How Canada Can Up Its Game Against Monopolies

At a moment when power and wealth are increasingly concentrated in the boardrooms of a few behemoth corporations, what can be done to reverse the trend? We may dream of big breakups that would give us more companies to choose from as they lower our bills through competition. But what are the chances, really?

Better than before, says Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, or CAMP, a think tank dedicated to addressing monopoly power in Canada.

“We're coming at it in terms of education,” Bester told the Tyee. “We're laying out what the harms are. We're laying out the solutions and sketching how we can get there.”

The conversation is timely. In November 2024, five months after passing a set of toothy new antitrust laws, Canada’s Competition Bureau sued Google for anti-competitive conduct. Google has since taken aim at these changes, insisting that Parliament “exceeded its constitutional authority” by passing these laws in the first place.

Bester and CAMP are closely tracking these landmark cases while empowering Canadian businesses affected and harmed by increasingly brazen, anti-competitive practices.

“For people who are on the outside but see something happening, or their business is affected in some way,” Bester explained, “we want to either give them the tools or connect them with the people who can help them in this case.”

Those tools are about to expand.

In June 2024, Canada’s Parliament passed several amendments to the Competition Act aimed at strengthening antitrust measures and preventing anti-competitive business practices. Most of the changes came into effect right away, but one aspect — expanded private access to the Competition Tribunal — was subject to a one-year delay.

It’s a game-changer. For as long as the act has been federal law, enforcement has been largely left up to the commissioner of competition. Beginning on June 20, 2025, individuals and businesses affected by everything from anti-competitive mergers to deceptive marketing practices like greenwashing can seek to enforce these provisions on behalf of themselves, and of others.

Informing Canadians of their new rights under the Competition Act is a big part of what CAMP is doing these days.

“We're talking to small-business owners, even owners of fairly large businesses, challengers in different parts of the economy,” said Bester. “We're trying to learn what they're facing so that we can translate, as well as to potentially help them address those issues.”

“A new set of laws is nice,” Bester said, “but it really is what you do with them. We'll have our hands full for the foreseeable future.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: I’m fairly new to anti-monopoly discourse, but I’ve been told by several smarter people that it’s time to pay attention. Antitrust: that’s where it’s at, people say, so I’m delighted to be speaking with an expert in the field. Why should Canadians care about antitrust? Why are we talking about this today?

Keldon Bester: We're talking about this because we took our foot off the gas — or, rather, off the brake, regarding any sort of boundary on consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, roll-ups, whatever you want to call them — and some of the most important markets in our economy, not just in Canada but around the world, were allowed to become a domain of, really, one or two companies in each case.

Since then, the consequences of that have been thrown in our face in one way or another. While the U.S. and Europe were very motivated by waking up to these tech monopolies that have been operating in their backyard, in Canada, I think what really happened was that prices started to rise, we started looking for alternatives, and we couldn't really find any.

We've had these sort of long-simmering problems, and it took a couple of things going wrong, as it usually does — Rogers and Shaw, the rise in food prices, RBC and HSBC — to get people's hackles up and start thinking about, you know, is this the way it has to be? And is another way possible?

Well, is it? And what would the other way be?

The other way is, frankly, a way of orienting our economy, our policy around competition and diversity, and a skepticism of concentrations of economic power. We're in a funny situation where we're seeing that, you know, a monopoly is the same whether it's a country or a company, and we ourselves are on the wrong end of an international dependency on the United States, which we've learned is less stable than we thought.

There’s a defensive and offensive way of doing things. Defensive is saying: we're going to take a real strong stance against consolidation, mergers, acquisitions, roll-ups. We're not going to make them impossible, but we're going to have a pretty big hurdle to get over if you want to buy up one of your competitors.

Offensively, it's looking at markets that are concentrated, that have been concentrated for a long time, and where we feel like we're getting a pretty raw deal. It's investigating them for abuse of dominance. It's potentially even breaking up industries, and it's looking at the regulations we have and the policy approach, and asking how we can change this to get more people competing for our business.

You're talking about the value of, specifically, domestic competition, which is often undervalued here. I’m glad you brought up telecoms. Canadians tend to complain about Rogers, Bell, Telus, how frustrating it is to deal with these companies, and why we don’t open things up to the U.S., just to shake up the markets and get better deals. But because of what we're seeing with the Trump administration and the tariffs, well, nobody wants that now. Maybe let’s keep it in-house.

There's a sort of corporate lawyer type that says, “It's these dastardly regulatory barriers. That's what keeps these companies away!” In some of these cases, it's simply not true. There really is no kind of foreign ban or restriction. Often it just doesn't make sense.

Airlines are the funniest one. People say if only we opened up to these American or international players, then we would have a competition paradise. But airlines in the U.S. are pulling out of markets that are much, much larger than the markets we need to service in Canada. There's phenomenal policy co-operation, actually, when it comes to air travel between Canada and the U.S., but we have communities the market just won't serve without intervention.

Even on telecom, unless we're talking about wholesaling — sharing infrastructure, basically — no foreign company is super thrilled to drop a couple billion dollars on parallel infrastructure. So it’s a bit of a fantasy. There's a regulatory barrier, but there's also an investment hurdle. So we need to actually pressure test those stories.

And then we need to layer in, now, this national security concern. Nowhere is that more pressing and more problematic, I think, right now, than in what we could call digital markets: online advertising, search, social media, cloud computing. All of these are dominated by one, two, maybe three American companies, and if we don't think that these are going to become part of what I’m going to call, generously, the “ongoing negotiation” that we're about to have with the U.S., I think we're kidding ourselves.

