Instead, a consolidation-friendly framework emerged, concerned only with avoiding “substantial lessening or prevention of competition” rather than halting monopoly in its incipiency. They stripped out proposed fairness considerations, and bright-line rules for mergers (clear-cut guidance that bars acquisitions above a certain market share threshold). And that 1986 law was the product of a 15 year battle that consumed the careers of multiple responsible federal ministers, and ended up passed (under the incoming Conservative government) as legislation effectively written by the corporations it was supposed to police. This worldview from 1969, then, underpinned Canada’s current Competition Act. But, under big business efforts to block any attempts to rein in corporate power, this laudable aim to beef up antitrust was skewered. Lawmakers had initially intended the Competition Act to be a departure from the lax treatment of monopoly under Canada’s original 1889 anti-monopoly laws, which had failed to block a single harmful acquisition in nearly a century of enforcement. That report stated that, rather than protecting the public interest in competition, Canadian competition policy should henceforth “aim primarily at bringing about more efficient performance by the economy as a whole.” Yet long before that, the (now long-disbanded) Economic Council of Canada, argued in its landmark 1969 report for a competition policy focused squarely on efficiency, rather than supposedly non-economic goals like diffusion of economic power and fairness. It is true that Canada’s efficiency obsession stems, in some part, from the intellectual revolution in the United States that gave rise to antitrust’s comfort with consolidation and its almost singular focus on low prices, laid out most influentially in Robert Bork’s Antitrust Paradox of 1978. Canada’s current competition law, the Competition Act, came into force in 1986 and bears all the hallmarks of the ‘80s fixation on narrow ‘efficiency’ concerns. Since its 1867 confederation, successive governments have tended to see concentrated corporate powers as national development partners, though often with some ambivalence about the resulting tradeoffs. is now waking up from the long hangover of the 70s, and seems to be heading back towards the approaches of past golden “trustbusting” eras, where strong and confident government tackled corporate power head-on.īut Canada never had such a golden era. But it would also be inaccurate to compare Canada’s intellectual and political journey too closely to that of the United States. Until real policy change began in 2021, the United States was mired in an antitrust dead-end too. ![]() ![]() What explains Canada’s feeble participation in this critical global policy conversation? We are not alone in harbouring approaches to antitrust that rely on outdated intellectual foundations. ACCC boss Rod Sims recognised in 2021 that many digital deals “should not have been allowed to proceed,” and that tougher approaches were needed. ![]() The ACCC has over three times as many staff as Canada’s Competition Bureau does, it has created a dedicated Digital Platforms Branch, and it is currently advocating for economy-wide rules to address unfair trading practices such as the covert collection and disclosure of customer information and unilateral contract changes. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), created as part of a whole-government focus on competition policy since the 90s, has spent years at the leading edge of global analysis of the power of Big Tech. While peer countries have moved on policy and enforcement action, including the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the United States’ Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) statement on unfair methods of competition (and much else besides ), or Germany’s multiple ongoing investigations into Big Tech under its expanded “abuse of dominance” provisions, the Canadian government is only now, belatedly, opening its competition law for public commentary.Ĭontrast Canada’s track record with that of its middle-power peer, Australia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |