Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Do Not Pass Go with Peter Nowak

There’s a significant battle brewing over the direction of Canada, and a humble can of peas is at the tip of it.

Earlier this summer, the Competition Bureau announced it was challenging an attempt by Quebec-based food processor Nortera to acquire canned and frozen vegetable brands Green Giant and Le Sieur from New Jersey-based B&G Foods.

The competition watchdog said the deal was a merger to monopoly that would give Nortera 90 per cent of the canned vegetable market and 80 per cent in frozen, which would lead to higher prices for consumers. The company said the deal was necessary to protect its business and Canada’s food safety against cheaper imports.

As reported here, Nortera managed to convince the federal government of that argument, leading to tariffs being placed on imports and a review of the market by the Canadian International Trade Tribunal. That body last month ruled that imports were indeed harming domestic processors, and that tariffs were justified.

Though Nortera and B&G abandoned their deal earlier this month, the case highlighted the differing priorities – and the growing conflict – between the Competition Bureau and the federal government.

On the one hand, the Bureau is applying new powers and funding that took years to acquire in protecting markets and consumers from abuses of dominance. On the other hand, the government is fighting a trade war and backing transactions that solidify sovereignty.

Former competition commissioner John Pecman – now an advisor at Fasken’s law firm – is among those who has recognized this growing disconnect in consumer and industrial policies.

In a new piece for the C.D. Howe Institute, he says the conflict isn’t necessary and that Canada will be better served by closer co-ordination between the government and the Competition Bureau.

Pecman joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how this could work, including the introduction of a mechanism that would allow cabinet ministers to veto merger challenges by the watchdog when it comes to sectors designated as nationally sensitive.

Read his intelligence memo here.

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Website crashes, interminable queues, a rash of fees that are climbing higher and higher… it sounds like we’re talking about concert tickets, right?

The comparison is apt, according to Cameron Fenton. In a recent investigation for The Walrus, the B.C.-based travel and outdoors journalist looked into Camis Inc., the “Ticketmaster of camping” that controls the biggest and most popular campsite reservation systems in Canada.

Besides this being a market dominance story, it’s also a sovereignty issue. Despite originating in Canada, Camis is now U.S.-owned and is pulling millions out of federal and provincial parks – money that Fenton says could be reinvested to meet growing demand.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to explain why it may be time to repatriate Canada’s camping booking systems and break one company’s dominance.

Read Fenton’s article here.

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Don’t look now – Do Not Pass Go is officially one year old!

It’s hard to believe we’re already at this point when it feels like just yesterday that we thought it might be a good idea to shine a spotlight on Canada’s competition problems. But here we are. Woohoo!

It’s been an incredibly busy year, and certainly one with no shortage of news or issues to cover. This is our 126th post and our 53rd podcast, and we’re only just getting started. Literally!

In this week’s episode, we go over some of the highlights from the past year and share exciting updates on the future of Do Not Pass Go… you’ll definitely want to watch or listen for all the goodies, but here’s a bit of a spoiler: We’re growing fast and expanding soon, and we’ve got a rebrand in the works.

Plus, we’ve got Arshy Mann – co-founder of The Hatchet newsletter and podcast, whose monopoly series on Canadaland was one of the main inspirations for Do Not Pass Go.

He’s back for another state-of-the-competition-union conversation, where we cover everything from airport privatization to consumer protection to whether the federal Liberals have a governing monopoly in Canada. Check out this pulse-pounding, super special episode – and don’t forget to subscribe!

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The federal government introduced changes this week to labour rights through Bill C-39 that may make it harder for workers to strike, but it’s perhaps not even the most pertinent matter when it comes to employee rights.

Despite being unenforceable in many jurisdictions and even illegal in others, non-compete clauses that restrict workers from switching jobs or starting their own businesses are rampant – and they’re on the rise. And Canadians have it especially bad.

A study of 15 countries released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development this summer showed that Canada had the second highest prevalence of non-compete contracts, after only Spain.

And while such restrictions originally applied only to high-ranking executives who might possess trade secrets, these clauses are rapidly expanding down the corporate ladder to even the lowest-ranking employees. Court cases in Canada have involved everyone from seasonal window washers to tattoo artists.

Dan Andrews, head of the growth, competitiveness and regulation division in the OECD’s economics department and author of the report, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how these restrictions are holding back economic growth by depressing wages, innovation and business creation.

Check out the full OECD study here.

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Canadian films account for only a small part of the overall Canadian box office, but they also make a disproportionate percentage of their money through independent cinemas. In fact, many earn their entire take through theatres that aren’t Cineplex or Landmark.

In other words, if we’re talking about sovereignty – and Canadians making Canadian film is certainly part of that discussion – then we have to talk about independent cinemas and how important they are to the national fabric. It’s a poignant subject, with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s investment summit and the Toronto International Film Festival intersecting this week.

A new report by the Network of Independent Cinema Exhibitors (NICE) – an association that represents 150 theatres across the country – lays out the challenges that independent theatres are facing, and how they’re often coming into conflict with anti-competitive practices by Cineplex and large distributors.

From exclusive zones that prevent indies from showing movies to so-called clean-run demands that require them to play films for weeks at a time, these practices mean less room for Canadian-produced cinema at a time when demand for it may be at an all-time high.

NICE founder and director Sonya Yokota William joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss the barriers that are holding Canadian films back, and how they could be removed.

NICE’s report on “Market Access Barriers” can be found here, while the Canadian Movie Marketplace is here.

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Gander Social officially opened its doors to the public this summer, finally inviting everyone in to try out the promise of the most Canadian of experiences: a kindler, gentler social media app. The sort where, rather than insults and trolls, users are more likely to apologize to each other, eh?

But Gander is more of a canary than a goose, so to speak, in that it’s in the proverbial coal mine. With sovereignty being built into its technological infrastructure and operating ethos from the ground up, it’s an experiment into whether it’s possible to build a fully Canadian startup.

As Canada’s trade war with the United States heats up and lakes get renamed, it’s no surprise that all eyes are on Gander to see if it can successfully chart a different course.

Founder and chief executive Ben Waldman returns to Do Not Pass Go for our very special 50th episode to talk about the progress his team has made and what challenges remain. He also tells us why pet photos do better on Gander than contentious news stories.

And, as part of our 50th episode celebration, check out our special deal on tickets to Rogers v. Rogers, the hit one-man play based on the book about the cable giant’s succession drama and takeover of Shaw Communications.

The show returns to Toronto this fall and we’ll be recording a very special live podcast episode – with playwright Michael Healey and Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, who wrote the book the play is based on – on Nov. 20.

Head to Canadian Stage at this link and use promo code DONOTPASSGO for discounted pricing to the show and taping, but hurry as tickets are limited!

