Do Not Pass Go with Peter Nowak – Détails, épisodes et analyse

A year ago, there was no doubt that affordability of basic goods and services – or lack thereof – was top-of-mind for Canadians. Along with that was the growing realization by policy makers and the public that corporate concentration in numerous industries is a prime driver of the problem.

But for big stretches of this year, a different story has dominated the national psyche: The U.S. trade war and continuing talk of Canada’s annexation by President Donald Trump.

Amid this turmoil, a new think tank emerges. Spawned of the Canadian Council of Innovators, an advocacy group for 150 scale-up firms, and armed with a $10 million investment from BlackBerry co-founder Jim Balsillie, the Canadian SHIELD Institute aims to bridge the gap between the two issues.

Renowned competition advocate Vass Bednar took the helm of the new think tank in June as its first managing director. In the latest episode of Do Not Pass Go, she explains how Canada’s push for economic sovereignty and its continuing effort to improve competition aren’t actually separate issues, but rather part of the same mission.

The United States and other countries have a number of journalists and media organizations covering corporate concentration, competition and monopoly issues. Canada? Not so much.

Do Not Pass Go is filling that void with original reporting, breaking news, scoops and investigations into how Canada’s biggest companies are taking advantage of consumers, competitors and employees, as well as the people who are letting them get away with it.

I’m your host, publisher and chief competition officer, Peter Nowak. I’m a journalist and have been ever since Google and Amazon were fun disruptors.

Check out this debut podcast for more on what this is all about and how it came to be, plus special appearances by The Hatchet host Arshy Mann and Canadian SHIELD Institute managing director and competition expert Vass Bednar.

Matthew Boswell is something of a rock star among the pro-competition set. While he started out as a criminal prosecutor before turning his attention to white-collar crime, for the past seven years he’s made waves as the head of Canada’s Competition Bureau.

He’s had successes: helping to convince the federal government to update competition laws and to boost the Bureau’s funding, plus cases, investigations and studies on everything from Google to DoorDash. He’s also had failures, most notably the Bureau’s ultimately doomed challenge of Rogers’ takeover of Shaw. But along the way, he has amassed fans for being perhaps the most active and vocal Competition Commissioner Canada has seen.

Boswell’s term is coming to an end in February. He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss the Bureau’s highs and lows throughout his tenure, how he feels about the cases his department takes on (and doesn’t take on), and what’s next for him.

In a country with highly concentrated industries, consumer protection should be a top priority for government, right?

Not in Canada, according to the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and Open Media, two of the nation’s most prolific consumer groups. Through lack of funding, red tape and a general lack of seriousness from the government, both say they’re on life support. It’s a dire situation because they’re important voices that represent the public interest when it comes to writing laws.

That’s not necessarily the case in Quebec, though, where consumer protection is part of the DNA. Option consommateurs, the province’s main public advocacy group, suggests a better way. Could consumer protection be Quebec’s best export to the rest of Canada since poutine?

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With nearly 300 million units sold since its official release in 1935, Monopoly is hands-down the best-selling board game of all time (not including checkers and chess). But its success is fraught with misunderstanding and controversy, beginning with its very origins.

Elizabeth Magie was a writer and feminist in the early 20th century. She was an ardent supporter of Georgism, an economic ideology developed by social reformer Henry George which held that people should own the value they produce through their labour and that rent derived from land ownership should instead be the primary tax through which government is funded.

Magie sought to popularize George’s progressive single-tax movement by creating The Landlord’s Game, but she couldn’t find a publisher willing to take it on. The game spread by word of mouth and became a folk hit nonetheless until, eventually, it drew Parker Brothers’ attention.

Tristan Donovan, journalist and author of It’s All a Game, joins us to discuss how the point of The Landlord’s Game was lost – and perverted – over time. Plus, we talk about today’s surprisingly competitive market for board games.

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There’s a cone of silence over the music business like no other industry, mainly because everyone in it is afraid to upset the one dominant company at the centre of it all: Live Nation.

Graham Wright, guitarist and keyboardist for the recently disbanded, multiple Juno-nominated indie rock band Tokyo Police Club, is one of the few who isn’t afraid so speak out.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to talk about how Live Nation is making indentured servants of working musicians through buying up venues, demanding cuts of merchandise sales and driving ticket prices to the point where regular people can’t afford to see their favourite bands.

The artists, meanwhile, have no choice but to go along with it, since there’s no other game in town.

“Sooner or later the bottom’s gonna fall out,” he says.

Plus, we also talk about the growing movement among artists against streaming services, why people are increasingly going to see cover bands, and even the merits of Kid Rock.

