I appreciate the question.
If you go back even before the legislative amendments in budget 2022, you can look at the fact that the government has made a significant resource addition to the bureau. By providing a significant injection of new funds to empower the bureau to be well placed and fit for purpose, one of the things the bureau has done with that, for instance, is that it has created a digital markets group that can more specifically look at the way in which technology and data-driven parts of the economy are actually understood from a competition perspective, because they run very differently, in many ways, than traditional industries do.
The 2022 changes to the budget created a number of important foundational elements. It took a look at penalties, for instance. It made penalties uncapped in a number of key zones and created essentially very important consensus-based items that were the foundation for early reform.
Bill C-56 then targets three core areas, and it is now proposed, under motion 30, to include at least one more, which would tackle things like the efficiencies defence, which, as the minister noted, right now allows for projected efficiencies on the basis of the collaboration to potentially outweigh the significant lessening of competition and allow a merger to proceed. Then, what is in the fall economic statement takes that even further, and what M-30 proposes is much similar.
Right now, for instance, abuse of dominance is one of the more challenging things to actually enforce against. Can you prove that someone really big in the market actually had intent to use their bigness, if I can put it that way, to harm competition, and that there are then effects of that in the market, as in you can prove that they've lessened competition? What M-30 suggests is that, for those purposes, that test should now be an “or”. You have to be big, but in order to be able to potentially get a prohibition order from the bureau, it's either intents or effects—not necessarily both.
Other really important changes are these killer acquisitions, for instance. It lengthens the period of time that the bureau has to review a merger. Oftentimes when a small company is being acquired—we can think of some in the tech space, for instance—we didn't even know at the time of the merger that it was going to be really foundational or important. Right now, there's a time limit on the degree to which the bureau can actually look at those mergers, so it will extend it to three years to allow for the bureau to be able to look back, take appropriate action and bring action to bear, if necessary.
In sum, what the overall effort has done is that it has tried to tackle the necessary resources, the fit-for-purpose regulator and then a series of legislative amendments that correspond with the kind of market dynamism that I think the government has suggested it seeks.