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Have you noticed that even run-of-the-mill products and services are now expensive? Whether it’s a car or a concert ticket or even just a loaf of bread, regular items that were priced regularly just a few years ago are now being sold as luxuries.

It’s no accident, according Eemaan Khan, a Canadian expat working as a strategy director at ExecCap Advisors in Chicago. It’s the product of a lack of competition across sectors, which is allowing providers to get away with charging exorbitant prices on thoroughly mid products.

The concept is known as “premium mediocre,” coined by management consultant Venkatesh Rao in 2017, and refers to products, services and experiences that use marketing, aesthetics and false luxury to make average, everyday things premium.

Canada – and Canadians – are particularly ripe for it, Khan recently wrote on his Make Canada Think Harder newsletter, because of a conditioned aversion to risk and failure. It’s a feedback loop that prevents competition from happening, which in turn keeps pricing going up and acceptable standards on what we’re being sold going down.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go to discuss premium mediocre and how Canadians can shake their penchant for accepting middling results at high costs.

Check out Khan’s newsletter here.

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In June, the Yukon government wrote angry letters to Bell, the CRTC and the federal government to complain about poor and degrading wireless service in the territory. It’s not the first time elected officials have resorted to doing so – the territory’s premier penned a similar missive two years ago.

The continuing problems suggest the pleas for improvement are not being answered. For its part, Bell – which holds a virtual monopoly over fibre and wireless networks in Yukon – says the economics don’t make sense. The regulator and feds don’t appear to be helping much, yet.

At a time when more eyes are on arctic security and wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, the ongoing connectivity crisis in the North can no longer be ignored – it’s a problem that needs to be addressed urgently.

Jennifer Gehmair, the Yukon minister of Economic Development, Tourism and Culture, joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how the competitive situation in the territories – or rather the lack of it – means that different solutions involving government and regulators are needed in everything from telecom services to grocery availability.

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If you’ve ever used a bike, you’ve been a centaur – a human whose natural abilities have been enhanced by a piece of technology. But if you’ve ever used modern artificial intelligence, you may be a reverse centaur – someone who has done more for the machine than the other way around.

That’s the premise of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, the latest non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow.

As it stands, he argues, the tech industry has been selling investors on the promise that AI will soon be able to replace vast swaths of human jobs, thereby saving employers untold millions or billions of dollars.

But in reality, AI’s capabilities have been hugely overstated while the resultant investment gold rush has irretrievably sunk billions of dollars and caused immense ecological harm via related data centres.

AI will be a useful tool, says Doctorow, a prolific science-fiction author, journalist, digital rights activist and credited coiner of the term “enshittification,” but policy makers and the public need to be able to see through the bubble being peddled by tech bros for their own interests.

He returns to the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how policy makers, investors and the public can best use AI, rather than have it use them.

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We’re safe from monopolies when we sleep, right? If only that were so.

Over the past few years, a wave of consolidation has created sleep business juggernauts in both Canada and the United States. In 2012, manufacturers Tempur-Pedic and Sealy merged to become Somnigroup, before going on to acquire Mattress Firm – the largest U.S. sleep retailer – last year. Earlier this year, the Kentucky-based company announced a $2.5 billion (U.S.) acquisition of component maker Leggett & Platt, setting itself up to become a vertically integrated powerhouse with an estimated 40-per-cent share of the U.S. market.

Meanwhile in Canada, Sleep Country has been on its own acquisition binge. Aside from gobbling up a host of online bed-in-a-box sellers including Casper Canada, Endy and Silk & Snow, the Toronto-based company last year acquired the rights to Bed, Bath & Beyond, with plans to relaunch the brand. And just recently, the company paid $702 million to acquire Minneapolis-based retailer Sleep Number, marking its expansion into the United States. Sleep Country says the deal makes it the world’s second-biggest sleep-oriented company after, you guessed it, Somnigroup.

Nate Cangemi has more than 20 years experience in the sleep business and is the proprietor of Golden Dreams Mattress, an independent retailer based in Carslbad, Calif. He has been vocal of this growing consolidation on his social media channels, arguing that it is resulting in higher prices, homogenized choices for consumers and declining innovation.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how concentration and vertical integration is literally preventing people from getting a better night’s sleep.

Check out Golden Dreams Mattress here and on Instagram.

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The news for the news media isn’t great.

A steady stream of surveys are finding that public trust in news outlets is on the decline. A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, for example, found that only 37 per cent of Canadians trust the news overall, which was down from 55 per cent a decade ago.

Many of the news media’s problems are self-inflicted, but some of them are also the product of forces we talk a lot about here – corporatization, consolidation and, yes, enshittification. It’s just another industry that has problems stemming from giant companies extracting profits at the expense of everything else.

Tara Henley is a journalist who went viral in 2022 after she left CBC and criticized the institution for how far it had strayed from objectivity. She has spent the past few years focusing on these issues through her Substack, Lean Out.

Now, she has focused all of that research and commentary into a new book, The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity, which covers both the internal and external failures that are showing up as these concerning survey statistics.

Her book is a sober diagnosis of what has gone wrong, as well as a plain prescription for how the news media can restore the public’s faith in it. She joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to talk about the trust spiral and how to reverse it.

Check out Tara’s Substack here and her new book here.

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The World Cup is over and we have a winner: after an exciting and drama-filled tournament, Spain has been crowned the ultimate champion. But there’s also a loser – and that is clearly StubHub.

The biggest name in ticket resale had issues before the World Cup, but the company is emerging from the event beset by problems of its own making. Texas and British Columbia are investigating StubHub for selling tickets that didn’t exist, consumers have filed class-action lawsuits in New York and Vancouver over the same reasons, and Ontario has added the company to its Consumer Beware List. Perhaps the most serious problem is the revelation that StubHub chief executive Eric Baker also runs a mass scalping side hustle through the website.

Many of the stories over the past few months, including the Baker bombshell, were turned up by CBC News investigative reporter Dave Seglins. His interest in the mess that is the ticketing business goes back nearly a decade further to a hidden camera investigation of a scalper convention in Las Vegas, where he and his colleagues caught Ticketmaster representatives not only encouraging mass resellers to use their platform, but recruiting them to do so.

That story figured into the recent U.S. antitrust case against Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, just as Seglins’ latest coverage has sparked the various government probes and lawsuits against StubHub.

No other journalist in Canada has covered this field as closely or with as much impact. In this episode, Seglins joins Do Not Pass Go to take us behind the scenes of the ticketing business, and to discuss why concerts and sporting events are deserving of serious attention from policy makers.

Check out the story on Eric Baker here, and the 2018 scalper convention investigation here. And here is the interview with Live Nation executive Dan Wall referred to in this episode.

