, right? They would just price tickets accordingly, whatever the market price was before and then do the same thing without the resale market, but that usually does not happen.

Instead, what really does happen is we get a massive reduction in the profits of the resellers and it puts a lot less pressure of finding tickets in the primary market in the first place.

Some people say this is all just supply and demand and should be left alone. How much of it is real demand and how much is just profit seeking? And the $3,000 example you mentioned earlier – if left alone, does that shift sports and concerts to where it’s only rich people going?

Yeah, it is. Imagine if we’re selling tickets at $300, there’s no resale and there’s tons of demand. Only 10 per cent of people will get tickets who actually want them at $300, so you basically turn it into a lottery. In some sense a lottery is more egalitarian, but it doesn’t mean that tickets go to the people who value them the most.

If you have a discriminatory resale market, that always gives tickets to the people who are willing to pay the most. It’s great for whoever is selling them and for everybody who has a high willingness to pay, but it is a much less egalitarian.

Willingness to pay is not necessarily the same thing as the deservingness of going to a game and so that’s obviously tricky.

Some season ticket holders aren’t happy with Ontario’s ban because they say it makes the product less appealing if they can’t recoup some of their expenditure. Does that argument have weight?

Yeah I think that’s absolutely true, and one could say maybe a better policy is we should differentiate between where we ban resale. Maybe we should ban resale on extremely high demand events and maybe less so on season tickets.

But whenever you allow resale, you’re creating this market that is basically pure rent-seeking. It’s just people getting in there to get a piece of that difference between the face value price and the market price.

We might say as a society: Is that really a valuable use of these people’s time? It’s good that they’re generating all this money, but maybe these resellers should be doing other more interesting jobs than transferring money from sellers or consumers to themselves. You could say that there’s just zero societal gain from all of this.

Of course, the resellers might push back and say, “Well, we allow this market to occur, and then that allows better allocation of tickets and better matching of tickets to those who actually value them the most,” and so on, but in essence it’s mostly just people out there trying to get a piece of those rents.

How difficult are such bans to enforce – it appears that Ontario isn’t doing so – and what happens when there’s no enforcement?

We don’t have much experience with real strong enforcement of these bans. We used to have these anti-resale laws in the United States, but it was always looked upon as a cavalier thing. Like, if people do it, it’s bad and they get told off, but nobody ever goes to jail or gets punished.

Once the third-party resale platforms arrived on a big online basis, everybody realized, well, there’s no way of stopping this unless we really massively enforce this and hand out fines. And basically, lawmakers then threw their hands up in the air and said, “No, we’re not going to do this.” And there’s also tons of lobbying from those resale platforms because it’s a huge market.

So do we actually know what happens if one were to enforce these things? No, because it’s never been done. Nobody has really been busted.

It’s not that difficult to enforce, if you were just required to show ID that’s matched to your ticket. Think about airlines – you can’t resell the airline tickets because you have to show up there with your ID.

Here in Ontario, StubHub says the province hasn’t provided guidance on how to prove face value of tickets. With dynamic pricing, it’s actually hard to actually tell what face value is. Is this a legitimate concern from the company?

It’s very easy to just say, “All the tickets are getting sold at $150.” But here, not only do different categories have different prices, but even within categories over time you have price variation. I can see how that would make the enforcement even harder to do.

But again, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is show your original receipt of when you first bought those tickets and what the face value was. I don’t think it’s that hard because they don’t want that law in there in the first place.

📱 TELECOM

• Last month, BELL got smacked down by the CRTC for attempting to get around new rules – which take effect today – that ban service activation and cancellation fees. This week, it was TELUS’s turn. The regulator sent the company a letter urging it to back off a plan to introduce a new charge of up to $25 for new SIM cards, including electronic eSIMs. Just as with Bell last month introducing a $40 “device handling” fee, the CRTC is taking a dim view of Telus’s move. “A SIM card or eSIM is required for the delivery of the wireless service customers are purchasing,” wrote Scott Hutton, vice-president of consumer, analytics and strategy at the regulator. “It would not appear that the SIM purchase fee falls under the exemption considered by the Commission for optional services and products. A fee associated with providing a SIM card or eSIM may be considered to be an activation fee that is prohibited under… the [Telecommunications] Act.” Telus may be sticking with its guns, however, telling the Canadian Press that SIM cards are separate hardware and that eSIMs require “real backend work even though there’s no physical card.” With the now-banned activation fees reaching as high as $80 and cancellation fees amounting to what are likely not insubstantial revenues for the telcos, it’s unlikely they’re going to go down without a fight on this one. The rules, by the way, were made part of the Telecommunications Act in order to eliminate fees that discourage customers from switching providers.

