Thank you for the question.
In plain language, the way the act currently thinks about collaboration is traditionally a collaboration that potentially is between a competitor and a competitor, and that collaboration potentially harms competition and therefore is within the reach of the bureau. What our change does in Bill C-56 is that it expands the concept of what could be a collaboration to not just those that are between competitors and competitors, but those that are between competitors and someone else in the value chain that actually potentially are going to impact competition.
The case that has often been used, or the example in the grocery sector that has often been cited, has been that it might not be two grocers getting together to collaborate to significantly lessen competition, but potentially a grocer and someone else in the value chain, like their landlord. When the grocer signs a lease agreement, they specifically and explicitly state that part of the lease agreement is that the landlord will not rent any other part of the premises—let's imagine that it's a strip mall—to anybody else who competes or sells in any vertical of the grocery store.
This isn't just preventing another grocery store. In many cases, this is actually saying, if they run a grocery store in this strip mall, you can't have a bakery, because a bakery sells baked goods and we sell baked goods. You actually can't have a hardware store, potentially, if they have homeware items.
What essentially this would do is expand the scope for the bureau to be able to look at those collaborations, deem whether or not they are significantly lessening competition and take action as appropriate.