Finance committee  That's a good question. I don't know if I know the most concerning ones, but one I always come back to as the foundation of the economy is the banking sector. I think that in the past 20 years we have acted to preserve at least some competition there. When I think about a market that feeds the rest of the economy, I think a competitive banking sector is one of the most important ones, if not the most important.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Well, what did we get for ignoring structure over the past 40 years? The C.D. Howe Institute put out a piece saying that of the eight contested mergers in Canadian history, seven resulted in market shares of over 60% and four of them resulted in literal or near monopolies. In the past 40 years, we've ignored structure, and it has cost us.

Finance committee  CAMP has put forward a 30% market share for a rebuttable presumption, which is to say that companies are free to make arguments as to why this is actually good for Canadians. At extreme levels of concentration, where a merger would result in one firm having 60% of a single market, we believe that should be banned outright.

Finance committee  Well, I think it flips how we think about mergers as something necessarily either benign or beneficial and instead focuses on how, if we are going to have more consolidation in Canada's already oligopoly markets, the job should be for the merging parties to sell Canadians and to sell our legal system on why we should allow it, as opposed to the bureau's much more whack-a-mole approach, just because of the structure of it, of taking on one or two big cases every couple of years.

Finance committee  The Competition Bureau is a department of the Minister of Industry, so there is a link there. I think the bureau takes its independence seriously. However, it is within a department, unlike the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, as an agency of Parliament.

Finance committee  In addition to that, the law includes a number of ways in which the minister can direct the bureau to pursue either a market study or an inquiry. That was the case even before these reforms.

Finance committee  I don't know if we're an outlier. It's difficult to compare. The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice in the U.S. are direct political appointees. The Federal Trade Commission has a commission structure that is explicitly political. It will have so many Democrats and so many Republicans.

Finance committee  As we enter a new generation of competition law in Canada, I think we need to look at the institutions—both the bureau and the tribunal. If the tribunal is going to be dealing with more cases under a more active law, we need to think about whether it needs more resources or if we need a fundamentally different structure.

Finance committee  Certainly, and it's a great credit to Bill C-59 for really narrowing that window. I think it not only discourages the bureau from taking cases, but, somewhat perversely, discourages the bureau from taking cases against the biggest companies, those with the biggest legal firepower, and says that if you want to take a less risky approach, we can maybe go after more medium-sized and smaller players.

Finance committee  That's our view.

Finance committee  This bill does make improvements, as I mentioned, in pulling in structure as something that we should pay attention to. The law doesn't totally ignore it, but it really deprecates it. If we really want to guarantee that we don't have another Rogers-Shaw or another RBC-HSBC type of merger, we need to take that next step and really encode that bias against further concentration.

Finance committee  Focusing on the remedies piece, which I think is the most important part, right now in Canada if we intervene in a merger, which we do very rarely—in less than 1% of mergers—the standard is not to restore competition: It's to make the reduction in competition slightly less. In the U.S. and in the EU, they put the bar much higher and say, “If we're going to intervene against a merger, things should be at least as good as they were before for citizens.”

Finance committee  I don't have a prepared text, but I think a phrase that I'd really like to see in there is “fair competition”. It would be about competition that benefits Canadians as consumers, workers and entrepreneurs, as you said, as opposed to the efficiency that we've seen—I think mistakenly—drive us towards oligopoly.

Finance committee  There's a laundry list, of course, but we focus on the big areas in which there's still room for improvement. As I mentioned, on the merger side, it's taking that structure seriously and ensuring that our oligopoly situation doesn't continue to backslide for Canadians. The second would be on the abuse of dominance side.