Industry committee  I'd love to. Here's another little plug on work that I've been doing. Vivic Research did some work with Policy Horizons, which is the foresight think tank in the federal government looking at how key technological changes may change the competition landscape. The question you'

Industry committee  Unfortunately, I have nothing to share about that, in part because I just don't have an in-depth understanding of the CRTC process. It's not my wheelhouse; that's not my nerddom.

Industry committee  I spoke about the purpose statement of the Competition Act is because I think that this is actually one of the most critical aspects. I think it's less critical from that legal perspective. The legal importance of the purpose statement is not that critical. What's most important

Industry committee  That's a good question. I think ultimately SMEs have to answer that, but my take on it is that it is in dynamic marketplaces that SMEs can realistically enter the market and achieve some sort of scale in order to be an effective competitor. Something that's really unique about

Industry committee  Yes. The fact of the matter is that among the various stakeholders impacted by competition policy, there are going to be varying needs. A lot of the time, these needs and interests are going to conflict. This is just the reality of the situation we are bringing ourselves into wit

Industry committee  Yes, I think that we need to restrike the balance. It may have been that in the past the balance that we had before was working. I think that this balance is becoming more challenging, especially in the advent of the digital economy, in particular the impact of big data on compan

Industry committee  Thanks.

Industry committee  I think there's a spectrum of solutions. What I'd like to see from the review of the Competition Act is some deeper thinking on what some of these alternatives could be. This is where my point about stakeholders coming together and finding compromise is really important. We need

Industry committee  Yes. The report I keep referring to is a report that I, as well as two other colleagues, Vass Bednar and Ana Qarri, was commissioned to do by ISED.

Industry committee  The nature of the report was an exploration of competition policy in data-driven markets, so it was looking at the impact of big data in competition policy and testing whether our Competition Act is fit to address these issues. This report is available online on the Vivic resea

Industry committee  That's a big question to unpack. To go back to the report that Vass Bednar, Ana Qarri and I did for ISED, one of the bits of analysis we did was compare cases that were taken in the European Union by the European Commission that dealt with cases of relatively similar conduct to

Industry committee  Yes. You hear that a lot from a lot of folks in the competition policy space: “The solution is just more enforcement. We need more money in the bureau. The bureau needs to go out and take more cases.” That's part of the solution, but again, if you don't have the right tools for a

Industry committee  Yes. Yes, I think so, simply put, and I think that in light of the review, there are some opportunities for us to rethink specifically how we plan to use the act to accomplish that. Coming back to the study I spoke about, which I and some colleagues did for ISED, one of the the

Industry committee  Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee. I appreciate the invitation to be here today. My name is Robin Shaban. I'm the senior economist at Vivic Research, which is an economic consulting firm. I'm also a researcher on competition policy in Canada. The focus of my cont

Industry committee  I think quantity is the big factor here. This comes back to the nature of competition law in Canada and the exceptionally high standards that officers have to meet in order to make a successful case. This comes back to some of the remarks I made in the opening statement about ref