Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear before the committee. My name is William Wu. I’m a partner in the competition and foreign investment group at McMillan in Toronto.
It has been almost 15 years since the last major review of Canadian competition law and competition policy. I think everybody here would agree that it is time for another review of Canadian competition law. In this regard, I applaud Minister Champagne for announcing a broad review of the Competition Act. That consultation will need to be broad and inclusive. I think everybody here would agree with that.
With that in mind, it is unclear to me why we need to have all these amendments done through this process right now, when the broader consultation is coming in the next couple of months, I believe. In relation to the wage-fixing and no-poaching provision in particular, in the bill itself that provision is only intended to come into force one year after the BIA receives royal assent. It already contemplates that something more needs to be done to that provision. With that delay already built in, I see no compelling reason why that provision in particular needs to be rushed through this regulatory process right now.
In terms of the substance of the no-poaching and wage-fixing provision, I share Professor Quaid's concern that using criminal law to deal with this issue may not be appropriate. Looking at the wage-fixing and no-poaching agreement, I think we can really conceive of it as a competition law issue or as a labour and employment law issue. To the extent that it is a competition law issue, the concern would be that employers are agreeing not to compete in their hiring or compensation practices. If that is a concern, I would say that using criminal law to create a per se prohibition is too blunt an instrument.
There are a lot of legitimate and pro-competitive reasons why employers might want to talk to each other about their hiring and compensation practices. I can speak to those in more detail later. It is not obvious at all that these types of agreements will always cause harm to employees by depriving them of higher wages or job opportunities. In that context, given that there can be harmful no-poaching and wage-fixing agreements and there can be legitimate ones as well, using the existing civil reviewable practices provision in section 90.1 of the act is an appropriate competition law framework to address these issues.
To the extent that the concern is the protection of workers, in particular low-wage workers, that is traditionally within the ambit of provincial labour and employment law and less of a competition law issue. I would submit that labour and employment law and labour and employment law regulators are better equipped and have better expertise and experience in dealing with those issues.
I will stop here for now, given the short time today. I would be happy to answer questions. I do have other views on other amendments, particularly the drip pricing provision, which I can speak to during questions.