I agree with you that we cannot ignore egregious behaviour. It's just that one has to remember that criminal enforcement, especially in the competition space, is rare. It mostly proceeds through the immunity and leniency program, and these cases end up in deals. Competition offences are not eligible for remediation agreements, the first of which was negotiated just yesterday in Montreal, but there is a workaround that has been developed under subsection 34(2).
If people are imagining that they are going to see executives in handcuffs going to jail, that's not going to happen in Canada. It has never happened. However, I worry that if we hang our hat on that and we don't do the hard work of talking to the provinces and figuring out how we create a framework in which we support workers in this new economy, this is just going to sit there on the books. I worry about criminal provisions that are just added, because everyone seems to dump big, complex problems into the criminal law, and then they get upset when it doesn't work.
That's my frustration. However, I absolutely agree that some egregious behaviour could be dealt with. I worry about how this provision has been structured. I think you need to ask some hard questions about whether the prosecution service has some opinions on this, because I suspect they do.