I'll try to respond briefly.
Mergers are something that has been modified over the past couple of bills. What I worry about is that we're doing things that make good sound bites but don't necessarily fit into an overall structure.
One of my worries is that we repealed the efficiencies defence. I was one of the people who were not fans of the defence. However, we still have to think about how we evaluate pro-competitive benefits because mergers do provide pro-competitive benefits, depending on the circumstances. We've just left that silent, along with a bunch of other things that were associated with section 96 that I don't think are going to go away. We also have added a whole bunch of new things. There's been an attempt to try to put some structural guardrails around merger reviews, so market share now can be taken into account and so on.
However, we haven't really stepped back and asked what the right levels are. Should we have structural rules, and what are they? What's appropriate for Canada? I worry that the intentions are good, but that we haven't necessarily had the time, quite frankly, to seriously think about what a restructured merger law would do that would help us, given our economy, given the tendency towards concentration. What do we do? I think we need to think about that. I don't think we've done enough yet. I worry that what's happened is that we've tinkered with a bunch of things and that it's not going to produce results.
I don't think that mergers are the only area that's important. I do think that dealing with practices where market power is used for anti-competitive reasons also needs to be addressed—and there are a bunch of flavours of that kind of conduct; we call them reviewable practices. I really am asking myself this in looking at the way the reform was done: Why don't we take these things apart, take a look, and say what bothers us about the abuse of economic power? Why are we actually parsing it into little categories? Why don't we rethink and start over? I think that abuse of a dominant position—that, more generally, abuse of economic power—should be rethought, particularly with the digital reality.
Finally, I do think that although some of the aspects of deceptive marketing are interesting, we need to think about that, too. Greenwashing is a big issue. Does it all need to be done by competition, or could it be done in other areas? We have to think about how those pieces fit together.
Those are some of the things that are high-level. I suppose the other small thing I would say is that we're adding a lot of private rights of action that go to the tribunal, but no one's talking about the tribunal. How is it resourced? Right now, it's a roster of a few Federal Court judges and lay members. Who are those lay members? Maybe we need to diversify the skills. We're not thinking about that.