August 9, 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:

• We ask you, the reader, what the future of Letters should look like
• Prediction markets by another name come to Canada amid rising gambling woes
• The U.K.’s communications regulator asks if it’s up to task of regulating the internet

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Now let’s dive in.

CAMP Studies a Critical Market: Our Readers

We spend a lot of time thinking about what deserves a closer look in Letters. But despite our efforts to corner the market, we don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. That’s why we’re asking you for your input. We’re considering new formats and new ways of digging into competition, power, and the economy in Canada and we could use your input.

If you’ve got the time, check out the survey below and let us know which subjects, voices and formats would make the newsletter more useful, interesting or worth forwarding to a thoughtful reader in your life.

We’ve got an excellent, expert, and engaged readership and we want to make sure that you’re finding Letters a good use of your Sunday mornings. Whether you choose to fill out the survey or not, the team at CAMP is grateful for your time and enthusiasm in the fight against monopoly.

You can find the survey here.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• ​American companies shouldn’t be allowed to bleed Canada dry (The Star)

When is a Bet Not a Bet?

It’s not betting, it’s derivatives. That’s the pitch Wealthsimple is making for their newest product offering, a trading application where customers can put money on the outcome of real-world events. Prediction markets are a growing business in the United States, with companies like Polymarket and Kalshi offering customers the ability to bet on anything from the outcome of sports to global weather events. In the Walrus this week, Kyle Volpi Hiebert provides a survey of the controversies, from insider trading to event manipulation, that Canada could soon be experiencing.

So far, Wealthsimple’s platform only allows users to take stakes in three markets: economic indicators (inflation, unemployment, and the like), financial data (stock prices), and climate events. In good Canadian fashion, they’ve prudently avoided more unseemly markets like those for sports, wars, and politics. Since the product is considered a federally regulated financial exchange, it won’t be subject to provincial jurisdiction over gambling. That may lead to a jurisdictional conflict that we’ve seen emerge in the U.S., where states like New York have filed suits alleging betting markets constitute an illegal casino.

The main argument that prediction markets aren’t gambling is that traders compete with one another, not against the “house” as is the case with casinos. But like a casino, the business models of prediction markets has taken to depending on a small subset of players, often referred to as whales, for most of their profits. As gambling addiction hotlines in Ontario, Canada’s leader in legalizing online betting, become overwhelmed with Canadians in trouble, there is a question we need to ask ourselves: how much do we want our economy to resemble a slot machine?

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Vaheesan, Antitrust as Anti-Oligarch Policy (The Regulatory Review)
• Marche, How Canada wins at tech (Gloves Off)
• Radwanski No one should pay $20 for a beer at the game. Here’s a solution to outrageous concession prices (Toronto Star)

U.K. Aims to Bring Digital Regulator into the Modern Era

In 2022, the U.K. passed its Online Safety Act, a bill that obliges platforms to remove content deemed harmful, and to implement age verification for social media and other platforms. This week, the new chair of the country’s communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), told the Financial Times he would be launching a major review of the organization to ensure it was up to the task of enforcing the act and regulating Big Tech effectively. The news is a reminder that while strong laws are important, we need effective regulators to enforce those laws.

As Canada considers our own online safety regulation, and the broader question of internet regulation, we need to keep this question in the front of our minds. To date, Canada has opted to pile new responsibilities on existing regulators, namely the CRTC, but that may be about to change. In June, the federal government tabled the Safe Social Media act, which aims to protect social media users, especially minors, from online harms, as well as the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, an updated data protection regime for the private sector. Rather than falling to the CRTC or Office of the Privacy Commissioner, both pieces of legislation will be the responsibility of a new Digital Safety Commission.

Proposing a purpose-built regulator is a positive change from a regulatory approach that had relied on layering more goals onto an already stretched communications regulator. The initial design of the Commission also appears to be a strong step towards regulators with meaningful investigatory, enforcement, and penalty powers. But open questions remain, especially about the degree of control that the responsible Minister’s office will have over the activities of the regulator. In the past, Canada met the introduction of new technologies with the creation of new institutions up to the task of ensuring the public interest was protected. We’re overdue to brush up on the skills to do so.

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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