Yes. The fact of the matter is that among the various stakeholders impacted by competition policy, there are going to be varying needs. A lot of the time, these needs and interests are going to conflict. This is just the reality of the situation we are bringing ourselves into with the review of the act.
The reason I bring that up is that in competition policy circles and among experts, there is a desire to, or belief that we can, sanitize competition policy and remove it from this political context. As I explained in my remarks, that's not actually the case, because if we ignore the reality that there are conflicting interests at play in light of the review, we're just kicking the can down the road. We're passing this problem on to other policy areas. I think this passing the buck can be more expensive to government and ultimately to taxpayers.
Per the example I gave, how much more expensive would it be for ISED to deliver more grants or more supporting programs to small and medium-sized businesses? Could some of that be offset with better competition law and better enforcement of that law?
The great thing about competition law is that in a lot of ways it's pretty inexpensive. All you need to do—well, it's not this simple—is create legislation and develop an enforcement agency. A lot of the mechanism is simply the threat of enforcement. There's a deterrence effect. Deterrence is pretty inexpensive as far as policy interventions go. It's a lot more inexpensive than writing cheques to small businesses or consumers in the form of tax and transfer.
This is the point I'm making. There are intersections in the interests of the stakeholders who will be at the table, and we need to reckon with that and acknowledge it, because it has implications for how competition law intersects with other policy interventions at the federal and, I would also say, provincial levels.