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.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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

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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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As much as it pains me to preempt our regular weekly news roundup given everything that’s happened in the competition space over the past week, I’m also uber-sensitive to sending you – dear subscriber! - more emails than I absolutely have to.

I really want to hear from you as we head into Do Not Pass Go phase 2, “Operation: Let’s Grow This Thing,” so I’m prioritizing the short, short, like really short survey below over dealing with some of the massive news from the past few days. Fear not, we’ll deal with the Live Nation verdict and Cineplex being up for sale soon enough.

In the meantime, please take a few seconds to answer five quick questions. Your answers will help me determine where to go next:

And since we’re here, have a listen to the new one-minute podcast trailer, inserted above, which I’ve created for Spotify visibility purposes. Speaking of the podcast, we’re back this Monday with an exclusive interview with Alexander Martin – aka Droqen – the independent video game developer who sued Google for being a monopoly.

As Billy Red Lyons used to say, don’t you dare miss it!

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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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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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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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