Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here. It's important to have conversations with the Competition Bureau.
We're hearing the word “imbalance” a lot. Your position is to potentially look into the abuse of that dominant position—that's what you said—to shape this legislation that we've put forward and one piece of legislation that's passed.
There were many consultations. I think there were about 400 submissions and a dozen round tables. It took about 18 months. It was focused and targeted, and we got consensus from many perspectives, including industry, academics and advocate groups.
In my understanding, one of the barriers that the commission faced in your investigation of concentration in the grocery sector was your limited ability to compel documents from grocery chains as part of your probes.
Bill C-56 will give the Competition Bureau the ability to do that, as well as give more market study powers and subpoena powers to compel those large grocery chains to provide more information, which is going to address the lack of transparency that we're seeing from these grocery giants. They submitted reports and information to us with various degrees of transparency and thoroughness.
How can the new powers that you have help your office to issue stronger and more informed recommendations and decisions?