Finance committee  The bureau does an incredible amount of work in the telecom sector. We're regularly providing competition advice or input to the CRTC on how it can take steps to enhance competition in that sector. We made a huge submission in 2019 to early 2020 on competition in the wireless space.

Finance committee  I have forgotten which former Bank of Canada governor said this in a speech, probably about 10 years ago, but I would just add that competition causes good disinflation. That is a point we've been making for years at the bureau. The more competition we have, the more it will drive this good disinflation.

Finance committee  Absolutely. It's better for productivity, better for innovation and better for consumers in all sorts of ways. It provides multiple dividends to our economy, and we should pay really close attention to it at all times. A key pillar of a capitalist society is having healthy, robust competition.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question, because it's important to clarify that that's not what we're suggesting. We're suggesting that when certain mergers—and it would be a very small percentage of mergers in Canada—get over the thresholds that we set out in our submission to this committee, those certain mergers, which are mergers in highly concentrated industries that make them even more concentrated, are where there should be a structural presumption.

Finance committee  Certainly. A bit of a unique feature in Canada in terms of competition law is carve-outs for certain types of mergers, where, effectively, our role becomes one of adviser. We provide our views to either the Minister of Finance or the Minister of Transport on mergers in those areas that they've deemed worthy of a public interest review, and then the decision on whether to approve the merger is actually in the hands of the respective minister.

Finance committee  Never through the court process, no.

Finance committee  That's correct. We saw what we refer to in the competition world as a “full block”.

Finance committee  I wouldn't describe it as “suing” the bureau. At the end of a litigation process, there's a notion of costs, and that's under the Competition Tribunal Act. The Competition Tribunal determined that the bureau ought to pay approximately $13 million in costs as a result of our attempt to block the merger.

Finance committee  As I set out in my opening, rebuttable structural presumptions are incredibly important and would be a very significant change in terms of merger law in Canada. As I pointed out, it's not some sort of magic thing that we've come up with at the bureau by ourselves. It's an approach they've been taking in the United States for 60 years, including through endorsing it at the level of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Finance committee  Sorry, I missed the tail end of the question. It was something about ITCs.

Finance committee  I'm not familiar enough with the ITC and its impact to comment on that. That's really outside of my lane.

Finance committee  I'm sorry.

Finance committee  Correspondence...?

Finance committee  I believe they responded publicly to the recommendation that the bureau made, yes.

Finance committee  In our submission to Finance, we pointed to specific data that shows the benefit of shopping around, in terms of the interest rate you are going to pay. When you have the ability to go to different institutions and say, “Do you want my business?”, you're going to get competition.