Thank you so much to the committee for inviting me to speak today on this important piece of legislation.

As you said, my name is Keldon Bester. I'm the executive director at CAMP, a think tank dedicated to addressing the harms caused by monopoly and building a more democratic economy in Canada.

We appreciate the opportunity to return to this committee and discuss improvements to Canada's competition law contained in Bill C-59.

Of the changes to the Competition Act in Bill C-59, I'm going to focus my time in two areas—the opening up of private access to the Competition Act as well as improvements to the merger enforcement framework.

Today, in contrast to places like the United States, where individual companies can bring cases against corporations harming competition, in Canada nearly every competition law case originates from the Competition Bureau. Despite the bureau's best efforts, it's an organization with finite resources and it can't have eyes on every aspect of Canada's $2-trillion economy. A more decentralized competition law enforcement framework is more likely to address harms to competition, especially those affecting small and medium-sized businesses.

Accordingly, a robust private access framework is an important complement to the expert work of the Competition Bureau, and Bill C-59 creates the foundation for this by expanding the scope of private access as well as allowing for damages to be claimed for harms caused by anti-competitive conduct.

I will shift to enforcement against harmful mergers. Today the Competition Act downplays the role that market structure and the number and relative size of players in a market play in determining competition. By removing language that rejects market structure as a potential indicator of the likelihood of competitive harm and by adding increases in concentration as a factor in evaluating a merger, Bill C-59 gives our competition law a better defence against mergers in markets where Canadians already face limited choices.

Bill C-59 also addresses a gap in Canada's law that excludes a core component of our economy from the analysis of mergers. We often talk about competition and the benefits to consumers, but Canadians benefit from competitive markets not just as consumers but as entrepreneurs and workers as well. Competition law has long focused on the effects of consolidation on consumers and businesses, but has largely ignored the potential effects on workers.

Thankfully, this is changing. It's changing at home with the addition of wage-fixing and no-poach agreements to our laws, and it's changing abroad with the inclusion of the effects on workers in a recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission challenge against a major merger in the grocery sector.

Bill C-59 is another positive step in this direction. By including effects on workers as a potential factor for review, Bill C-59 gives our competition law a more complete view of the costs of consolidation to Canadians.

In addition to these changes, the committee should consider the ways in which Bill C-59 could go further to protect Canadians in markets where they already face limited choices. When a market is highly concentrated and is characterized by a few large players, further mergers and consolidation are more likely to harm competition at a cost to Canadian consumers, workers and entrepreneurs.

To recognize this, a bias against mergers and markets with few players, often referred to as a “structural presumption”, should be incorporated into Canada's competition law. With a structural presumption, merging parties must work harder to prove that a merger truly is to the benefit of Canadians, and these presumptions can intensify as markets become more concentrated, banning them outright where a single firm dominates a market, for example.

As others have pointed out, Canada's current competition law has repeatedly allowed mergers that create a near or literal monopoly, killing competition and choice for Canadians. This is a consequence of a competition law that does not take market structure seriously, a trend that Bill C-59 has an opportunity to break with.

Bill C-59 is an important component of comprehensive reform to the law that Canadians depend on to protect competition and affordability in all sectors of the economy, and this committee has a chance to strengthen these reforms to truly protect Canadians.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions.

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