Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As mentioned, my name is Alexa Gendron-O'Donnell. I'm an Associate Deputy Commissioner at the Competition Bureau. I head up our Economic Analysis Branch. I am pleased to appear today before the committee studying Apple iPhone performances and their batteri

Industry committee  Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, unless something is already public, we unfortunately can't speak to whether or not we have something ongoing in the space. I think all of us refer back to our work on big data and some of the other things I mentioned just as examples of how t

Industry committee  The Competition Act certainly applies to companies that operate in Canada. There are provisions there, particularly when I think about our deceptive marketing provisions, that make it such that the person you are—quote, unquote—“deceiving” does not have to be in Canada, but as so

Industry committee  Within our act, we have deceptive marketing provisions, and maybe I'll tell you a bit about those. We have civil provisions and we also have criminal provisions. In our civil provisions, we're looking at representations to the public that are false or misleading in a material r

Industry committee  Unfortunately, whether or not we have received complaints and the number of complaints is also confidential information. However, as you mentioned, our bureau accepts complaints and anyone can call us and report their concerns.

Industry committee  Again, without being able to speak to the specifics of this case, in a general sense, the analysis that we undertake really depends on the part of the act that we are looking at. For example, in an abuse of dominance matter we are certainly looking to see whether the company is d

Industry committee  I will say from a general perspective that we have a lot of co-operation with our counterpart agencies, as I mentioned in my opening remarks. Again, I can't speak to this case but we have various MOUs with all of these different agencies that allow us to speak with them, if it's

Industry committee  When we, for example, negotiate consent agreements, that can take a large variety of forms. I'll point to a previous case we had with Telus where they committed to restitute up to $7.34 million to affected consumers. The form that penalty takes is very case-specific, depending on

Industry committee  Part of what I will do is provide you with the link to our fintech report for a bit more detail. The budget spoke about looking at things like open banking and spoke to fintech more generally. That is what I was referring to. Fintech to us is a really important topic, as it's s

Industry committee  That's right. The suggestions are provided broadly, and really what we want to make sure is that there are both enough regulations, such that people are comfortable using this kind of new technology, but not so much that we're chilling potential innovation. Really, the report is

Industry committee  We think the budget started us down a path that is promising.

Industry committee  As I mentioned before, Canada does have both civil and criminal provisions in its act. In terms of things like deceptive marketing and abuse of dominance, we do have quite strong provisions already, even if they are not identical to those of our counterparts. Obviously, the chang

Industry committee  The laws in Canada that we enforce don't often name specific types of conduct. We tend to have laws that are broader, for example, against deceptive marketing, against abuse of dominance. I think I described them a bit earlier, so you have a sense of what they cover. The idea is

Industry committee  As I said before, the Competition Bureau doesn't hold the policy function with respect to its laws. The department would be the one to speak to you. I'm not in a position to comment on that.

Industry committee  As I mentioned previously, we keep information, including complaints, confidential. We are a law enforcement agency, so we conduct our work in confidentiality. That's written into our act and that's also our procedure. We do that to maintain the integrity of our investigations un