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If you’ve got a pet in your household - and half of all Canadian households have at least one - this podcast episode is for you. We’re talking about how consolidation in the veterinary industry is rapidly driving up prices, and what’s being done about it.

A CBC investigation last year found that before 2010, almost all veterinary clinics in Canada were owned by the vets themselves. Fast forward to the present and more than half of emergency and specialty hospitals and more than 20 per cent of all clinics are owned by just six corporations.

As is the case with virtually every industry where consolidation is occurring, prices are going up – and dramatically so in this case.

A survey of pet owners last year by Gallup and PetSmart Charities of Canada found that more than half of respondents had declined recommended veterinary care or skipped a visit, with two-thirds citing cost as the reason.

Having to pay sky-high fees to get pets healthy, or worse, not being able to afford the cost of doing so, is often devastating to families.

The rolling up of the industry is getting a lot of attention as a result and it’s inevitable that regulators and governments are going to start investigating. Maybe some will take action. But in the meantime, some of those still independent vets are trying to disrupt this norm.

Emma Harris is the chief executive and, along with Dr. Brendon Laing, the co-founder of Novel, a new vet clinic that opened last year in Burlington, Ont.

As the name implies, they’re trying to do the vet business a bit differently, driven largely by the desire to make sure that pet care is affordable so that families don’t have to make that terrible decision of foregoing treatment with their fur babies.

Harris is also finishing up her PhD at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, where her thesis delves into the growing overlap of vet care and big business.

She’s the perfect person to talk about how private equity is driving up the cost of pet care but also investing in necessary advancements, and how disruption and better clinics may be the best counter to industry consolidation.

Check out Novel here and a Globe and Mail feature on the clinic here.

CORRECTION: A previous version of the show notes for this episode referred to Dr. Laing as Ms. Harris’ husband. They are not, in fact, married. We regret the error. An audio clarification will be made in the next episode.

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In December last year, Ubisoft Halifax employees voted overwhelmingly in favour of establishing a union – 74 per cent said yes. Just a few weeks later, the French company shut the studio down and laid off everyone.

Legal action followed, which the two sides settled in April, only for Ubisoft to then close its Winnipeg studio in June, laying off a further 65 employees.

Those layoffs – more than 45,000 globally since 2022, with 8,200 so far this year including Microsoft’s news this week of an additional 3,200 Xbox cuts – are what’s driving the unionization push, not just at Ubisoft but across the industry.

Employees at U.S. studios owned by Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax Media and Sega of America have all unionized recently. Last year, workers in the United States and Canada partnered with the Communications Workers of America to announce the United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433, marking the historic launch of an industry-wide labour movement.

In this episode, Ubisoft Halifax lead programmer and union leader Jon Huffman takes us behind the scenes of the studio’s move to get organized, and he explains how consolidation and financialization are forcing workers across the industry to finally fight back.

Check out Huffman’s new independent games studio, Phantom Rowboat.

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The NDP took a drubbing in the last federal election, suffering its worst defeat in history. The party lost 17 seats, with its share of the popular vote falling by two-thirds to just 6.3 per cent.

Some of that was because many Canadians got spooked by Donald Trump’s 51st state rhetoric, so they rallied behind the Liberal party to prevent a Conservative win. But part of it was also because, as many within the NDP openly admitted, the party had lost its way - it was no longer representing the interests of regular Canadians.

At the same time, in Manitoba, premier Wab Kinew has been enjoying some pretty significant support. He’s regularly showing up as the most popular premier in the country in polls, an obvious beacon of success for the NDP in Canada.

That popularity is the result of his tackling the issue that is top of mind for the vast majority Canadians: affordability.

Since taking office in 2023, Kinew’s government has passed a raft of pro-consumer and anti-monopoly legislation. From taking on grocery chains and the restrictive land contracts that prevent competition, to banning surveillance pricing and giving farmers the ability to repair their own tractors, the province been on a mission to counter the effects of market concentration.

The federal party and Kinew’s counterparts in the other provinces have not only taken notice, but they’re adopting the same playbook.

This past spring in Winnipeg, Avi Lewis won the federal NDP leadership and has since adopted many of the same positions on a national level. He’s in favour of municipally run grocery stores, a total ban on surveillance pricing, and publicly owned telecom providers, among other measures.

In Ontario, Stiles is pushing a similar agenda. Her party has introduced bills on right to repair, cutting taxes on groceries and the establishment of programs to cut energy bills.

She joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on how the NDP is tying a hoped-for rebound to a focus on competition and affordability issues.

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Want to cancel your phone or internet service? Better carve out a serious chunk of time for calling in to plead and argue with a customer agent.

The irony is that same service might have taken only seconds to sign up for online in the first place. And it’s not just telecom, it’s widespread. Satellite radio, gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions – there are no shortages of businesses in Canada that purposely make it delightfully easy for customers to come on board, but dreadfully difficult to leave.

As usual, Canada is lagging while other countries are moving to protect consumers from such predatory tactics. Fortunately, there’s a bright spot on the horizon, as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission recently announced new regulations that will force telecom providers to make it easy for customers to change or cancel their services online without having to call in to speak with an agent.

These so-called “click-to-cancel” rules are the first federal effort to address the scourge of consumer lock-in, but they aren’t coming into effect until April 2027 and they only apply to telecom companies.

Tahira Dawood, acting director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre consumer rights group, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss why Canada is so behind and why click-to-cancel rules are broadly needed throughout the economy.

Check out the Competition Bureau’s recent paper on dark patterns here.

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Surveillance pricing is firmly in the public crosshairs, with the federal government this week introducing legislation to govern the controversial practice.

Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, promises to ensure that Canadians’ “personal information is used responsibly, transparently and for appropriate purposes, including to address unfair uses of personal information such as inappropriate surveillance pricing.”

With more than 80 per cent of Canadians wanting a ban or strict regulations on surveillance pricing – where prices for goods and services are individualized based on the data that sellers have about buyers – the government’s move is timely and follows similar action in Manitoba.

But unlike the province’s ban, which was passed in April, critics are already warning that the proposed federal rules don’t go far enough and lack specifics.

The legislation appears to leave room for market segmentation and the preservation of merchants’ ability to offer discounts, which, as we’ll hear in this podcast episode, are hallmarks of a possible slippery slope.

Alec Opperman is a producer and strategist with More Perfect Union, an Emmy-award winning non-profit journalism project in the U.S. He recently produced a video on how surveillance pricing laws are getting watered down and neutered by lobbyists in the United States.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss these cautionary tales, and to highlight the warning signs of supposed bans that are anything but.

Check out More Perfect Union’s video here.

