That's a big question to unpack.
To go back to the report that Vass Bednar, Ana Qarri and I did for ISED, one of the bits of analysis we did was compare cases that were taken in the European Union by the European Commission that dealt with cases of relatively similar conduct to cases also taken by the Competition Bureau in Canada. This included Google, for example, and the self-preferencing of its own shopping service on its website.
Both the Competition Bureau and the European Commission undertook investigations on this conduct. The European Commission found that behaviour to be anti-competitive and fined Google a lot—I can't remember how many billions of euros. In the Canadian investigation, the bureau found that there was no evidence of anti-competitive behaviour.
It raises this question of how the European Commission managed to fine Google billions of euros, yet in Canada, somehow this behaviour isn't anti-competitive. I think a lot of these same trends are occurring across jurisdictions, given the global nature of digital commerce.
The difference that we're seeing in Canada versus other major jurisdictions is that our competition law is not keeping pace with what competition laws elsewhere are able to do. Again, I know it's kind of boring, but this really comes down to specifically how the act understands and evaluates anti-competitive conduct. Moving towards a more rules-based system in which anti-competitive conduct means that it's illegal if you do a certain thing is closer to the European model, whereas in Canada we have this very effects-based approach whereby you need to show heaps of evidence that this particular behaviour is detrimental.
I'll pause there because I know you only have six minutes.