June 21, 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:

• Competition Bureau set for broad examination of competition in the food supply chain
• Canada’s proposed privacy bill misses the mark and passes the buck on key issues
• The fight to control Anthropic’s Mythos makes AI model monopolies a global issue

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Now let’s dive in.

Holistic Approaches to Competition

With the National Food Security Strategy coming hot out of the oven last week, the Competition Bureau has just announced an examination into Canada’s food supply chain, and how competition issues are contributing to rising food prices. This examination, which should take about a year, is a first step toward grounding more focused interventions, and as government has allocated $130 million over 10 years for the Bureau to focus on the food system, we can expect a lot more to come.

Going beyond the scope of the Bureau’s 2023 grocery market study, this examination will look higher up the supply chain as well— from fishing, farming and food processing, to logistics and distribution, and finally into retail, with callouts to anti-consumer practices like algorithmic pricing and shrinkflation. The scope of this examination is massive, but if the Bureau wants to deliver for Canadians, it ought to leave no stone unturned. In a complex system like food supply, which involves many inputs, actors, processes and capital, market concentration and barriers to competition at any stage can drive up prices for producers and businesses, which eventually get passed down to consumers. As CAMP’s own research has shown, this is certainly the case, with concentration squeezing farmers, vendors, and independent grocers at every step of the process.

To do this investigation right, the Bureau needs to hear from Canadians, from farmers and entrepreneurs trying to bring their products to market, to grocers trying to offer competitive prices, to food processors and consumers. But as rising food prices put pressure on more Canadians, market power in our food system is not only a universal issue, it’s becoming a matter of national concern that should be as impossible for our governments and regulators to ignore as it is for everyday Canadians. This announcement is promising, but we’ll be watching the follow-through.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• ​Competition bureau launches study to examine how food supply chain affects grocery prices (The Globe and Mail)

Partial Privacy

Canada’s privacy laws are decades old, and ill suited to addressing some of the defining challenges of the day, from a time before people conducted much of their economic and personal business online, and before companies started tracking that behaviour to analyze and sell. This week, the federal government has launched a third attempt to modernize the laws that govern how the private sector collects, uses, and discloses the personal information of Canadians. At a glance, Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act (PPCDA) comes with a consent-to-collect framework, strong regulator, some interesting definitions, but not a lot to say on pressing privacy issues.

The government suggested the PPCDA would tackle surveillance pricing, but that seems to be just window dressing; businesses that use personal information for pricing decisions will have to be transparent about it, but this won’t do much for consumers who don’t have a choice to shop elsewhere. CAMP has argued before about the need to single out specific classes of information as particularly sensitive, but the PPCDA merely says that businesses need to take that sensitivity into account. The law doesn’t cover location tracking data at all, despite the massive privacy and national security risk.

Overall, the PPCDA struggles to balance commercial interests against Canadians privacy, and points to important issues without decisive action. It puts a lot of weight on forthcoming regulations and subjective categories, like what a “reasonable person” would consider an “appropriate” or “legitimate” use or disclosure of sensitive data. This will require an active regulator to systematically review business practices, which the legislation suggests will be built from scratch under close Ministerial guidance, a problem unto itself. As the bill moves forward, Canadians should seek more concrete rules for the collection and use of sensitive data and put pressure on what constitutes legitimate business interests in the age of surveillance capitalism.

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📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• ​“The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Price Tag – Why too little competition is damaging football for fans, consumers and players” (Balanced Economy Project)
• Siddiqui, Musk’s Starlink hooked rural customers. Then came the price increases. (The Washington Post)
• Armentrout, Gov. JB Pritzker signs $55.9B affordability-focused state budget with tax on social media companies (Chicago Sun Times)

Mythos Madness

While other AI companies remain embroiled in controversy, Anthropic has tried to play the model company, going against the US administration by befriending the Pope and saying it won’t do mass surveillance. But their ongoing conflict with the US administration has now gone global in scale, and led to a ban on the use of their latest models by any non-US person, and then a withdrawal of model access for almost everyone in the world.

Prime Minister Carney correctly identified the underlying monopoly problem of the situation, telling reporters it was based on an “over-reliance on certain models.” The models in question are Fable and Mythos, allegedly so powerful they could wreak havoc on the world’s digital systems by rapidly identifying critical vulnerabilities. Understandably, that meant big companies and nation-states wanted to get their hands on it, to start securing their systems and preparing, with the US administration seeking to keep that power for themselves. There are parallels to be drawn between the AI and nuclear arms races, but in this case, the power increasingly lies with one company’s CEO and product, with global cybersecurity in the balance.

Anthropic’s choices around access to its models have big consequences for competition, because the company controls not only one of the most prevalent AI products on the market, it also controls some of the most important resources for further innovation and development: its models. Anthropic has cut off model access to a competitor, abruptly changed its pricing and subscription structures, and recently came under fire for secretly limiting the usefulness of its models for AI research, preventing would-be competitors from developing products. Now, conflict over that control is putting the world’s digital infrastructure, cyber security, and its people at risk, and it isn’t yet clear if global governance, domination, or mutually assured destruction will be the result.

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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