• The CRTC has launched another round of information gathering on cable wholesale internet pricing, which is the access cost that smaller providers such as TEKSAVVY and EXECULINK pay large companies including ROGERS and VIDEOTRON to use parts of of their networks to deliver services to customers. In a letter sent to the relevant parties this week, the regulator asked large network owners to resubmit their wholesale cost estimates, since the existing studies they filed several year ago may now be out of date. “Commission staff notes that the cable carriers submitted their initial… cost studies between June 2023 and April 2024,” the letter says. “However, Commission staff is concerned that the costing information currently on record may no longer reflect the prospective incremental costs of providing these services.” That very much sounds like an invitation to the larger companies to raise their stated costs, which means that wholesale-based ISPs may end up paying them more. That can, in turn, be bad news for consumers, as indie ISPs discipline the prices that large cable companies can charge their own customers. And, according to CRTC figures, up to 40 per cent of Canadian households are still connecting to the internet via cable connections, despite the rise of fibre. What’s potentially more concerning is that the CRTC’s letter is effectively an admission that the regulator has been taking too long to settle this important matter. “It’s the longest-ever process on a mandate to do things faster,” says one ISP executive. “That is troubling.”

• The CRTC has also launched a public consultation on harmonizing the disparate consumer protection codes it oversees. Currently, the regulator maintains separate codes of conducts for internet, cellphone, home phone and television services, and is looking to unite them into one that would be “easier to understand, reduce billing surprises, and help Canadians make informed choices about their communications services” and “create greater consistency for service providers, helping reduce complexity and resolve customer complaints faster.” The CRTC is accepting comments from the public until Aug. 11.

• In case you missed it, not only are telecom complaints out of control – big telcos aren’t properly informing customers about their options when it comes to service and billing disputes:

✈️ AIRLINES

• The federal government this week said it would offer loans to Canada’s airlines to help cover the elevated cost of fuel resulting from the war in Iran. One might expect the companies to welcome this help, but not WESTJET – the country’s second-largest airline “strongly opposes” the offer. “The government faces a choice: continue with costly and market distorting subsidies or build a sustainable future for Canadian aviation,” a spokesperson told CTV. “We’ve seen where this path leads. In 2025 alone, taxpayers lost around $400 million in COVID-19-related airline loans that were forgiven by the federal government. With this, they have been turned into direct taxpayer subsidies to some airlines.” Passenger rights activist Gabor Lukacs doesn’t necessarily disagree, telling Do Not Pass Go that these sorts of subsidies are effectively rewarding airlines that have failed to properly hedge against such risks. “Their execs can have a confidence that the government will bail them out anyway because they are ‘too big to fail,’” he says. “This is not so say that we should necessarily let these airlines go bankrupt per se, however, the current owners and not taxpayers should be bearing the financial consequences of their lack of responsible financial planning and management.” FLAIR, PORTER and AIR TRANSAT did indeed welcome the loan news, while AIR CANADA spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick tells us the company has a “very strong balance sheet built in anticipation of events such as the recent spike in fuel prices and we are able to adapt in response and manage this situation ourselves.”

🕺 ENTERTAINMENT & MEDIA

• Related to the item on concert and sports prices above, Business Insider this week published a piece that effectively lays out the realities of surveillance pricing. Staff at the publication tried to buy the exact same ticket at the exact same time to a recent Yankees-Red Sox baseball game on STUBHUB, only to get five different prices. The $55 pricing range between cheapest and most expensive was largely due to differences in the fees being added to the base ticket, with one staffer on a desktop getting $60 tacked on while another in a different city got only $28. “For consumers, the modern American shopping experience is a constant battle that no one signed up for and no one can win,” the piece concludes.

• And on the topic of surveillance pricing, the WASHINGTON POST is being sued by subscribers for price increases that are based on personal information. Subscribers started seeing renewal notifications starting in March, with offers stating that “this price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” The suit, filed by Clarkson Law Firm, is seeking class-action status.

• The ongoing PARAMOUNT acquisition of WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY saga continues to turn up new twists and turns, with the company this week accusing NETFLIX of waging a “scorched earth” campaign against it. Paramount says the streaming giant is trying to turn regulators and other stakeholders against it after the company beat out Netflix with its bid to acquire Warner Bros. For its part, Netflix says the accusation is “absurd.” Meanwhile, add the U.K. competition watchdog to the list of entities opposing the $110 billion (U.S.) merger, with the Competition and Markets Authority opening an investigation into the deal that it believes will result in a substantial lessening of competition. Australia and New Zealand, however, are cool with it, with regulators there giving the merger the green light.

