Competition Summit '25: Hawks, red tape and lemonade stands

Speakers at the annual Ottawa confab agreed on the need for a whole-of-government approach to lowering the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and small businesses

Canadians can be forgiven if they start thinking of their federal government as a kettle, given the growing number of officials referring to themselves as hawks. (Fun educational fact of the day: a “kettle” is the common term for a group of said predatory birds.)

Industry Minister Melanie Joly earned the plumage – bird references will stop shortly, I promise – on Wednesday in a speech kicking off the sixth annual Competition Summit in Ottawa, where she proclaimed that her government “will be hawkish on competition.”

Joly stressed that more competition across sectors is vital to growing the economy at a time when Canada is under stress from the U.S. trade war and millions of Canadians are struggling with the affordability of basic goods and services. She touted some of the government’s efforts to that effect, including its recent decision to uphold a CRTC rule that allows big telcos such as Bell and Telus to use each others’ fibre networks to deliver internet services to customers.

“Canada is open for business, but we expect companies to compete fairly,” she said. “We’ll continue to strength competition in Canadian markets because affordability depends on it.”

The declaration of hawkishness evokes memories of similar comments in 2023 by Joly’s predecessor, previous Industry Minister and now Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, when he approved Rogers’ $26 billion acquisition of fellow cable and internet giant Shaw.

Champagne allowed the unpopular merger to proceed with the caveat that the companies involved would be subject to legally-binding requirements regarding job creation, infrastructure investment and service affordability. The government would “watch them like a hawk” to ensure those conditions were being met.

How that’s going is a topic for another day, but Joly’s comments were nevertheless well received at the summit, an annual confab of competition advocates and experts from the public and private sectors.

“When I heard Minister Joly say we’re going to be hawkish on competition in a room full of competition experts, that for me was a moment,” said independent Senator Colin Deacon, who moderated a panel on entrepreneurship later in the day.

The rules they need a’changin’

Birds of prey aside, regulatory improvement was the summit’s prevailing theme as multiple speakers and panellists highlighted how complex, unnecessary and unfair red tape is standing in the way of competition and new ventures.

Matthew Chiasson, a senior policy advisor at the Competition Bureau, presented a collection of real-world examples ranging from the absurd – such as when two young Ottawa girls had their lemonade stand shut down in 2016 because they didn’t have the proper permits – to the harmful, such as the decades-old property controls that are keeping new grocery stores from opening in northern Halifax.

Chiasson’s point was that Canadian policy makers need to embark on a comprehensive clean up, streamlining and elimination of rules and regulations where and when they don’t make sense, so that entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses are able to more easily enter markets, innovate and grow.

As it is, the complexity perversely benefits and entrenches larger firms that can afford to employ lawyers, lobbyists and experts who are able to navigate the red tape.

“It makes for an economy that is not promoting broad-based economic participation, an economy that’s more extractive and less inclusive,” he said. “This is not a call to deregulate, but the way we regulate is important and has consequences.”

His comments were echoed by Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell, who in his remarks again called for a whole-of-government approach to promoting competition throughout the economy. (Boswell also discussed this here on the Do Not Pass Go podcast; go have a listen if you haven’t already.)

The conceit drew broad agreement from other panel participants. Blair Wiley, chief legal officer for financial services competitor Wealthsimple, for one, said his company has spent huge resources trying to get through the complicated rules that govern how consumers transfer their money between institutions.

“It’s extraordinarily hard to move your banking to Wealthsimple… because there is fragmented oversight in our Canadian financial system,” he said. “There’s no one party who will actually stand up and say we’re going to do something about that.”

Marwa Abdou, senior research director of the Business Data Lab at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, related a story of how she recently spoke with an Uber driver from Nigeria who was trained in data science. The driver was trying to start her own business, but has been unable to get a loan because of her lack of a credit history in Canada.

“When you think about the number of times that immigrants and underrepresented groups are shut out just because we have archaic rules and regulations that prevent them from participating in the economy, that’s not just a family struggling to put food on the table, that’s an idea, a job, a community that we’ve said, ‘Sorry you’re not central to our growth story, you don’t matter enough,’” she said.

Extinction horizon

If there was a mic-drop moment at this year’s summit, it belonged to lawyer and Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project fellow Rachel Wasserman, who took aim at private equity firms and how they are buying up scores of small- and medium-sized businesses with the intent of extracting value out of them rather than continuing them as vital concerns.

Part of why this is happening, she said, is because employees of those businesses are finding it difficult to get the money they need to buy their own firms, and even if they do, private equity is often able to offer considerably more to owners.

“This is not hyperbole. We are facing the potential extinction of entrepreneurship in this country if we don’t find a solution to either make entrepreneurship easier or provide opportunities for entrepreneurship through acquisition,” she said. “We have to be willing to appreciate that the interests of big business and small business are no longer aligned.”