Canadian Heritage committee  We would look at whether there are barriers to entry, and how high those are. Generally for media, I think they'd be less than a grain operation where you need strong distribution and a lot of infrastructure. We do take each case as it comes. We drank the purple Kool-Aid that c

Canadian Heritage committee  I guess I'd speak from the merger perspective. We're looking at whether it's going to be negatively impacted by a particular transaction. Generally, we're looking at aspects on which the parties compete. Those would be things like service, quality, price, whether we're going to

Canadian Heritage committee  I'll say what I've said before. My opinion is formed on the basis of each transaction as it comes. Market shares in and of themselves are not a focus of ours. It is a sign that we will probably look a little deeper when we're looking at a transaction. It's likely that we will be

Canadian Heritage committee  We did an investigation into Google; it wrapped up in April 2016. We looked into six practices about which we had received complaints. Our investigation took three years. We consulted hundreds of witnesses. Basically, we found evidence for one problem for which we came up with a

Canadian Heritage committee  We're evaluating the competitive dynamics of an industry at the time that a particular transaction is taking place. That allows the framework of the Competition Act to live, so to speak, in the real world of competition as it's occurring now. What we look at with respect to merge

Canadian Heritage committee  I can speak to what we've seen in recent transactions with respect to digital media, in particular with respect to local news and local voices. What we see there, in particular, is newspaper transactions, the Sun Media/Postmedia merger, the Transcontinental/QMI a couple of years

Canadian Heritage committee  Internet is going up, but it hasn't become a substitute for advertising in local media. We've seen it increasing, but it's still on the margins. It's not part of that product market that advertisers are looking for. What they've told us in those transactions is that they continue

Canadian Heritage committee  I guess I would speak to that. We have our merger regulation in review. That's really geared towards making sure that media concentration with respect to a particular transaction is not leading to increased prices for consumers. We also have Julien's shop, which is the competit

Canadian Heritage committee  I think we look at each transaction on a case-by-case basis. We generally look at 250 merger transactions across all industries in the run of a year, so we are guided by what the competitive dynamics are in the particular industry based on the evidence that we obtain from supplie

Canadian Heritage committee  Okay. I have one last one. The Sun-Postmedia merger we reviewed in October 2014. In that examination we interviewed over 50 market participants, examined thousands of documents, compelled significant data and documents from the merging parties, and engaged an independent econom

Canadian Heritage committee  My apologies.

Canadian Heritage committee  I would just answer that by saying that we're a law enforcement agency and our mandate is under the Competition Act. It is to look at the economic impact of the transaction. For that transaction, we did a full deep dive. We interviewed all the market participants: competitors, su

Canadian Heritage committee  In that particular transaction, we also had significant concerns. As a result of that, they had to divest 10 of the channels that they were proposing to acquire. In addition, the CRTC examined that transaction and had issues with the radio broadcasting side. We accepted the resol

Canadian Heritage committee  Good morning, Madam Chair. I am the Competition Bureau's senior deputy commissioner responsible for the mergers and monopolistic practices branch. I will begin my remarks by providing some context about the Competition Bureau and its mandate. Then, I will move on to our role as