Good morning. I'm Matt Hatfield, and I'm the executive director of Open Media, a non-partisan grassroots community of nearly 270,000 people in Canada who work for an open, affordable and surveillance-free Internet. I'm joining you from the unceded territory of the Sto:lo, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam nations.

I confess that I'm at a disadvantage in textual analysis compared to my fellow witnesses, whom we've just heard. I'm neither an economist nor a lawyer. Consider me a representative of ordinary Canadians in the room, reminding you of why this all matters. In that light, I'm very pleased to see this committee continue its work to strengthen our competition laws by studying Bill C-352. Bill C-56 and Bill C-59 have made a strong start to getting competition right in our country, but alone they are not sufficient to rebalance our laws to truly serve Canadians first.

Canadians do not believe that our competition laws are serving them. Last year, we conducted a Mainstreet Research poll that found that nearly 70% of Canadians believe our existing competition laws are designed to serve the interests of oligopolies more than those of ordinary Canadians. That was not a partisan finding. Majorities of Canadians who vote for each party felt that our laws serve large corporations ahead of them. A full 92% of Canadians believe that Canada's extremely high market concentration in many sectors is a key driver of our very high consumer prices. Again, there was a very small partisan difference.

Within telecommunications, OpenMedia's specialty, we have decades of evidence from across the country that prices track the number of competitors in a market. Prices go down when there's a third or fourth provider, and they spike when a company leaves the market. Put briefly, no matter who you come to this committee to represent, your constituents and your voters are looking to you to deeply reform the rules of the game in Canada to drive more competition between companies and more fairness for Canadian consumers.

Supporting Bill C-352 will demonstrate your commitment to better market competition. Placing the onus on large companies to demonstrate that their merger is unlikely to harm competition; giving the bureau expanded power to study what's going wrong in a sector and recommending how to improve it; and providing more meaningful penalties for subverting competition law and longer periods to undo damaging mergers are all smart, proportional proposals that we believe will meaningfully improve competition in Canada in ways that ordinary Canadians will feel in their daily lives.

Strengthened presumptions against mergers in already overly concentrated sectors in particular will be a very powerful tool against deals like the Rogers-Shaw buyout, which this committee condemned and which was soon followed by price hikes for many of Rogers' mobile consumers. With Bill C-352 passed, the Competition Act will continue to afford large businesses many opportunities to defend and successfully carry out mergers and buyouts that are in the public interest.

When I wrote my opening remarks, I expected that some witnesses would tell you that this set of amendments would place some of Canada's largest companies on the defensive when they contemplate buying each other out, uncertain that a merger and acquisition strategy will succeed. I know that some have. That's good. They should be on the defensive for a change. Businesses out-competing each other through vigorous market competition is much healthier for our economy and Canadian consumers than businesses solving their competition problems by financing buyouts and mergers and by reaping monopoly rewards for it. Some flexibility for the bureau and tribunal to examine different models of defining a market, for example, is a good thing, in OpenMedia's view, for better enforcing competition.

For decades, we've deferred to a very narrow view of how to define markets and identify competition problems. That has served us very poorly. Many democracies have gotten competition wrong over the last four decades, assuming that competition mostly sustained itself and that disruption would always come from market leaders. That has not happened. Competition is very powerful, but it requires an active and intervening regulator to sustain itself, particularly in sectors with naturally high investment costs, like telecommunications and tech. Canada has had the weakest competition laws in the OECD for many decades, and Canadians are paying proportional costs for that. From telecommunications to groceries to housing, we're a world leader in consumer costs, but we're far from a world leader in the quality of what we receive or the incomes we have to pay for it.

We believe that Bill C-352's remaining amendments that are not yet passed are modest and proportional to Canada's competition problems. If what's left seems bold to you, I encourage you to be bold. The scale of Canada's problems does not call for small, edge reforms. Nearly 24,000 Canadians have endorsed OpenMedia's anti-monopoly charter, which calls for our government to permanently block the formation of larger oligopolies in Canada. Bill C-352's strong presumption against mergers would be a powerful tool to this end. On behalf of our community, I ask you to support and pass it.

I welcome your questions.

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