June 14, 2026

Welcome 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 installment we have:

• Canada’s National Food Security Strategy makes competition a priority
• Safe Social Media Act to hold social media and AI chatbot operators accountable
• Action, not hints, needed to intervene on surveillance pricing

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Now let’s dive in.

Farm to Table Competition

This week, the federal government announced a National Food Security Strategy with a goal of increasing both affordability and resilience in Canada’s food system. The strategy identifies market concentration as a major issue driving up prices for consumers, and puts competition front and centre, motivating big investments into increasing domestic infrastructure, industry, and even consumer protections.

Importantly, the strategy goes well beyond the grocery sector itself, with funding directed to farming, food processing and distribution. $1 billion will go to scaling Canadian capacities for food processing, giving farmers more options to sell their produce and promoting competition in a deeply consolidated market. Another $1 billion into food hubs and public food terminals will provide wholesale options for independent grocers across Canada, making it easier and cheaper to operate. The Competition Bureau will also have some funding restored after cuts earlier this year, earmarked to go after anticompetitive practices and abuse of dominance in the food system, and conduct a major market study on Canada’s food system.

Alongside these big-ticket items are several more nods to important issues that readers will be familiar with. Property controls make an appearance, but the role of commercial real-estate consolidation and prices isn’t considered. Surveillance pricing gets a mention — right alongside a commitment to PIPEDA modernization that has yet to materialize. There’s no mention of merger controls, sadly, which will be essential to ensure returns on these competition investments aren’t swallowed up by incumbents. But even so, the National Food Security Strategy marks an ambitious step towards addressing the structural issues at play in Canada’s food system.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• Eaves, NATO’s Digital Back End Could Fall Apart Without Change (Foreign Policy)
• Reboot Democracy, Reboot Weekly: 10 Data Center Questions, Kazakhstan’s AI Frontier, and Reimagining Universities​

Digital Safety Redux

In another big regulatory move this week, the federal government also proposed its Digital Safety Act or Safe Social Media Act (SSMA). A successor to the Online Harms Act, the SSMA aims to regulate social media, online platforms, and even AI chatbots to make sure the products are effectively moderated, and that the companies operating these products are held to verifiable and enforceable standards. Canada’s policymakers have had the opportunity to learn from other jurisdictions’ attempts at social media regulation, which some argue, makes the legislation stronger.

Specifics, including which services will be included and how standards will be set, evaluated and enforced, aren’t yet clear. It will be up to the newly created Digital Safety Commission and its leadership to make those decisions. That Commission will have a lot of power, not only to set standards, but to make sure companies are doing their duty. Many are talking about age restrictions on social media, and rightfully so. The SSMA does restrict social media for people under the age of 16, but only conditionally — if operators can prove they’re safe for kids, then there’s still room for all-ages platforms. Notable provisions also include monetary penalties, requirements to take down harmful content, and carve-outs for accredited researchers to use data from platforms to do public interest research.

This is an important and needed piece of legislation that addresses the role of online platforms in our society and imposes duties not only to proactively protect vulnerable users, but to account for their actions to regulators and the public. The government should use a similar formula for the forthcoming anti-scam strategy. Empowering regulators and researchers to understand social media feeds, and imposing duties on platform operators is a good start, but the new Commission will have an uphill battle against some serious opponents like Meta and will need to be able to show its teeth. $20 million fines aren’t going to cut it.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Stevenson & da Mota, Canada Cannot Compete on AI Regulation, but It Can Coordinate It (CIGI)
• Bednar, AI Shopping Agents Are Manipulating Consumers, Study Finds (The Walrus)
• Hubbard, Who do AI agents work for? Power and Control in the Next Internet (Open Markets Institute)

Surveillance Pricing and the End of the Deal

The use of personal data to set prices for consumers, often called algorithmic or surveillance pricing, is not popular in Canada. 52% of Canadian respondents want it banned, and 31% would only accept it if strongly regulated. Not to be upstaged by opposition leaders calling for a ban, the governing Liberals have been inserting subtle mentions to the practice; in their AI strategy, and now in their food strategy. In a new piece, CAMP fellow Andrew Paulley makes the case that intervention is needed now, before the scales are tilted too far against the consumer and in favour of the corporation.

In the most extreme forms of surveillance pricing the base price of an item all but disappears, and each shopper sees only a price that is generated based on their context and data, possibly served to them by an AI agent. If pricing is totally individualized and the consumer always pays the highest possible price, the notion of a discount or a deal evaporates. Consumers will have no idea how to determine if they’re paying a good price, but these kinds of practices and systems are designed to be opaque, and their effects can be hard to track. Last week, the government also gutted funding for consumer protection research in civil society, which will make finding effective ways of tracking and calling out surveillance pricing even harder.

The government needs to act now, rather than waiting for this to become a more serious problem, as the Bureau did last year when its consultation into algorithmic pricing ended with a shrug. From a regulatory perspective, updating privacy regulations is a good starting point, which is exactly what the government has floated in the National Food Security Strategy. These regulations must cover the kinds of data that can be collected about Canadians, and how it can be used — including how it can be synthesized and sold. If companies are going to offer or use services for price setting, those algorithms must be available to regulators, due to the possibilities for collusion and price gouging.

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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