The Conservative leader said the planned combination “lets the biggest bank in Canada gobble up 800,000 customers without having to offer those customers anything for their business.” (The Logic)

Talking point: The Competition Bureau reported in September that with the sector already heavily concentrated, letting the biggest bank in the country buy the seventh-biggest won’t result in a “substantial lessening or prevention of competition.” Poilievre said the bureau found that HSBC is a “rate disruptor” in Canadian mortgages, to customers’ benefit. In fact, the bureau reported that HSBC has seen itself that way, while the evidence is that the bigger banks mostly respond to each other, not smaller players. The Bank Act gives Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland broad power to approve or reject bank mergers, which her predecessor Paul Martin used in the late 1990s to stop RBC and BMO, and then CIBC and TD, from combining.