The Paramount-Warner Bros merger is done. Here's how it could affect Canadians
CBC
Skydance-owned Paramount has completed its $81 billion US takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, further concentrating an already consolidated entertainment industry. CAMP Executive Director Keldon Bester told CBC the merger could mean fewer films, greater reliance on blockbuster productions and tougher competition for Canadian production work as the combined company looks to cut costs.
Nortera-B&G Canada backing down from takeover is a win for competition and food affordability
October 6, 2026 [Ottawa, ON] – The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP) welcomes the decision by Nortera Foods and B&G Foods Canada not to proceed with Nortera’s proposed acquisition of Green Giant and Le Sieur brands, a deal the Competition Bureau said would likely reduce competition in the supply of canned and frozen vegetables.
The Bureau challenged the proposed acquisition in August, alleging that it would eliminate a major national competitor in markets where Nortera already holds a dominant position. Its investigation concluded the deal was likely to lead to higher prices and fewer choices in the grocery aisle for Canadians when they need it most.
“It’s good to see the Competition Bureau’s more assertive enforcement stance begin to pay off,” said Keldon Bester, Executive Director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. “The Bureau was right to challenge a merger that would have put Green Giant and Le Sieur under the same umbrella as one of their competitors. With the deal off the table, retailers and shoppers will keep another option in a market where affordability matters and choice is already limited.”
The outcome follows the Bureau’s successful request for an injunction from the Competition Tribunal to block the transaction while the merger case was heard. This is an early sign that Canada’s reformed merger enforcement regime is able to address harmful consolidation before a deal closes and the loss of a competitor becomes harder to reverse.
“Preventing this merger from going ahead keeps the market from getting worse, but it does not fix the concentration that is already there,” Bester said. “Canned and frozen food production remains highly consolidated. If we want competition and choice to improve, we need to think bigger than stopping individual deals.”
Competition among food producers and suppliers shapes the prices and choices available to retailers and, ultimately, consumers. Effective merger enforcement is an essential defence against further concentration. To improve competition, Canada needs to go on the offence and address the conditions that make food markets difficult for new and growing competitors to enter and expand.
Strengthening the Safe Social Media Act
In this report
As introduced, the Safe Social Media Act has the potential to make Canadians safer online by creating reasonable duties and obligations for important online platforms. As it stands, however, the scope of the Safe Social Media Act misses a key opportunity to protect Canadians from a driving source of economic harm online: frauds and scams.
With the right reforms, the Safe Social Media Act could be a winning formula for protecting Canadians online. Expanding its scope to address fraud and scams, strengthening accountability for the businesses and technologies that enable them, and making compliance workable for smaller platforms would help the Act deliver on that promise. CAMP proposes four changes:
The Safe Social Media Act provides a long awaited and necessary step toward the regulation of these online platforms. The Act’s combination of duties of care, reporting requirements, researcher access and the creation of an empowered regulator are a winning formula to building and maintaining a safer online environment for all Canadians.
But the Act can be made stronger, and better fit to purpose by expanding protections for consumers and for competition. No case makes this clearer than the epidemic of frauds and scams on social media, impacting tens of thousands of Canadians and causing hundreds of millions in losses every year. Seniors are especially vulnerable to online scams, representing 40% of reported losses in 2024. Online fraud is a growing problem for all Canadians, with younger Canadians now the most likely to fall victim to scams.i
Social media platforms and other online sources accounted for the majority of scam losses in Canada in 2024, and account for nearly 75% of cyber-enabled fraud, over $357 million.ii
Advertisements on social media play a major role in distributing scams; in 2024, Meta’s internal estimations suggested their platforms served up to 15 billion potentially fraudulent advertisements per day. As advertisements are paid content, the incentives to address them outside of regulatory pressure are weakened: reporting found that Meta estimated that potential scam ads constituted up to 10% of its annual ad revenue, and the accounts behind these ads were allowed to accrue dozens of strikes before review, if any action was taken at all.iii Other jurisdictions, like Australia, have enacted comprehensive anti-scam legislation that makes online platforms and other actors responsible for eliminating scams, and to be transparent about how they do it. UK regulators have included scams as harmful content under the Online Safety Act.
To protect all Canadians from the most proliferate online harms of our day, frauds and scams must be included as harmful content. Excluding frauds and scams from the Act leaves vulnerable Canadians like seniors, youth, and newcomers at risk of extortion and financial ruin.
