There are a couple of different topics. I'll take them in turn.
Bill C-59 does change the limitation period for mergers, specifically as it applies to mergers that are not notified to the commissioner. It extends that period from one year to three years, and I think there is some sense in doing so.
In my experience, bureau investigations for mergers that the bureau believes potentially harm competition or lead to an SPLC, which is the legal standard, take quite a bit of time. There's a lot of information gathering. There's a lot of analysis. There are a lot of submissions going back and forth and gathering of that sort of information. In a case where the limitation period is only one year for a non-notified merger, the bureau may simply not have time to conduct that analysis, which may lead to them rushing a case to the tribunal to try to catch it before the limitation period ends. That may not be the most efficient way to address these issues. They may also simply may run out of time.
It's not clear to me how many of those mergers have been missed, rushed or caught. I'd be interested in hearing about the magnitude of this issue, but to the extent that it is perceived as an issue, I think a three-year period is a sensible extension. It's bringing us back to what the limitation period was prior to the 2009 amendments to the act. We wouldn't want it to go too long because as time goes by, it's much harder to pin effects in a market to the merger itself rather than to other structural considerations. I wouldn't want to extend that, but I think that's a fairly limited and sensible amendment.
To my comments about the merger control thresholds, I don't think any merger control threshold is going to be perfect. If you're setting out asset- and revenue-based thresholds, or even the market share threshold that some jurisdictions have, you're always going to capture some mergers that are not problematic and you're always going to miss some mergers that are problematic.
What I would recommend is taking a look at that and trying to figure out whether our thresholds as they currently exist, the $93-million transaction-size threshold and the $400-million party-size threshold, are capturing many mergers. Are we missing a lot of mergers?
As I said in my statement, I think between 65% and 75% a year of the mergers that are notified to the Competition Bureau are non-complex or are characterized as not having any competition issues. With that number being so high, is there a way we can exclude certain non-problematic mergers from notification?