Graham has his own podcast, Major Label Debut, where he talks to other musicians and industry insiders on breaking into the business. Check that out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

(Also, my apologies for actually uttering the words “Star Wars: The Next Generation”)

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Does it feel like every business – whether it’s telecom providers, airlines, grocery chains and more – are simply trying to get more and more of your money these days without providing better products and services in return?

It’s not your imagination, according to Columbia University professor and Biden administration competition advisor Tim Wu.

In his new book, The Age of Extraction, Wu argues that platforms – both online and off – have morphed from being enablers of other businesses to money-extraction machines that are killing competition and draining consumers’ wallets.

This “main-character syndrome” needs countering, with an economic rebalancing necessary to prevent the world from sliding into disaster.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how we’ve arrived at this age of extraction, how it’s leading to the rise of authoritarianism, and what can be done to stop the ensuing societal collapse.

Amid all the doom and gloom, we also discuss the 2025 World Series. Wu is Canadian, after all, and a huge fan of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Canadians are generally aware of the giant oligopolies running various industries – banks, airlines, telcos – but many likely aren’t familiar with the silent force killing competition: private equity.

For some time, these asset-managing firms have been rolling up small businesses across the economy – from veterinary and dental practices to retirement homes and even cemeteries – in the interest of pulling value from them.

This extraction generally comes in unfriendly terms: worse products and services for consumers, higher prices, plus lower wages and layoffs for employees. And because the individual business acquisitions are typically small, competition authorities don’t notice until it’s too late.

Rachel Wasserman, a Toronto-based lawyer who used to work in the field, is among those raising the alarm on the need for new rules that govern industry roll-ups. Without them, small businesses are going to find it increasingly hard to start up and to sell out to anyone but private equity firms.

As she explains on this episode of the Do Not Pass Go podcast, every-day consumers have a role to play too in terms of where they spend their money.

Further reading for articles and papers mentioned in this episode:

Wasserman’s white paper on private equity for the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project.

Toronto Star op-ed on the “new giant story of capitalism.”

The New York Times op-ed on how private equity is “gutting America.”

CBC story on veterinarian consolidation and resultant price increases.

University of Waterloo study on deaths in private equity-owned retirement homes.

Do Not Pass Go is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fees to maintain accounts, fees to use ATMs, fees to transfer investments. Lousy services, difficult-to-get loans, non-competitive mortgages. And, oh yes, quarter after quarter of record profits. Welcome to banking in Canada.

The Big Five – RBC, Scotiabank, TD, BMO and CIBC – are among the biggest and richest companies in the country thanks to decades of protection from competition by government and regulators, who have prized stability among all else.

The side effects of that preoccupation are becoming increasingly clear. A study last year by consultancy North Economics, for example, found Canadians were paying about $10 billion per year in excess fees, compared to the U.K. and Australia, working out to about $350 per person. On top of that, a growing number of economists are pointing at the banks for Canada’s woeful productivity and innovation showings.

Amid the dual affordability and sovereignty crises, it’s about time for change – and it finally appears to be happening.

As the head of the Bank of England for much of the past decade, Mark Carney had a front-row seat to how competition and innovation in banking spurs a nation’s economy. It’s why the Prime Minister and his government have introduced a raft of imminent reforms including open banking and updated payment systems.

Industry vet and economist Andrew Spence, who lays out the many ways in which the big banks rake in those outsized profits in his book Fleeced, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to talk about how behind Canada is – and how we may be about to catch up to the rest of the world.

Check out his book here. And check out the story on RBC’s backfiring TV spot:

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When everything costs an arm and a leg, maybe the only rationale thing to do is to buy nothing?

The idea isn’t new, stretching back until at least the 19th century. In 1992, a Canadian artist named Ted Dave adapted criticisms of conspicuous consumption into Buy Nothing Day – a symbolic single day of the year that encouraged people to think about the effects they were having on both inequality and the planetary ecosystem through the things they were purchasing.

Adbusters, a Vancouver-based leftist magazine and non-profit, picked up that message and in 1997 tied it to Black Friday, the day after U.S. Thanksgiving that kicks off the holiday shopping season.

Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn joins Do Not Pass Go this week as we head into our annual consumerist smorgasbord to talk about how Buy Nothing Day is merely the tip of the iceberg, leading to what he calls the “third force” – a new kind of politics that seeks to rein in and limit corporate power and that accounts for ecological well-being rather than just pure economic growth.

Along with limiting corporate market share, requiring stock buyers to hold their purchases for at least 24 hours and imposing the idea of “True Cost” – adding the ecological damage of products and services to their price – Lasn shares his vision for a “worldwide revolution” that can allow humanity to survive the 21st century.

Tune in for the literally radical conversation, man, and if it’s your kind of jam, head to adbusters.org for more.

Do Not Pass Go is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free subscriber.