Canada’s regulatory approach must not entrench the positions of firms that resist regulation and stifle innovation at home. To protect competition and the possibility of new products and services entering the Canadian market, obligations must be proportional to the role of the platform without entrenching dominant players, and resources must be available across the market. This includes technologies developed for safety and compliance.
Making social media safer for all Canadians
01 Add frauds and scams to the definition of harmful content
As well as offering a model for online safety legislation, the United Kingdom and Australia are also leading the way in combatting scams and fraud. The Office of Communications in the UK has proposed regulations to cover fraud and scams under the Online Safety Act, imposing duties to act against scam accounts, remove fraud advertisements, and verify advertisers.iv Similarly, Australia’s Scams Prevention Framework regulates social media platforms by imposing a duty to protect users, report their efforts, and creating a compliance regime.v The Safe Social Media Act has all the necessary components to be an effective anti-scam bill, with some adjustments.
CAMP Recommendations
- Include frauds and scams as a category of harmful content in the Act
- Ensure duties for regulated platforms to review and remove reported harmful content include scam and fraud content and advertisements
02 Regulate business models that incentivize harmful scam content and the actors behind it
While online platforms are quick to make public statements about cracking down on scam activity, investigations and research have revealed a different picture. Platforms can be slow or unwilling to take down content and crack down on accounts that are significant revenue sources, removing offending content while leaving accounts free to continue operating. In large part, this is because the advertising-based business model that many scammers exploit to target victims means that scammers are consistent sources of revenue. Allowing online platforms to self-regulate and selectively report allows them to hedge their financial gains from scams against the costs of regulatory compliance. Regulators and researchers need the tools to set clear requirements for conduct, verify measures are effective, and act when they are not.vi
CAMP Recommendations
- Clarify language around platform purpose in 8(a) so that advertisements and paid content on regulated social media platforms and online services are covered by proposed duties of care
- Include regulatory guidance covering advertising and sponsored content within the remit of the Digital Safety Commission, including advertiser verification, and guidelines for advertising of financial products and investment opportunities
- Strengthen platform reporting requirements on harmful content to include:
- Action at the account level, rather than individual content
- Information about how potentially fraudulent content is reviewed and handled
- Revenue generated from removed or flagged harmful content and accounts
- Verified account transfers and approval processes to prevent scammers from laundering accounts
- Include retention requirements for advertising content that includes all versions of ad copy for flagged and removed advertisements as well as account information
03 Acknowledge the role of AI models and their owners in labelling and safety requirements
AI generated content is increasingly used by scammers to impersonate public figures, and to spread other harmful content. To effectively deal with the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools for generating synthetic content and its effects on social media and discourse, the Act’s labelling obligations must apply to all actors involved. The responsibility for labelling synthetic content should start with the generator of the content, and extend to the distributor, as the European Union has done with its Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content.vii If labelling of synthetic content is uniquely the responsibility of online platforms, it may become a resource-intensive content review requirement that is difficult to meet for all but the biggest firms.
CAMP Recommendations
- Extend synthetic content labelling requirements to regulated chatbot operators
- Ensure that compliance measures developed by model owners are available to commercial license holders and operators of those models
Protect competition and alternatives for Canadians
04 Make compliance resources and technologies available across the market
Compliance with the Safe Social Media Act will incur technology and administrative costs on regulated providers, including developing digital safety plans, employing resource persons, creating content retention strategies and even age verification. The largest platforms in the market will have the advantage and initiative when it comes to developing technologies and standards that influence compliance standards. To avoid entrenching the market power of dominant platforms and Canada’s dependence on US tech companies, smaller platforms must be able to grow without being hindered by a compliance regime built for companies that are already massive.
CAMP Recommendations
- Require regulated platforms to release documentation on systems implemented for the purpose of C-34 compliance and develop a resource collection that makes processes and technologies used for compliance available across the market
- Develop and promote open standards and whitelisted technologies that lower barriers to compliance, such as secure data retention and content flagging and review systems
CONCLUSION
Protecting Canadians online starts with a comprehensive understanding of how and why harmful content proliferates online. A definition of harmful content that reflects all the types of harms that Canadians experience online must include scams in order to be effective.