The Chamber of Progress, mentioned in this episode, has critiques of surveillance pricing laws – such as those Maryland tried to enact – on its website.

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One question we often ask in these parts is what can the average person do about monopolies and oligopolies? The answers vary depending on the situation, ranging from boycotts of products and services to shareholder activism and even political action.

But with so many Canadians struggling just to make ends meet – when many are working multiple jobs and have precious little time or energy to devote to anything other than the basic necessities of life – the better question might be: Who can do something about monopolies and oligopolies?

It’s known as “demographic availability,” or the privilege of protest – where only a certain well-resourced group of people are able to take action, whatever form it takes.

It’s an ironic situation because it means that those who are most affected by economic concentration are often the least able to resist it directly, which gives rise to the question: Does that put more of the onus to do so on those with more resources and discretionary time?

Stephen Gasteyer is an associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University who has written about activism and demographic availability. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss the privilege of protest, the different forms of economic resistance and whether society’s more resourced members have a heightened responsibility to engage in it.

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Many of us see supposed discounts every day – products in flyers or on websites where the “regular” price is crossed out and replaced by a supposed sale price: a vacuum that is normally $599 is now $499, or a pair of pants that usually sells for $99, now only $49!

Sometimes the deals are legitimate, but often they’re fake discounts meant to mislead consumers into thinking they’re getting a bargain.

These fake discounts aren’t just marketing gimmicks, they’re illegal – running afoul of Canada’s “ordinary selling price” laws, which require listed regular prices to be legitimate. Products must genuinely be sold at the regular price for either a certain length of time or a specified volume of overall sales.

The laws are meant to protect consumers from deceptive advertising and to keep merchants honest, but they’re routinely violated because the practice works. Psychological studies show that the promise of a bargain, real or not, makes people more likely to buy what’s being offered.

The practice is already difficult enough for enforcers to detect and stop, so what happens when algorithms and artificial intelligence are added to the equation? What constitutes an “ordinary selling price” and a discount when dynamic pricing means costs for products and services can change every few seconds?

These are questions raised in a new paper by Matthew Chiasson, a senior policy advisor for the Competition Bureau, who believes it’s the first attempt to address the issue in an academic context.

Chiasson previously appeared on the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how large companies were weaponizing regulations to stifle competition. He joins us again to talk about what’s a real discount in a world where the price of everything is increasingly fluid.

Check out his paper here.

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Payouts in the class-action lawsuit against Loblaw for its role in the Great Canadian Bread Price-Fixing Scandal are now going out, which is great news… but also not.

The $49.11 deposits, being paid out to those who registered for the lawsuit, are a drop in the bucket compared to what the scandal has cumulatively cost Canadian households – and a reminder of the big competitive problems plaguing the industry.

For 15 years, Loblaw and its fellow large grocers – including Metro, Sobeys, Walmart and Giant Tiger – conspired to raise the price of bread. While Loblaw is finally paying something for its role in the cartel, the public is in the dark as to what – if anything – is happening with the other participants.

Worse still, what little is known about the scandal suggests that price-fixing on other products may be happening and the chains themselves haven’t changed their behaviour, if the string of continuing controversies is anything to go by.

Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, says strong action is needed by all levels of government to shed more light on the various ways in which the nation’s large grocers are colluding and preventing competition in the sector.

He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to discuss why the current payouts are good news for consumers, but also to explain why Canada’s approach to fixing the industry’s structural problems isn’t even half-baked.

Check out the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project here.

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Canada has some of the most expensive elevators in the world — and as a result, we have far fewer of them per capita than most countries in the world.

It’s a symptom of a much larger problem involving regulation, competition, housing affordability and Canada’s relationship with the United States.

The two countries have effectively isolated themselves from the global elevator market by maintaining their own unique technical standards. While most of the world follows European regulations, North America requires different testing, sizing and certification rules that make it harder for international competitors to enter the market.

The result is a highly concentrated industry dominated by four big multinational firms, where elevators cost far more to install, maintain and modernize than they do in Europe or Asia. As Canada becomes more urbanized and relies increasingly on condos and apartment buildings, these added construction costs are rippling through the housing market.

Worse still, two members of the Big Four – Finland’s Kone and Germany’s TK Elevator – are now set to merge in a $34 billion (U.S.) deal that will create the largest manufacturer in the world and tighten the oligopoly even further.

Stephen Smith is the executive director of the Center for Building North America, a research group that studies elevator markets around the world. He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how Canada needs to detach itself from U.S. standards and move closer to Europe in order to address the housing crisis and open its market to players outside of the oligopoly.

Smith’s Globe and Mail piece, referenced in this episode, is here, while his recent report on the global elevator market is here.

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Industry concentration, supply problems and the war in Iran are all contributing to ever-escalating grocery prices for Canadians, but there’s also a serious anti-competitive issue behind them: restrictive real-estate covenants.

These secretive real-estate deals, signed by Loblaws, Sobeys and others when they open stores, are keeping competitors away and funnelling consumers toward existing stores. They’re prevalent across Canada and, in some cases, their terms are egregious – would you believe that Loblaw’s typically blocks billiard halls from malls?

Once used to prevent specific minorities from living in certain areas, grocery chains have discovered and deployed these restrictive covenants to great effect, which why is the Competition Bureau is now investigating them and Manitoba has banned them.

Jacob Filipp, a marketing professional in Toronto, began unearthing and tracking these contracts after discovering how they drive up grocery prices. He maintains a definitive and growing database on his website as something of a hobby and a public service.

He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to explain restrictive covenants and how grocery chains are using them to drive up prices for Canadians.

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Fun fact: Canada once led the world in fighting monopolies.

With the Anti-Combines Act of 1889, we became the first country in the world to enact pro-competition laws, designed to bust monopolies and protect consumers. But, as the saying goes, being first doesn’t always mean being best.

The Competition Act, which took effect on June 19, 1986, was an attempt to fix the problems with its predecessor. It’s been revised several times since.

As the Act turns 40, we’re joined by its chief architect, Lawson Hunter, to assess how it has evolved and performed, and where Canada’s competition policy and enforcement should head next.

Hunter’s career is long and distinguished. A former competition commissioner and assistant deputy industry minister, he is the recipient of the Chambers Canada Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as a member of the bar and a member of the Order of Canada.

He’s the former chief corporate officer for Bell Canada and, as a long-time counsel at Stikeman Elliott, has advised many of Canada’s biggest companies on mergers and acquisitions.

On this week’s Do Not Pass Go podcast, we discuss the up-and-down enforcement of the Act, who should be the next Competition Commissioner, and how Canada has been “infected” by all these antitrust hipsters.

