Weekly Roundup: Manitoba Probes Grocery Prices While Cineplex Probes Scene Data
Plus: Canada's banks found to be most profitable in the world and Big Telco, fresh off crushing indies, ironically spar over wholesale network access
The beauty of writing these weekly roundups on competition, corporate concentration and affordability is there’s never a shortage of things to talk about. So let’s get to it!
🛒 GROCERIES & RETAIL
Manitoba has launched an investigation into GROCERY PRICES and how to make food more affordable in the province. The study will look at predatory and differential pricing – where people can be charged different amounts based on their shopping patterns and personal information – and whether fees and taxes could be changed to reduce grocery bills. Industry advocates say there’s no evidence of differential pricing being used in Manitoba, to which government officials basically replied with: “…yet.”
In case you missed it, we followed up this week on CANADIAN TIRE pleading guilty to false advertising in Quebec. The province’s consumer protection agency busted the company for showing “regular” prices on products in flyers alongside lower sale prices, while rarely if ever actually selling those goods at the higher costs. While the retailer is paying a $1.2 million fine for its transgressions, it’s nevertheless continuing the advertising strategy in flyers, leading to calls for stronger consumer protections regarding information asymmetry:
💾 BIG TECH
Canadian SHIELD Institute managing director, competition expert and Do Not Pass Go’s unwitting surrogate parent Vass Bednar has an op-ed in The Globe and Mail that asks: If France can ditch American tech, why can’t Canada? Picking up on the growing aversion by European nations to platforms coming out of an increasingly hostile United States, such as MICROSOFT products for example, Bednar points out how Canada is only talking the talk so far. “This sovereignty moment has been almost brutally consumptive so far,” she writes. “Instead of sparking new institutions or digital infrastructures that deliberately strengthen our strategic autonomy, we’ve simply sought to support Canadian products more often and take better vacations. There’s more we can do.”
🕺 ENTERTAINMENT
Rumblings of a potential LIVE NATION-TICKETMASTER settlement in the United States got louder this week, especially with the Department of Justice’s antitrust head Gail Slater getting ousted from her job. Slater was forced out by DOJ head Pam Bondi, who herself had quite a week before a congressional hearing, reportedly because the department is looking to settle its case against the entertainment giant. A settlement would likely kill any efforts to break the company up, which would be bad news for concert goers, independent venues and, obviously, Kid Rock. It’s worth noting that other efforts in other countries to break up Live Nation – including a filing by the Consumers Council of Canada with the Competition Tribunal – are still in progress.
It’s been a bad week for CINEPLEX, first with the news of its theatre in the Beaches area of Toronto closing and then its quarterly financial results putting in a Melania-like performance. The theatre is going to be replaced by a gym while the woeful revenue and profits will be replaced, the company hopes, by a better slate of movies in 2026. An interesting tidbit to come out of this is how the chain is using customer data from its Scene loyalty program. In explaining the success of certain South Asian films, Cineplex chief executive Jacob Ellis told The Hollywood Reporter that Scene is helping the company target theatres and show times to reach diverse and multicultural audiences. “Six years ago, we’d never have placed some of these films,” he said. “We put them in now and they do really well for us.”
And while we’re on the topic of movies, friend of Do Not Pass Go and fellow Substacker Eric Veillette has a great feature over on CBC about the history of popcorn and other snacks at THEATRES in Canada. When theatres were in their early days and trying to be thought of as high art, concessions were reviled, he writes, but now they’re the lifeblood of every cinema. And let’s face it – with so many bad movies being released, they’re often the best part of the whole experience.
📱 TELECOM
After spending years trying to deny and mess with independent telecom companies accessing their networks on a wholesale basis, BELL and TELUS are now doing the same to each other. Telus lodged a complaint with the CRTC last month saying Bell had “drastically degraded” its ability to sign up new customers on its network in Ontario and Quebec. Now, Bell says Telus is doing the same in Western Canada. The irony is… just… we can’t even.
And this is your… weekly?… monthly?… notice that ROGERS is raising prices again, this time on certain internet packages. Hey, the company has to pay the Blue Jays’ soaring payroll somehow, right? (More on that below, by the way)
Speaking of TELUS, chief executive Darren Entwistle is stepping down, much to the surprise of Bay Street. Entwistle had been CEO for 26 years and shown little indication that he was looking for an exit. His replacement is company board member and ex-CIBC honcho Victor Dodig. Which means we couldn’t think of a better way to connect this category of the newsletter to the next if we tried…
🏦 BANKS
Canada’s banks are the most profitable in the developed world and can afford to lend out a lot more money than they do, according to a new report by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. “Canadian [systemically important banks] have strong profitability compared to international peers, reporting the highest return on equity, on average, in recent years,” says the OSFI report. As Peter Routledge, head of the country’s bank regulator tells Bloomberg, Canada’s largest banks could afford to lend out an additional $1 trillion without breaking non-binding regulatory minimums. Interesting, the OSFI report comes a month after the Competition Bureau announced an investigation into the problems that small- and medium-sized businesses are facing in securing financing.
🥊 COMPETITION
We’ve covered Canada’s looming succession crisis – in which giant numbers of small- and medium-businesses stand to be lost or gobbled up by rapacious private equity over the next few years – so the CBC’s coverage this week of EMPLOYEE-OWNED TRUSTS is welcome news. The trend, where business owners are selling their companies to their own employees, is gathering steam, especially because so many are wanting to keep their legacies in Canadian hands.
In case you missed it, science fiction author and digital rights activist CORY DOCTOROW joined the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to discuss his latest book and total zeitgeist capturer, Enshittification. Recorded live at the Bakka Phoenix science-fiction bookstore in Toronto where Doctorow worked as a teen, he explains why the current Trump nightmare is actually a golden opportunity for Canada to break free of American-imposed digital restriction laws:
🚨 COMING UP:
This Monday, veteran Globe and Mail sports reporter David Shoalts joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to talk about how ROGERS has amassed total control over Toronto sports teams (and the media that covers them) and why this is bad news for their fortunes.
The elephant in the room is financial services. Specifically visa&Mastercard. The rest of the world is way ahead of Canada. The EU has capped interchange fees making credit cards less appealing. There's pix in Brazil. My understanding is that digital wallets - such as wero - are much more common in Europe too.
It strikes me a lot of time and effort spent on trying to fix complaints directed at our monopolies. If they just improved their processes they could save a lot of time and money for everyone and the government as well.
Fixing their processes would make life easier for everyone.
Reporting a simple problem and tying to resolve it is like walking into a mind numbing hell. I was trying to renew a contract and spend 14 hours on hold. In the end I could not get a hold of anyone.
The only solution was to file a complaint with the CCTC.
I recently closed a credit card account. When they asked why I was closing my account I told them, no particular reason. They hung up on customers when they cannot solve a problem. Incredibly bad service. There was no yelling or abusive behaviour on my part. I figured that why should I help the bank when they treat their customers with such contempt.
Good customer service is always more profitable than p-o'd customers who move their business elsewhere.
A good reason to not tie all your email contacts to your ISP. That way if you have to leave you can just drop them and move to another provider.
That goes for the same with financial providers. Having all your eggs in one basket makes a move to a competitor much more painful.