At a time when telecom complaints are going through the roof, Canada’s largest service providers have continued to flout rules requiring them to inform customers of the independent ombudsman agency that handles service and billing disputes.

Bell, Rogers and Telus were only partially compliant with the requirements in 2025, according to an annual report card by the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services, releasing Wednesday.

This year’s report, which audited 37 service providers’ websites last year, shows that only 12 were fully compliant at the outset - including Bell Aliant, Bell MTS and Lucky Mobile, as well as Chatr and Comwave, but notably not their respective parents, Bell and Rogers. Telus and its Public Mobile subsidiary were fully in line, but not Koodo or the company’s other sub-brands.

Rogers and Bell were also not listed as fully compliant in last year’s CCTS report card, nor was Koodo. Rogers and Bell did not respond to requests for comment.

Telus spokesperson Brandi Merker said the Koodo website was substantially compliant in 2025 and that the CCTS questioned additional text that appeared when required search terms was entered into our website. “While the correct information and link to the CCTS appeared, we removed any additional information that also showed up alongside it in January.”

The CCTS requires service providers to have a complaint-handling webpage that gives customers information about their own internal dispute systems, as well as pointers to the federal agency. Their websites must also be searchable and easily turn up results when keywords relating to “CCTS” and “complaints” are entered.

This year’s report found that only 24 of the 37 websites had a search function at all, while half did not return results on those two search terms. Further, half of the sites also had more than one complaints-handling page, with only one listing CCTS information.

“This frustrates the [CCTS’] Public Awareness Plan objective because it fragments information available to customers,” the report says. “Customers who are trying to navigate provider websites to understand their options when they have a concern may not be provided with information about the CCTS.”

Complaints accepted by the agency have exploded in recent years, hitting a new record of 23,647 for the year ended July 31, 2025. That was up 17 per cent from a year earlier and the third new annual record in a row.

The latest half-year results, up to Jan. 31, show this increase is accelerating, with complaints for the six-month period at 19,157, up 61 per cent over a year earlier. Rogers led the pack with a 95-per-cent increase in complaints.

The CCTS, which is overseen by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, does not have the ability to impose penalties on service providers, other than to publicly name and shame them for non-compliance.

“We don’t have any authority to punish or fine service providers for not following these rules,” assistant commissioner Janet Lo told Do Not Pass Go. “The public can make choices with what they want to do with this information.”

Last year’s report card audited 65 service providers. Lo confirmed that the lower number covered this year reflects the CCTS’s available resources, which have been stretched in handling the rising tide of complaints.

The organization may soon experience further spikes in billing and contract disputes as new CRTC rules banning activation and termination fees come into effect on June 12.

“Our service is available if the customer requires a second look by an independent agency, but we really do encourage customers to navigate these new rules with their service providers,” Lo said. “It will require more resources if volumes continue to increase.”

The CRTC has regularly found that service providers aren’t doing enough to inform consumers of their options through the ombudsman. The regulator launched a public proceeding in October on how to raise public awareness of the CCTS, but paused it a month later after large telcos complained about how it was happening alongside the regulator’s efforts to harmonize the various consumer protection codes that exist across different services.

The CRTC revived the consultation in April, with proposals from interested parties due by July 23.

This year’s compliance report comes on the heels of the federal government moving to shut down the Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA), along with its Canadian Consumer Protection Initiative, which funds advocacy group projects ranging from fraud protection for seniors to junk fee tracking.

A spokesperson for Innovation, Science and Economic Development, which oversees the OCA, told Do Not Pass Go at the time that several federal departments and agencies – including the CRTC – would continue to provide consumer protection despite the cuts.

The CCTS is funded by service providers through annual contributions based on their revenues, plus amounts based on the number and complexity of complaints they generate.

The other providers listed in this year’s report as being fully complaint with the awareness rules are Cogeco and its Oxio subsidiary, Videotron and its Fizz brand, and TekSavvy.

Four smaller service providers are listed as non-complaint and failing to respond to requests to rectify the problems: Netfox Communications, Poynt360, TeleMart and TNext Communications.

But with so many Canadians struggling just to make ends meet – when many are working multiple jobs and have precious little time or energy to devote to anything other than the basic necessities of life – the better question might be: Who can do something about monopolies and oligopolies?

It’s known as “demographic availability,” or the privilege of protest – where only a certain well-resourced group of people are able to take action, whatever form it takes.

It’s an ironic situation because it means that those who are most affected by economic concentration are often the least able to resist it directly, which gives rise to the question: Does that put more of the onus to do so on those with more resources and discretionary time?

Stephen Gasteyer is an associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University who has written about activism and demographic availability. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss the privilege of protest, the different forms of economic resistance and whether society’s more resourced members have a heightened responsibility to engage in it.