July 20, 2025Welcome to Letters from CAMP, a newsletter on anti-monopoly activity in Canada and abroad, brought to you by the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. In this instalment we have:
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Competition Bureau Leaves Alberta Tourists Out in the ColdIt’s the storyline for at least one 80’s movie you shouldn’t go back and rewatch. A monopolist comes to a sleepy ski town and threatens to buy up the local hotel while the authorities stand by, leaving it up to the community to stop the takeover. A climactic ski race is involved. That’s exactly what happened this week when the Competition Bureau quietly closed its investigation into an alleged Rocky Mountain monopoly. Well, not quite, but close enough. In 2024, Colorado-based VIAD was allowed to acquire the Jasper SkyTram, an attraction providing panoramic views of the majestic Rocky Mountains in Alberta. This, according to nearby Mt. Norquay ski resort owner Adam Waterous, put VIAD’s market share of the sightseeing sector in Banff and Jasper national parks above 90%, an eye-watering figure in any non-Google market. In response, Mr. Waterous filed a complaint with Canada’s Competition Bureau and the enforcer began an investigation. VIAD and its subsidiary Pursuit have been allowed to amass quite the recreation empire in the Rockies. The company owns gondolas, lake cruises, a bus line, and ten hotels in the two national parks, with the majority in Jasper. In the past decade, the company was allowed to purchase eight hotels, bringing its market share north of 80% according to Mr. Waterous. If these market share numbers are accurate, they reflect a level of concentration well above what Canada’s reformed competition law considers grounds for concern. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know exactly why the Competition Bureau decided to close its Rocky Mountain monopoly case, but the saga shines a light on consolidation in an area of the economy important to Albertans and visitors from around the world. Mountain vacations may not be a necessity, but Canadians and tourists alike deserve competition for their business when they decide to spend their hard-earned cash on them. Highlight: CAMP’s Competition Case TrackingCompetition law in Canada is hard to keep up with. Today, the Competition Bureau is effectively a black box. Once an investigation is announced the story can go quiet for years while the Bureau does its work, and accessing documents requires navigating the federal court system. While the Bureau has improved communication with the public, the quiet closing of the Rocky Mountain investigation shows there is room for improvement. It’s still far from the transparency of regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) which maintains a list of ongoing cases and when the public can expect updates on them. At CAMP, we’re trying to make it easy to keep tabs on ongoing competition law cases in Canada with our Investigation Tracking program. The program provides a snapshot of what’s going on in key Canadian competition law cases, including case summary and analysis, relevant court documents, and references to similar cases in other jurisdictions. As investigations evolve or close, we’ll be updating our tracking pages to make sure you’re up to date on competition law in Canada. Just this week, we’ve added three ongoing cases to our roster, including the drip pricing lawsuit against delivery company DoorDash, the investigation into whether Kalibrate’s gas station pricing tools are muting competition, and an investigation of Dye and Durham’s invisible monopoly in real estate software. If you’ve got ideas on how we can improve our tracking, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca. 📚 What We’re Reading 📚
Price Discrimination Is Bad, ActuallyWe’re in a love-hate relationship with price discrimination, that is, selling the same thing at sometimes wildly different prices. For every outrage over Uber charging higher prices to users with lower phone batteries there is someone punishing themselves with multi-stage layover to save a few bucks on a flight or a movie theatre popcorn purchase at an estimated 1000% mark-up. Economists are particularly enamored with price discrimination, dreaming of a world where every buyer is matched to their perfect price. But a new study throws cold water on the idea that certain kinds of price discrimination should be taken for granted as beneficial to consumers. Price discrimination comes in several flavours, or degrees. Third-degree price discrimination sorts buyers by observable groups and provides different prices accordingly; think student or senior discounts. It’s this third-degree price discrimination that this new (and admittedly math-heavy) paper finds more problematic than initially understood. For decades, economists believed the word of antitrust villain Robert Bork, that the ability of a monopolist to charge different prices for the same goods would make consumers better off. This was the basis for the revolt against the U.S.’s Robinson-Patman Act, which banned companies from offering preferred discounts to buyers that could shut out smaller competitors. Using supermarket scanning data, Eugenio Miravete finds that engaging in third-degree price discrimination decreases output and welfare. In English: the ability to price discriminate across markets has the potential to harm consumers. While just one study, Miravete’s work is an important empirical contribution to the reassessment of long-held beliefs in the competition and antitrust space. As the cost of living remains a top priority for Canadians, policy makers need to revisit practices that have long been considered business as usual. If you have any monopoly tips or stories you’d like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca
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