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Most musicians in North America are afraid to say anything negative about Live Nation/Ticketmaster for fear of retaliation, but not Rollie Pemberton. The Edmonton-born rapper, better known as Cadence Weapon, doesn’t just speak out – he takes action.

In 2022, Pemberton started My Merch, a movement against the entertainment giant demanding a cut of artists’ merchandise sales in venues it owned. That effort led to more than a hundred venues signing on and a wave of public awareness around the issue.

Now, on his just released new album Forager, the former Edmonton poet laureate uses his love of vintage clothing and thrifting as a bridge to connect with his immediate surroundings and to return to a less ephemeral existence that isn’t so controlled by big corporations.

He goes further in his upcoming book, Ways of Listening, in which he explores how to really connect with music – without relying on algorithms.

He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to talk about the ongoing Live Nation monopoly cases in both the U.S. and Canada, the future of Spotify and streaming, and how the fakeness of artificial intelligence is going to make people treasure real music again.

Check out Forager here. His upcoming book, Ways of Listening, is out May 26 and can be found here. And of course, check out his regular musings on Substack.

We also mention The Artist Economy, a Substack by Joel Gouveia, which can be found here.

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It wasn’t the result he was hoping for, but Alexander Martin’s defeat in Canada’s competition court was historic nevertheless. Now, he’s ready to talk about it.

Last year, the Toronto-based independent game developer – known online as “Droqen” – jumped on a new law that lets regular citizens and civil society groups challenge monopolies.

His target was Google’s deal with Apple, where its search engine is the default on the iPhone maker’s devices in exchange for billions of dollars. This arrangement, Martin argued, is harmful to Canadian businesses and internet users because it forces them to use an opaque system that Google can – and does – change at any time.

The Competition Tribunal in January refused to let his complaint go ahead, citing doubt that Martin and his law firm, Berger Montague, could mount a compelling case.

But the effort was historic because it established the rules that other Canadian monopoly cases against Live Nation and Apple are now following.

Martin joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to talk about the experience, how the new law is intended to allow regular people like him to fight monopolies, and how the judge in his case may not have got that memo. Link is in the first reply below.

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Airlines, banks, telcos, grocery chains. The economy is three companies in a trench coat. Welcome to The Antidote. Do Not Pass Go, your very own survival guide to our monopolized times. Join me, Peter Nowak, every week as we delve into competition issues, oligopolies, their influence over our lawmakers, affordability, and what it means for you.

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This week we’re celebrating a pair of milestones here at Do Not Pass Go: We’ve officially hit both the six-month and the 1,000-subscriber marks!

Our quick growth tells us there’s a big appetite for what we’re doing here, which is reporting on and elevating the profile of competition, affordability and consumer issues in Canada.

That’s great news, because we’re just getting started – there’s so much more to come.

Join us on this very special episode of the podcast for a look back at some of the highlights and stats from the past six months, plus a look forward at what’s next.

Plus, in between, we’re joined by Vass Bednar, director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute sovereignty think tank, and Arshy Mann, host of The Hatchet podcast and Substack, for a report card on how the “hawkish” Carney government is doing so far on competition issues.

Along with Denise Hearn, Vass is the co-author of the 2024 book The Big Fix, while Arshy in 2022/2023 produced Canadaland’s monopoly podcast series, both of which were the inspiration for Do Not Pass Go.

What better way to celebrate our milestones than a conversation with grandma and grandpa!

Check out the Canadian SHIELD Institute here and The Hatchet here.

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Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, a small business or a large enterprise, having an online presence is a necessity. And while businesses have always had to deal with unfavourable changes to online platforms, these issues are multiplying now that concentration has set in and competition between them has levelled off.

Stories of businesses losing access to their social media accounts are increasingly popping up. Entire industries have pivoted because of changes to algorithms, only for platform owners to switch them up again on a whim. Some have ceased to exist entirely while others have changed hands and ushered in completely new sets of rules.

On top of it all, most of the platforms in question are U.S.-based – a big problem when Canada is pushing toward more sovereignty.

In other words, it’s never been a worse time to hitch your online wagon to someone else’s train.

Spencer Callaghan is the brand and communications director for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the non-profit organization that sells the dot-ca domain name. He’s self-admittedly biased because of who he works for, but he’s not wrong in advocating for businesses of all sizes to control their own online fate.

He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to warn of the dangers of businesses putting too much effort into opaquely run platforms, and to share his advice on how they can own rather than rent their respective online presences.

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Of all the places you’d think that Canada would have drawn inspiration from when deciding how to adjudicate its competition problems, Sweden maybe isn’t top of mind.

But that’s exactly what lawmakers did back in the 1980s, when they borrowed from the Scandinavian country’s Market Court to create the Competition Tribunal – Canada’s court of first resort when it comes to assessing mergers and abuse of dominance cases.

As the name implies, it’s not precisely a court. The Tribunal is indeed made of up judges, but they are often joined by lay members that jointly hear cases as a panel. As per the Swedish approach, the idea has always been to couple real-world economic and market knowledge with legal expertise.

Prior to retiring this past October, Paul Crampton served on the federal court for 16 years, with 14 of those as its Chief Justice. His duties included heading the Competition Tribunal, where he presided over some of the biggest and most contentious cases in Canadian history – including perhaps the biggest and most contentious, the Rogers-Shaw merger in 2023.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to discuss how recent, badly needed updates to Canada’s competition laws are likely to affect future Tribunal cases – and, of course, we talk about that Rogers-Shaw case.

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When it comes to increasing corporate concentration and declining competition, Canada is dealing with a double-barrelled problem.

On the one hand, big companies are continuing to snap up competitors. On the other, less visible serial acquirers – often private equity firms – are rolling up entire categories of businesses, from dental clinics and veterinarians to laundromats and car washes.

Fortunately, a new counter-force has begun to emerge: employee-owned trusts (EOTs). Enabled by legislation that came into force in 2024, these new structures allow rank-and-file employees to buy the companies they work for, providing a different option for owners who want to retire or otherwise exit their businesses.

It’s an exceptionally timely development – not just because EOTs are providing an alternative to further concentration, but also because of the nation’s looming succession crisis and a growing desire to keep local companies in Canadian hands.

Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners and Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project board member, is perhaps the biggest proponent of EOTs in the country. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to explain their upsides and downsides, and to warn that employee-owned trusts are at risk if the government doesn’t take immediate action on the tax incentives that make them appealing.

Learn more about employee-owned trusts here.

Read the letter signed by notable business leaders to the federal government here.

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If there’s one highly concentrated industry that the federal government refuses to fix (perhaps more so than others), it’s airlines. It’s why Canadians pay some of the highest prices to fly and suffer under some of the weakest passenger protections in the world.

