August 23, 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 wants Nortera’s acquisition of Green Giant and Le Sieur brands canned
• Why Canada should aim to be more misaligned with the U.S. on digital trade
• Major venture capital firm finds themselves on the wrong side of an antitrust investigation

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Now let’s dive in.

Bureau Defends Canadians from Canned Food Consolidation

This week, the Competition Bureau moved to block consolidation in the canned and frozen fruits and vegetable market. In fall of 2025, Nortera, the Canadian processor and distributor of brands like Del Monte and Arctic Gardens announced its intention to buy the Green Giant and Le Sieur brands from B&G Canda, a subsidiary of U.S. based holding company B&G Foods. B&G acquired Green Giant and Le Sieur from General Mills in 2015, and while Nortera has been the exclusive producer of Green Giant and La Sieur in Canada for 30 years, B&G competes with Nortera through the marketing and sales of those brands.

The Bureau alleges that the acquisition of these brands would effectively eliminate Nortera’s only national-level competitor, leaving only the relatively smaller role played by foreign providers. Controlling most of Canada’s capacity for freezing and canning product, Nortera is a dominant producer of frozen and canned vegetables in Canada, a highly concentrated market with equally high barriers to entry. Any competitive pressure Nortera faces comes primarily from competing brands like those owned by B&G foods, lowering prices for retailers and consumers.

You’ve heard us talk about competition in food supply chain once or twice, so it won’t surprise anyone that CAMP welcomes the Bureau’s move to prevent even further consolidation in the sector. Frozen and canned vegetables are an important staple that families rely on to stay healthy while keeping grocery bills even somewhat in check. More consolidation in the refrigerated aisle could mean higher grocery bills for already stretched households. But if we really want competition in canned goods, we need to look at breaking open the highly concentrated processing layer beneath retail and wholesale markets. Blocking this merger would prevent things from getting even worse, but if we want things to get better, we need to think bigger.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• ​Canada shouldn’t try to build everything it needs for the AI era (Policy Options)
• ​CRTC Breaks Silence on Website Issues, Won’t Address Hack Claims (iPhone in Canada)

We Could Stand to Be a Little Less Aligned

What a difference three days makes. With talks breaking down at the last minute, Canada and the U.S. are no longer poised to sign a deal that, while not public, had been leaking into the discourse throughout the week. But few deals are dead forever. While much of the discussion this week was focused on issues like automobiles, dairy, and U.S. liquor, less covered among the list of (deeply) pre-emptive wins declared by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) was talk of greater “alignment on digital trade” between the countries.

What would being more aligned with the U.S. on digital trade mean? In a piece out this week, CAMP executive director Keldon Bester argues it could further constrain our ability to rein in American tech giants. As CAMP’s digital trade brief out early this year covered, Canada and the U.S. are already pretty buddy-buddy on digital trade. CUSMA contains provisions that restrict our ability to limit where our data is stored and how it’s used, whether we can regulate companies that are dominant digital markets, and whether we can open up and understand the systems that drive important aspects of our daily lives.

For now at least, it looks like that status quo on digital trade will hold. While the new round of tariffs will be painful, Canadians may be grateful that we didn’t cede even more control of our lives online. Ahead of the summer, Parliament introduced bills to support a safer and more private online environment. Even without greater alignment, the digital trade provisions of CUSMA could throw cold water on the ambitions of those bills. Digital trade rules have already been a cudgel against Canadian efforts to have a say over the digital sphere, and this week shows that even more ground can be ceded if we’re not careful. When it comes to the Trump Administration, being a bit more misaligned is a good thing.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Woolf, Canadian tech experts concerned that trade talks may concede sovereignty over digital policy(The Globe and Mail)
• Bednar, What “Digital Trade Alignment” Would Cost (Canadian Shield Institute)
• Parry, Brussels changes gear on Big Tech enforcement (Politico)

Overlapping Interests

The breakdown of American antitrust enforcement and the embrace of the Trump Administration by Silicon Valley is old news at this point. So consider us surprised when we learned this week that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most prominent venture capital funds in the world, and whose founders have led the march of the tech elite towards Trump. On the nerdier front, the case is also interesting example of the revival of a rare use of one of the pillars of American antitrust law, the Clayton Act.

The substance of the DOJ’s allegations relates to the U.S.’s deeply underutilized rules against “interlocking directorates” that prevent people from simultaneously serving on the boards of competing companies. A board seat gives access to sensitive information about company operations and strategy, the kind of info that can support collusion rather than competition. At issue in this case are two a16z partners who serve on the boards of Databricks, Fivetran, and dbt labs, the latter which was recently acquired by Fivetran. These companies offer complementary but competing products, and shared board members could facilitate the carving up of the market between the relevant players.

What makes this case especially interesting is not only that these interlocking directorate cases are rare, revived by the Biden Administration, but that it’s one of the first cases to involve venture capital. It’s common in the industry for venture capital partners to sit on the boards of multiple portfolio companies in the same industry, a practice that this investigation could put a deep chill on. Whatever the outcome, the investigation is an important broadening of the concept of market concentration. Why go through the trouble of buying up your competitors if your board members can simply pull up a seat and spill the beans?

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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