OTTAWA — In a June 3 meeting of the House of Commons industry committee, Conservative MP Ryan Williams and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh fought bitterly over which of them is the fiercer foe of big companies.

“You’re not standing up for Canadians,” Williams said. “Canadians feel that you’ve sold them out—”

“That’s not at all the case,” Singh interrupted.

“—they feel that you’re not standing up to the corporations. They feel that you’re not going to do it,” Williams plowed on. “People only trust when actions match words.”

For Singh, the leader of a social democratic party whose political rhetoric has targeted the “ultra-rich” for years, his wasn’t a surprising position.

But the rhetoric from Williams and other Conservatives gives some insight into one way a Conservative government might approach regulating the Canadian economy.

The Conservatives have joined the New Democrats in the populist fight against big swaths of corporate Canada—so much so that Williams, the Tory critic assigned specifically to competition, can go after Singh for not pressing the governing Liberals hard enough on it. When bills on competition come to votes (as several have), nobody holds them up or even substantially challenges them.

Some of Canada’s biggest businesses do not like it.

“Parliament’s effort to punish large businesses is a punishment for success. And this is very much at cross purposes with each of the political parties’ desire to grow the economy and create good jobs,” said Trevor Neiman, the Business Council of Canada’s vice-president of policy.

The council includes executives from most of the national parties’ recent targets: banks, airlines, telcos, insurance companies.

Big companies collectively employ more people than any other segment of the economy and they pay more taxes, Neiman said. Economic data indicates they’re the most productive and slightly more likely to create new products and adopt new processes.

In the meeting where Singh and Williams fought, the setup was unusual. Singh was testifying and taking questions on his own private member’s bill, C-352, which is about giving the Competition Bureau more power to stop corporate mergers across sectors. Williams got to question Singh, and used the chance to criticize the NDP for propping up a Liberal government that’s allowed Rogers to buy Shaw. Singh shot back that the Tories are too friendly with grocery magnates. Around and around they went.

The Conservative critic did not respond to The Logic’s request for an interview, but he’s clearly not gone rogue: last fall, his party leader, Pierre Poilievre, demanded the Liberal government stop RBC’s acquisition of HSBC Canada, using language he might have borrowed from Tommy Douglas: “Will the government side with consumers and homebuyers, instead of corporate oligarchs and big banks, and block this merger?”

(The government would not block that merger, ultimately.)

In a January speech in the Commons, Williams rhymed off industries he said demonstrate Canada’s “monopoly problem”: banks, cellphone providers, airlines, grocery stores, insurance companies, beer.

“Our monopoly problem means that consumers lose with higher fees, less choice, higher mortgage rates, lower investment, lower productivity, fewer start-ups and, more importantly, really bad service, lower wages and low wealth inequality,” he said.

There’s a genuine issue here that the parties cannot ignore, said competition lawyer Elisa Kearney in an interview: inflation has been high and paying bills hurts. 

“Reform of the [Competition Act] is a punching bag for all political parties to say, ‘Look, we’re doing something,’ even if that something is not really going to directly impact prices or ease the cost-of-living pressures that Canadians are feeling,” she said.

Kearney chairs the C.D. Howe Institute’s competition policy council and the Canadian Bar Association’s competition law section. She has worked for Shaw (when Rogers was buying it), Alstom (when it was buying Bombardier Transportation), Wattpad (when South Korea’s Naver was buying it) and Google. She has also represented the Commissioner of Competition and advised the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. 

“The catalyst of mergers in the telecom industry and allegations of both bread-price fixing and salary-wage fixing in the grocery sector have made it very easy for Canadians to at least think they understand what’s going on,” Kearney said.

The Competition Bureau reported last year that from 2000 to 2020, Canada’s most concentrated industries became even more so, the biggest firms faced less challenge from smaller ones, existing industries saw fewer new entrants—and both price markups and profits increased.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne launched a review of the Competition Act in early 2022.

“From that initial comprehensive review and the consultation process, things have very quickly gone off the rails,” said Neiman of the business council.

The major parties have put bill after bill on the parliamentary agenda to make mergers and acquisitions more difficult and increase the power of the Competition Bureau; the criticism the Liberals face from opposition parties on both left and right isn’t that their moves on competition are wrongheaded, but that they don’t go far enough, fast enough.

Previous versions of the Conservative party have been aligned with big business. The current one, say observers, doesn’t seem interested in what corporate Canada thinks. 

“I’m involved in C.D. Howe, and I’m involved in the Canadian Bar Association, and no one from the Conservative party has called me or any of us to say, ‘What do you think about these amendments? Is this going to be good or bad for business?’” said Kearney.

The legislative agenda has been crowded.

Singh had his bill first; the Commons industry committee gutted it Monday, deciding much of it was redundant after subsequent government bills covered a lot of the same ground—though Conservatives voted with New Democrats on some elements. Williams introduced one of his own to kill the “efficiencies defence,” a feature of competition law that lets authorities consider how much more cost-effectively one larger company can operate than two smaller ones when deciding whether to approve a merger.

The Liberals have taken not one but two cracks at competition reform in less than a year. The first essentially hijacked Williams’s bill and supercharged it by giving the Competition Bureau even more authority. That received royal assent in December.

The second Liberal move, worked into Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s fall economic statement, tackled “killer acquisitions” and created a legal right for companies to challenge alleged unfair competitive practices themselves, without having to go through the Competition Bureau.

Not only did those measures sail through the House of Commons, but the body’s finance committee dropped yet another element into the bill, reversing the burden of proof when a corporate acquisition would take one company’s market share above a certain threshold (typically 30 per cent). The companies involved will have to prove that such a deal is good for the market, rather than leaving it to the Competition Bureau to try to prove the opposite.

When that came to a vote in the House of Commons, MPs approved it 316-0.

The Business Council disagrees with the substance of that move, but is just as alarmed by the way it was done. There should be a standalone Competition Act overhaul bill that gets due study, said Neiman; instead, there’s chaos.

“We are an open, trade-exposed country, where the rule of law, the soundness and predictability of our market framework is a prized asset,” he said. “This is essential to what makes Canada such an attractive destination for investment in innovation.”

A new Conservative government—or any new government—will have to reckon with the need to juice Canada’s economy with little fiscal room to do it, Neiman said.

“I think there will be a realization of the importance of very large businesses, just given how important they are to the economy,” he said.

But right now, corporate Canada is spooked, Kearney said. “You started to see more agitation amongst the business community, expressing their concerns that what is being proposed is not workable, whereas prior, they were all kind of like, ‘Well, we’ll see how it all plays out and evolves.’”

There’s been so much change so fast that much of the fallout will be in cases heard by the Competition Tribunal and the courts, and those bodies will not have an easy time trying to divine Parliament’s intentions, she said.

“If all you have is Singh saying that prices have gone up and the Conservatives blaming him because his brother works at Metro, that’s not going to help the judicial interpretation of the statute.”

If we want more competition in some of these sectors, like telecom, Kearney said comprehensive reforms like allowing foreign players to compete with the big Canadian companies would really shake things up. “That’s too nuanced, really, to talk about in these sorts of discussions.”