The government has ignored a major report issued by the Competition Bureau last year that has recommendations on how to improve the problems. The passenger complaint backlog sits at close to 100,000, with each individual issue taking years to resolve. Worse still, according to a CBC Go Public investigation published in January, the feds are actively delaying making airlines pay for the complaints system.

With such inaction and even complicity by officials, other resistance emerges. Enter Gabor Lukacs.

For nearly 20 years, this one name has been striking fear into airlines by becoming synonymous with air passenger rights – in fact, Air Passenger Rights is his group, which has more than 274,000 members on Facebook.

Lukacs has fought – and won – dozens of court battles with the airlines, getting passengers justice and the money they’re owed in the process. He’s a fixture in virtually every news report on airline misdeeds, which is to say he’s on TV a lot. He’s the nation’s veritable avatar of passenger anger.

But who is Gabor Lukacs? Why has he taken up this crusade? What drives him?

A child math prodigy, Lukacs escaped an abusive mother in Hungary when he was just eight years old and ended up doing a PhD in Canada at just 16. He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to share his amazing story and how it – and his love of math – fuels his crusade for the justice that the government refuses to deliver.

For more, check out airpassengerrights.ca.

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Cineplex isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders right now.

Theatre closures, poor financial results, a fractious relationship with local film makers, plus the possibility of fewer movies coming its way are all making for a murky future for Canada’s pre-dominant theatre chain.

But, to borrow from The Lion King, it’s the circle of life. At least it is according to Eric Veillette, arts journalist, theatre historian and former head programmer of the independent Revue Cinema in Toronto.

Movie fans don’t need to worry much, he says, because theatres aren’t necessarily going anywhere. The days of BIG theatres, however, may be numbered – the next few years are likely to bring a market correction, and with it, consolidation and shrinking of the large chains in Canada and elsewhere.

But just as cavemen (and cave ladies!) gathered in front of the fire to watch shadow-puppet stories, peoples’ need to experience stories communally is as strong as ever, especially at a time when so many of them are being fed to screens by faceless algorithms.

Veillette joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to reveal the often shady and competitively-fraught history of movie-going in Canada, and to discuss why its future is going to be smaller and more indie.

Check out his Substack, The Downtown Theatre, and keep an eye out for his book, “In the Dark: A Select History of Movie-Going in Toronto,” coming from ECW Press in 2027.

And check out our feature episode the Revue Cinema here.

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Surveillance pricing is getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so – the individualized prices seen online for years, based on what companies such as Amazon and airlines know about their customers, are rapidly making their way into the real world.

Also known as dynamic pricing, it’s a problem because it means retailers are increasingly going to be able to charge people differently based on what they know about the person and their ability to pay, rather than on traditional supply-and-demand economics and competitive factors.

The driver of it all is poor privacy protection. Canada, with its lax laws, is especially vulnerable, according to Jim Balsillie, who needs little introduction.

Balsillie was the co-chief executive of Research In Motion, otherwise known as BlackBerry – the tiny startup from Waterloo, Ont. that ignited the smartphone revolution in the early-2000s and became the most valuable company in Canada for a time.

Apple and Google ultimately ate up the smartphone market, but Balsillie has continued to be a prominent voice in Canadian business and policy. He has started several think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Canadian Council of Innovators and the Canadian SHIELD Institute. And he continues to argue for stronger laws and policies that protection Canadian businesses and consumers.

In a new Globe and Mail opinion piece, he takes aim at surveillance pricing and privacy and how it is contributing to Canada’s cost-of-living crisis.

He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to lay down the gauntlet on Canada’s political parties – he wants them to declare whether they’re really on the public’s side when it comes to privacy and affordability or whether they’re all about their own self-interests.

Check out his Globe and Mail opinion piece here.

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Thank you Courtney 🇨🇦, Shirley Figueroa, Laurel Fairchild, Kathy, Matthew Mendelsohn, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Baseball spring training is here! Hurray!

Whether or not you’re a fan, it’s a symbolic reminder that the end of winter is just around the corner. It’s a time of celebration akin to the best pagan renewal rituals.

But we’re not here to talk about the pending arrival of spring and sunnier days ahead. We’re here to discuss the problem in Toronto sports in general, and Canadian sports overall. And that is the monopoly that one company – Rogers Communications – has over all of it.

After buying out its “rival” Bell’s share of Maple Leaf Sports Entertainment last year, Rogers now owns 75 per cent of the company and therefore full control of its properties, which include the Maple Leafs, Raptors, Toronto FC, the Argos and several other teams.

Along with the Blue Jays, which Rogers bought in 2000, the company also owns the Rogers Centre (it’s still Skydome in these parts), the Scotiabank Arena, television broadcast rights and much of the media that covers the teams.

Strangely, no one is doing anything about it. The Competition Bureau gave the MLSE transaction a pass in late 2024 and didn’t even say why.

David Shoalts is an award-winning veteran of Canadian sports journalism. He spent decades covering sports for The Globe and Mail and, in 2018, published the latest of his three books: Hockey Fight in Canada, about how the CBC lost its NHL broadcast rights to Rogers.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how Rogers’ sports monopoly is bad news for fans – not just when it comes to the prices they pay for tickets, snacks and beer, but also in how the teams are covered in the media and how that can affect their chances of winning.

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Enshittification – it’s a word you’ve doubtlessly heard before, especially if you’ve been reading or listening here.

It’s a term that neatly and cheekily encapsulates how everything, from our digital devices and streaming services to real-world retail stores and even health care, have gotten worse.

It’s also the title of a new book by Cory Doctorow, the Toronto-born digital rights activist, science-fiction author and coiner of the word itself, which has won accolades including Word of the Year from the American Dialect Society in 2023 and the Macquarie Dictionary in 2024.

Doctorow is everywhere these days expounding on his book, which has hit on the zeitgeist in a way that few others do. It’s probably because everyone instinctively knows exactly what he’s talking about.

He was recently in Toronto for a joint talk at the Hot Docs theatre with his childhood friend, former Biden administration advisor and fellow Do Not Pass Go podcast guest Tim Wu, who unfortunately ended up participating via video call because of travel problems.

Prior to the event, Doctorow sat down with us for a very special recorded interview at Bakka-Phoenix, the science-fiction bookstore where he worked as a teenager.

In this conversation, we discuss the uniquely American aspect of Enshittification – and how the rift with our neighbour is presenting Canada with a golden opportunity to escape a big part of it.

Check out all things Cory Doctorow at his Craphound site and buy Enshittification here. Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore on Flickr.

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Back in October, former Conservative party leader and Prime Minister candidate Erin O’Toole argued that monopolies and oligopolies aren’t necessarily all bad at a University of Toronto debate on the subject.

