No party wants to be seen as soft on “big business” but that is a bad reason to pass potentially harmful, counterproductive competition policy legislation.
The recent federal budget was widely panned – in particular by the entrepreneurial class – for its proposal to raise the capital gains inclusion rate. As it turns out, “soak the rich” might sound like clever politics (it’s not) but it’s definitely a poor narrative if your goal is to incentivize and encourage risk-taking and investment.
But while this damaging measure in the federal budget has at least drawn plenty of public ire, other harmful legislative changes are afoot that are getting virtually no attention at all. They’re contained in Bill C-59 – the omnibus bill still wending its way through Parliament to enact measures contained in last fall’s economic statement – and consist of major proposed amendments to Canada’s Competition Act. The lack of coverage and debate on these changes is all the more concerning given that, if enacted, they could have a long-term negative impact on our economy comparable to the capital gains inclusion rate hike.
Worst of all, the most potentially damaging changes weren’t even in the original bill, but were brought forward by the NDP at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, and are lifted directly from a previous submission made to the committee by the Commissioner of Competition himself. In effect, they would change competition law to put a new onus on businesses to prove a negative: that having a large market share isn’t harmful to consumers.
MPs on the committee have acknowledged they don’t really understand the changes – they involve a “concentration index” described as “the sum of the squares of the market shares of the suppliers or customers” – but the government itself previously cast doubt on the need for this additional change. It’s obvious that a lot of politics are at play here: no party wants to be seen as soft on “big business.” But this is about much more than “big business.” It’s about whether we want to enshrine in law unfounded, and potentially very harmful, assumptions about how competition operates in the real world.
The changes in question are what are known in legal circles as “structural presumptions” – which, as the name implies, involve creating presumptions in law based on market “structure” – in this case, regarding the concentration level of a given market. Presumptions in law matter, because they determine which side in a competition dispute – the regulatory authority, or the impugned would-be merging parties – bears the burden of proof.
So why is this a bad idea? There are at least three reasons.
First of all, the very premise is faulty: most economists consider concentration measures alone (as opposed to market power) to be a poor proxy for the level of competition that prevails in a given market. In fact, competition for customers often increases concentration.
This may strike most people as counterintuitive. But because robust competition often leads to one company in particular offering lower prices, higher quality, or more innovative products, those who break from the pack tend to attract more customers and increase their market share. In this respect, higher concentration can actually signal more, rather than less, competition.
Second, structural presumptions for mergers are not codified in the US or any other developed country other than Germany (and even then, at a 40 percent combined share rather than 30 percent). In other words, at a time when Canada’s economy is suffering from the significant dual risks of stalled productivity growth and net foreign investment flight, the amendments proposed by the NDP would introduce one of the most onerous competition laws in the world.
There is a crucial distinction between parliamentarians putting such wording into legislation – which bind the courts – and regulatory agencies putting them in enforcement guidelines, which leave courts with a degree of discretion.
Incorporating structural presumptions into legislation surpasses what most advanced economies do and could lead to false negatives (blocking mergers that would, if permitted, actually benefit consumers), chill innovation (as companies seeking to up their game in the hopes of selling or merging are deterred from even bothering), and result in more orphaned Canadian businesses (as companies elect not to acquire Canadian operations on global transactions).
Finally, the impact on merger review will not be a simplification but will likely just fetter the discretion and judgment of the expert and impartial Competition Tribunal in determining which mergers are truly harmful for consumers and give more power to the Competition Bureau, the head of which is appointed by the federal Cabinet. Although the Competition Bureau is considered an independent law enforcement agency, it must still make its case before a court (the Tribunal, in this case).The battleground at the Tribunal will shift from focusing on the likely effect of the merger on consumers to instead entertaining arguments between the Bureau’s and companies’ opposing arguments about defining the relevant market and shares.
Even if, after further study, the government decided that rebuttable structural presumptions are desirable, C-59 already repeals subsection 92(2) of the Competition Act, which allows the Tribunal to develop the relevance of market shares through case law – a far better process than a blanket rule in legislation. Nothing prevents the Bureau from incorporating structural presumptions as an enforcement screen for mergers in its guidelines, which is what the United States has done for decades, rather than putting strict (and therefore inflexible) metrics into statute and regulations.
No one disputes that Canada needs a healthy dose of competition in a wide range of sectors. But codifying dubious rules around mergers risks doing more harm than good. In asking for structural presumptions to be codified, the Competition Bureau is missing the mark. Most proposed mergers that will get caught by these changes should in fact be permitted on the basis that consumers would be better off – and the uncertainty of being an extreme outlier on the global stage in terms of competition policy will create yet another disincentive to start and grow businesses in Canada.
This is the opposite of what Canada needs right now. Rather than looking for ill-advised shortcuts that entangle more companies in litigation and punt disputes about market definition rather than effects to the Tribunal, the Bureau should be focusing on doing its existing job better: building evidence-backed cases against mergers that would actually harm Canadians.
Aaron Wudrick is the domestic policy director at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
