Agriculture committee  To be honest with you on that question, we've just had a very significant reform of our legislation about six weeks ago. And that's probably the most significant reform that has happened in the past 20 years. In my view, it has made some very significant improvements to the Compe

Agriculture committee  Sorry, did you say you had two questions?

Agriculture committee  To be honest with you, I can't speak to the specific circumstances around those comments or potash. I didn't come here today to talk about specific matters and specific companies, because then I'll get a phone call shortly thereafter from them on these topics. It is important fo

Agriculture committee  I always like to know the second question, so I don't trap myself with the first one.

Agriculture committee  It's post-closing. That is among the available remedies that exist under the merger provisions of the act, not abuse of dominance. The first question is a good one, about how we gather this information and do these sorts of things. In the XL-Lakeside transaction, as we mentioned

Agriculture committee  That raises an interesting issue, and perhaps just interesting to competition policy folks like myself, but when you're thinking about the civil provisions of our act, getting away from the criminal cartel stuff that we were talking about before, you really have, in a sense, two

Agriculture committee  Really your question raises issues that relate to the abuse of dominance provisions of the Competition Act. Let me speak about the “fangs” for a moment. Recently, as I mentioned, Bill C-10 enacted a change to that provision to allow the tribunal to award administrative and moneta

Agriculture committee  Those types of situations come to us in a number of different ways. It can be through complaints. It can be from our own review of industries. It can be based on our own knowledge of that. An example would be back to the Canada Pipe case I was discussing earlier, which really dea

Agriculture committee  The second question addresses what remedies are available under the merger provisions of the Competition Act. I don't want to leave you with a misimpression. The $10 million administrative monetary penalty we're talking about is in relation to abuse of dominance, not merger. Ou

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that question. I'm going to answer certain parts of it and ask my colleagues to speak to some specifics of other aspects of it. Obviously we are concerned about the temporary closure of the plant in Moose Jaw. We have asked for more information from XL in order to

Agriculture committee  In terms of the steps that are available to us, we have a period of time following the closing of the transaction where we're able to seek a remedy in respect of any transaction that has the result of substantially lessening or preventing competition. What my colleague is referri

Agriculture committee  Let me just talk for a moment again on the issue of the grocery stores. I'm not sure if there's a broader point if you're asking about “fangs”, if that was the word you used--

Agriculture committee  Absolutely.

Agriculture committee  I should just clarify that the administrative monetary penalties were just introduced approximately a month and a half ago, so there are no cases in that short period of time in which the administrative monetary penalties were issued. But certainly there are examples of remedies

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that question. I'll try my best to address this issue in a broader context. I should confess, I'm here in my capacity as the head of the Mergers Branch, to speak to mergers in the agriculture sector, so there are certainly limitations on my knowledge in specific ar