They were instrumental in building Canada in the first place, and keeping the country free from domination by the United States in its formative years.

As the saying goes, everything old is new again, and Canada once again finds itself between a veritable rock and a hard place – an aggressive and increasingly unfriendly neighbour and a need to rein in corporate concentration and the affordability crisis it’s contributing to.

O’Toole knows a thing or two about consumer issues and national security. Prior to politics, he worked as a competition lawyer for Procter & Gamble and served in the military for 12 years, where he earned the Canadian Forces Decoration distinction.

After the Conservatives lost the 2021 election, he returned to the private sector, where he is currently the president and managing director of risk advisory firm ADIT North America.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss Canada’s difficult geopolitical situation and its equally difficult effort to bring oligopolies to heel, plus he sings a few bars of Gordon Lightfoot.

Check out his Blue Skies Substack here.

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In an effort to tackle out-of-control unaffordability, Prime Minister Mark Carney is upping the GST rebate and renaming it the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit. A family of four will get nearly $1,900 in credits this year and $1,400 in each of the next four years.

But is that enough to counter the problem of skyrocketing grocery prices?

In Canada, five giants control more than 80 per cent of the market – Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart. And while they blame other factors such as supply chain problems for rising prices, their continually rising profits – and profit margins – suggest oligopoly is also at cause.

It’s why the idea of public grocery stores – those owned or operated by government – are gaining cachet. New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani recently rode the promise of establishing public grocery stores to an election victory while here in Canada, federal NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis is making them part of his pitch to voters.

The concept has been criticized, notably by the Globe and Mail, as unworkable, but a group of food experts beg to differ. In a recent paper, they’ve worked out the math and suggest that public grocery stores aren’t just possible in Canada, they’re necessary to provide competition and price discrimination to the oligopoly.

Aaron Vansintjan, policy manager at advocacy group Food Secure Canada, joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how public grocery stores would lead to lower prices for consumers.

Read the paper by Vansintjan and his colleagues here.

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There’s a battle going on over Canada’s crown jewels: Banff and Jasper.

With more than 6 million annual visitors between them, the two national parks are the nation’s biggest tourist attraction – not to mention the symbolic image of natural beauty that many people around the world picture when they think of Canada.

But a single company has rolled up nearly all of the market for paid attractions, including gondolas and boat rides, plus a third of the hotels in Banff. And worse yet, critics say, it’s an American company: Denver-based Pursuit Attractions and Hospitality.

The Competition Bureau investigated the company’s roll-up last year but chose not to take action because of jurisdiction issues with Parks Canada, the federal agency responsible for national parks.

That prompted the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project watchdog to call on the government to intervene by breaking up Pursuit and requiring Parks Canada to consider competition issues in national parks going forward.

Perhaps the biggest supporter of that stance is Adam Waterous, an oil tycoon from Toronto who also owns the Mount Norquay ski resort in Banff and the local train station.

Waterous joins Do Not Pass Go this week to discuss how Pursuit’s monopoly is raising attraction prices and contributing to congestion in the parks. Stuart Back, Pursuit’s chief operating officer for Banff and Jasper, also joins us to refute the charges.

The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project brief on Pursuit’s holdings in Banff and Jasper can be found here.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user rvdbrugge, CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Telecom service complaints continue to skyrocket, with the ombudsman that deals with them reporting a 17-per-cent increase to a new record of 23,647 for the year ended July 31. It’s the third year in a row that complaints have set a record, according to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services.

Wireless services led the way, with television and higher set-top-box fees close behind. Contract disputes, unexpected price increases and promises that weren’t honoured – basically all the things that consumers routinely deal with when it comes to telecom.

It’s a broken record. Canada’s big telecom companies – Bell, Rogers and Telus – are basically the poster children for oligopolies, and therefore oligopolistic behaviour. Absent concrete action by the government to address the industry’s structural failures, it’s a story that’s bound to continue repeating.

There is a small change in this tale, however, and that is that the CCTS now has a new boss. After 17-plus years at its helm, founding commissioner Howard Maker has stepped aside and handed the reins to Josée Bidal Thibault, who becomes the organization’s second head.

Many Canadians still don’t know about what the CCTS does. Thibault joins Do Not Pass Go this week to discuss her predecessor’s legacy, what she hopes to do differently, and what’s behind the explosion in complaints (spoiler: it’s the affordability crisis).

Read the latest CCTS annual report here.

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There’s an amazing (and hilarious) video that’s been doing the rounds for the past few years of a 1993 interview with Nirvana about concert ticket prices. As the above photo of frontman Kurt Cobain illustrates, the band was horrified to learn that some artists were charging upwards of $50 to attend one of their shows. Nirvana, meanwhile, was charging around $25.

Were he still alive, Cobain might be even more horrified of what ticket prices are like today. Natural inflation aside, the crosshairs for why that’s so are squarely falling on one entity – a company that has taken over and become dominant in nearly every aspect of the concert-going experience: Live Nation Entertainment.

Legal and regulatory actions against the company are multiplying rapidly. U.S. antitrust enforcers with the Department of Justice are trying to break the company up while the Federal Trade Commission is suing the company for artificially inflating prices. A host of class-action suits over Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary are proliferating in both the U.S. and Canada. Even the Swifties, still mad over Ticketmaster’s mishandling of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, are continuing their lawsuit.

Add a major new Canadian case to this list. Mirroring the DOJ, the Consumers Council of Canada is asking the Competition Tribunal to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

Filed over the holidays, it’s among the first cases to take advantage of new competition laws in Canada that allow private parties to bring abuse-of-dominance charges in the name of the public interest. We’ve covered the other two – an indie game developer taking on Google’s search deal with Apple, and the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic case against Apple’s App Store – here on Do Not Pass Go. It’s clear that this is a growing wave.

Neil Hartung, a lawyer and director with the Consumers Council, joins the podcast this week to explain why the advocacy group is taking a stand and why it thinks it can actually break up a giant American company. (Read the filing here)

It’s worth noting that literally no one else is covering this movement, which is why it’s amazing that you’re here. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this important work.

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Happy 2026 to all! It’s going to be better than 2025, right? Right?!?

Hopefully so. But before we dive back into how bad things are, let’s start the new year off with a potentially good news story – which is that there’s about to be a new social media player in town, and it’s Canadian.

Gander Social is targeting a first-quarter launch and is aiming to be a kinder, gentler social media platform, which is another way of saying of course it’s Canadian.

And aside from trying to be better than the other bot-infested rage farms out there, Gander is also differentiating itself by laying down sovereign roots: Canadian hosting that’s free from the dictates of any foreign mad king.