It’s hard to get a handle on what’s happening in the U.S. Originally I assumed that these tech companies — Meta, Apple, Alphabet — were just kind of marching in lockstep with Trump. But it turns out they're not? Some of this antitrust movement is actually coming from his administration. This issue has become surprisingly bipartisan. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

Myself and my colleagues in the U.S. and Europe, we're watching very closely what I would describe as mixed signals. On the positive side for our camp, we have the U.S. Department of Justice still going very strong against Google. That's critical. As well, [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg’s lobbying efforts earlier this year do not appear to have paid off yet.

On the other side of the ledger, you have the U.S. Federal Trade Commission abandoning a really important case against Pepsi and Walmart.... So the big tech story is more complicated, but it's really a question of, you know, we're not in the driver's seat.

Meanwhile, a pretty good chunk of how we access information online, how most publications get 20 to 30 per cent of their revenue or more through digital advertising, access to cloud computing, it's all on the table. You're absolutely right. This is not cut and dry. Everybody's hopping aboard. But this is still something we have to deal with, because we're at risk.

Well, great. I hate being at risk. What can Canada do, or do better, or harder? I understand that Parliament made several amendments to the Competition Act this time last year. Can you explain what those amendments are and how they might be used?

We can kind of bucket them in a couple of areas. One is a much stronger stance against mergers. That's a defence. The law is now much more skeptical of consolidation, especially in already concentrated markets where there are two or three players that dominate.

The law also really strengthened and expanded something called abusive dominance, which is, I'd say, big business behaving badly. It's conduct that kills competition, whether by an individual company or jointly — denying input, predatory pricing, margin squeezing. It's basically competition through flexing of power, which tends to not benefit Canadians. And so the scope for that was opened up. The test was made easier. The penalties were raised. In general, it's a much stronger piece.

Then, third, and this is why your timing is fortuitous: this really comes into effect on June 20. They've really opened up the ability of organizations other than the Competition Bureau to bring cases under the Competition Act. It’s still quite a big lift. You're still talking about a million dollars in legal fees. You're still talking about having to get the evidence of this conduct. But starting on June 20, it will be much more common for individual companies to bring cases against their dominant incumbents.

So I would keep an eye out, because I think there's going to be a bit of a rush of cases as people try to test the law and see what we can do with it.

Will that be enough? I wonder sometimes about Canada's regulators, and how much we can actually do to impede the rampaging tech monster. It seems like our main recourse is toothless financial penalties. At best, we're just siphoning off a fraction of profits from the most profitable companies on the planet. Can you give me some hope that we can actually strike fear into the hearts of these titans?

This is a global problem, and that means two things. Canada can't go it alone, but we can't count on other people to do our homework for us. The European Union has put some pretty strong competition regulations on these big tech platforms. The DOJ is pursuing these cases. The FTC is pursuing these cases. But absent a global breakup of the firm, there's nothing forcing Google from changing how it does business in Canada, even if it's ordered to do so in the U.S. or the EU. We actually need to be involved in this process.

You highlight an important failing of Canada's approach to big tech so far. It's only a part of it, but it has been very much about, well, if only we can sort of skim some off the top, we'll be good. This ignores, I think, the real consequences: a loss of control, loss of dynamism, a loss of economic activity.

As much as possible, you need to focus on the structure that allows this conduct to occur. Think less about fines and think more about simple, straightforward solutions. If you are found in violation, you risk actual, serious criminal charges. We may actually see this. In the U.S. there's an Apple executive who's basically been held in contempt of court, perjured himself. Bring it back to individuals, and you’d be surprised at the result.

There’s an isolationist undercurrent to this political moment, especially lately. It’s easy to think that we’re just on our own. So it’s nice to be reminded that there are people all over the planet working hard to rein in these massive tech monopolies. It’s not just little old us against them.

It’s true. It remains a tall task but we are together on this. We’re not the only ones under the gun here. There's more shared. There's more similar than different when it comes to how countries like Canada, Australia, France, Germany and the U.S., even, have been treated and are being treated. That, I think, is grounds for some measured optimism.

Recently, I switched from Google Chrome to DuckDuckGo. Did that do anything?

It does. It’s competition working, right? It's alternatives. It's a different way of doing things.

But I try to avoid... one example is the Loblaw boycott. I think that was a great effort, and it raised the profile of an issue, but we can't put this all on consumers. In many cases, the structure of the market is determined elsewhere, and you are presented the choices you are presented with. If we want to change that, we need to take a structural, market-level view.

While I think using different products, engaging with challengers, trying them out, is fundamental, it’s part of the process. We can't just sit back and say, well, people can just use a different search engine. It ignores a phenomenal amount of inertia and, in some cases, a lack of alternatives.

I think that people have serious doubts that we can ever break up these tech monopolies. They just seem so in control at this point. Do you really think it's possible?

Absolutely. Can Canada just come out of nowhere and say we're going to break these companies up? I don't think that would be successful. But in the U.S., in the EU, in Canada, in Australia, if we believe ourselves to be sovereign, we have the ability to affect the markets around us. We don't get to just wave a magic wand. These things take time. They take effort. They take strategy.

We always think we’re in the era of the most, the worst, the best, so on and so forth. But we would have thought the same about the previous generation.

I do think there is evidence that this is worse than it ever has been. The extent of control and integration has never been higher. But we have done this in the past. We have said no. We have picked a different path.

If we believe that we can’t, then we can’t. But I think that the record shows otherwise.