The company blew through its crowd-funding goals late last year by raising $1.5 million and has more than 35,000 users waiting to get onto its app, which is borrowing some of the best aspects of BlueSky, TikTok, LinkedIn and others while trying to avoid their worst pitfalls. (Full disclosure: I chipped in some bucks through that crowd-funding effort.)

Chief executive and co-founder Ben Waldman joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how Gander is going to be different from other platforms and whether the world needs another social media app in the first place.

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You’d think that going up against a competitor that holds three-quarters of the market (cough, Cineplex, cough) would be suicide, and you’d generally be right.

But the Revue Cinema in Toronto – Canada’s oldest operating movie theatre – isn’t just holding its own, it’s doing exceptionally well.

The theatre is run by the non-profit Revue Film Society, which this year became a charity, so it’s numbers are public. And the numbers show that revenue and profit are climbing exponentially.

That’s impressive given the non-stop challenges the theatre has faced over its history – not just Cineplex, but also moral panics, pearl-clutching regulators, a pandemic and a hostile landlord.

On this episode of Do Not Pass Go, we dig into how the Revue has persevered and entered what seems to be a new golden age, and we learn how its strategies and executions can be emulated – not just by other independent cinemas, but by all small businesses who are competing against their own respective behemoths.

A special note: I’d like to wish everyone a very happy holiday season! Thanks to all for reading, listening and subscribing through these first few months of our launch. I’m taking a break for the holidays and will be back in early January. We’re just getting started!

And if you’re looking for last-minute gift ideas, why not a paid subscription to Do Not Pass Go? Give the gift of joining the movement against oligopolies!

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Deregulation – it’s synonymous with big business, right? It’s what leads to chemicals in water supplies, dangerous additives in food products and all manner of profit-maximizing tricks that have negative effects on consumers and the environment.

But wait a sec – it’s not quite so simple, says Matthew Chiasson, a senior policy analyst at the Competition Bureau. While deregulation may indeed be a dirty word that is often tied to big companies getting their way, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, with complicated, voluminous red tape strangling small and medium businesses, it may be time to apply it in the name of the public good. It’s time for deregulation’s makeover.

In a recent presentation at the annual Competition Summit in Ottawa, Chiasson took attendees on a cross-Canada tour of how excessive regulation is smothering competition and killing off entrepreneurialism. You can watch that presentation here.

On this episode of Do Not Pass Go, he takes us through a few of those examples and explains how big companies are using regulation as a weapon to take out smaller competitors. With entrepreneurialism levels dropping dangerously, it’s time for Canada to cut the red tape.

And be sure to check out the CBC short doc on how regulators waged war on Jamaican beef patties in Toronto in 1985.

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Donald Trump’s election as U.S. President just over a year ago threw a real wrench into the growing worldwide movement against corporate power and concentration.

If the headlines around a series of recent legal defeats are to be believed, that momentum – at least in the United States – has stalled, if not reversed. Certainly, Netflix’s just-announced $72 billion (U.S.) takeover of Warner Bros. isn’t helping with the narrative. After all, such deals simply aren’t brought forward in an environment that is frosty to mega-mergers.

In Canada, the movement has been subsumed by the bigger issue of the trade war and Trump’s repeated threats of annexation, serious or not. These dangers fester near the top of the public and government consciousness, but the concentration problem and the unaffordability crisis it’s driving continues to bubble just underneath.

Matt Stoller, research director at the non-profit American Economic Liberties Project advocacy group, has a different view.

He doesn’t believe the antitrust and anti-corporate power movement in the United States is in as bad shape as it’s being made out to be. And he believes that Canada and other countries are using the U.S. situation as an excuse to avoid dealing with their own problems.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss Netflix’s big move and what Trump’s impossible-to-predict policy on monopolies mean to the rest of the world.

Check out his Substack newsletter BIG here, and his Organized Money podcast here.

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Back in June, Toronto-based independent game developer Alexander Martin – known as Droqen online – filed a lawsuit against Google, charging that the company was abusing its dominance in search by paying Apple billions of dollars to make its search engine the default on iPhones and iPads.

The case is the first of its kind as Martin is taking advantage of newly introduced amendments to Canada’s competition laws that allow private individuals to make such charges on behalf of the public interest.

Those amendments were put in place by the federal government as a way of enabling ordinary, every-day Canadians to fight back against market abuses by larger, dominant companies.

University of Ottawa law professor Jennifer Quaid, an expert in competition and digital policy, says this case is highly significant because it will determine whether the Competition Tribunal intends to entertain the government’s intentions, or whether it slams the door shut on individual actions like Martin’s.

She joins Do Not Pass Go this week to explain why all eyes are on this David vs. Goliath case.

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Just before spring sprang in 2021, Rogers made a bombshell announcement that shocked corporate Canada and everybody everywhere with a cellphone.

The biggest cable company in the country was buying the second biggest cable company in the country – Shaw Communications – for a whopping $26 billion.

Nobody who wasn’t in on a cut of the action was for this deal. Consumer advocates decried it, customers freaked out and Shaw employees hated it, leading the Competition Bureau to try to block it in court.

At the same time, behind the scenes, company scion Edward Rogers was trying to oust his mother and sisters to take full control of his departed father’s telecom empire. Much of the ensuing drama played out in public, like Canada’s very own version of HBO’s Succession.

The Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, who was on the front lines reporting on both unfolding stories, detailed it all in her 2024 book, Rogers v. Rogers. Her award-winning book is now a one-man play opening this week at the Crow Theatre in Toronto, and in February in Winnipeg, followed likely by stints across the country.

Playwright Michael Healey says the most interesting part of the book, for him, was in how it illustrates the massive political power that uber-rich families like the Rogers’ wield in Canada.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to explain why he chose to orient his play around that aspect of the story – and why Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell, is cast as the hero.

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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.

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Outsider disruptors are making their mark in the United States.

Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, recently beat out the billionaire establishment’s pick to become the new mayor of New York, riding a promise of making daily life more affordable.

Fellow New Yorker and congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders drew giant crowds at rallies this year, where their main message was that billionaires and their oligopolies were destroying democracy.

Here in Canada, the self-styled outsiders aren’t as prolific but they do exist, with Beaches-East York Liberal backbencher Nate Erskine-Smith among them. His message is similar: strong action is needed to break the hold that oligopolies have on Canadians.

Erskine-Smith’s 10 years in government have been colourful. As part of the Industry committee, he’s dressed down telecom CEOs, dropped F-bombs in Parliament and critiqued his own party.

He hosts his own podcast, Uncommons, was briefly in cabinet as Housing minister, and nearly became leader of the Ontario Liberal party – a job he’s considering running for again. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss runaway prices on just about everything, plus the giant mess that is Blue Jays playoff tickets.

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