NOTES
References
- Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC). 2024 Annual Statistical Report. Annual Report. Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 2025. https://opencanada.blob.core.windows.net/opengovprod/resources/1ffc4a5e-e41b-48c7-929e-633d023ef8dc/cafc-annual-stats-report-2024-en.pdf?se=2026-07-01T15%3A11%3A15Z&sp=r&sv=2024-08-04&sr=b&sig=3XRgDn4iM78OI%2BigygXiBF81lIkEuuq4W3S1%2B5wWOcc%3D.
- CAFC, 2024 Annual Statistical Report.
- Jeff Horwitz. “Meta Is Earning a Fortune on a Deluge of Fraudulent Ads, Documents Sh….” Reuters, November 20, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/; Jeff Horwitz and Angel Au-Yeung. “Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook.” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-fraud-facebook-instagram-813363c8; Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham. “Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud from China to Safeguard Billions in Revenue.” Investigations. Reuters, December 15, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampant-ad-fraud-china-safeguard-billions-revenue-2025-12-15/.
- Ofcom. “Big Tech Must Tackle Scourge of Scam Adverts, Says Ofcom.” Www.Ofcom.Org.Uk, United Kingdom, July 10, 2026. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/online-fraud/big-tech-must-tackle-scourge-of-scam-adverts-says-ofcom; YouGov and Ofcom. Online Paid-for Advertisements Research Report. United Kingdom, 2026. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-advertising/online-paid-for-advertisements-research-report.pdf?v=422394.
- The Treasury, Australian Government. “Scams Prevention Framework – Protecting Australians from Scams.” Gov.Au, 2025. https://treasury.gov.au/publication/p2025-623966.
- Chris Fox. “Facebook and Google ‘Failed to Remove Scam Adverts.’” Future. BBC News, April 26, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56888693; Jeff Horwitz. “Meta Is Earning a fortune.”; Jeff Horwitz and Angel Au-Yeung. “Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’.” https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-fraud-facebook-instagram-813363c8; Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham. “Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud.”; Tech Transparency Project. Meta Awash in Deepfake Scam Ads. Tech Transparency Project, n.d. Accessed October 1, 2025. https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/meta-awash-in-deepfake-scam-ads.
- European Commission. “Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content.” European Commission, July 31, 2026. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content.
The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP) is a think tank dedicated to addressing the issue of monopoly and building a Canadian economy where markets work for the people who depend on them.
Expert Interview Series: Rob Csernyik
Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project · Expert Interview Series
A Losing Hand: The Human Costs of Canada’s Gambling Epidemic
Welcome to the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project’s Expert Interview Series, where we speak with researchers, journalists, advocates and other experts about how concentration, market power and competition show up across different industries, and what those dynamics mean for Canadians.
For this edition, we sat down with investigative journalist Rob Csernyik, whose reporting on the economic and social consequences of gambling has been recognized by the Atlantic Journalism Awards, Digital Publishing Awards and RTDNA Canada. In 2022, he received a Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Reporting to investigate gambling-related suicides in Canada.
His new book, A Losing Hand: The Human Costs of Canada’s Gambling Epidemic, published by Sutherland House in August 2026, examines the expansion of gambling in Canada, from casinos and video lottery terminals to sports betting and online gaming, and the gaps in how governments track and respond to its social and economic harms.
We spoke with Rob about what Canadians misunderstand about the gambling industry, what competition looks like in the rapidly expanding iGaming market, what happens when gambling becomes available at any time from a smartphone, and what Canada can learn from other countries.
Buy the bookThe conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you realize this was a bigger story about Canada’s approach to gambling, rather than a local or regional story about Nova Scotia?
I think that started when I was going through old newspaper archives. One of my central resources for the story was looking for statistics, key dates, who were the players, and using that as the launchpad to find other resources to build out my investigation into the economic and social effects of the casinos in Nova Scotia.
I was using a database of Atlantic Canadian newspapers. It was certainly clear that some of the same issues that were happening in Nova Scotia were also happening elsewhere, but one of the biggest for me was the suicides.
Gambling-related suicides started to pop up quite frequently in my research during the first few years after casinos and video lottery terminals were established in the country.
I found it strange that that topic was not in the public consciousness in Canada, and I wasn't seeing a lot of recent stories about it. It struck me as interesting that in 2003, it was deemed to be such a crisis that coroners and medical examiners said, "We're going to change the way we track this information."
I thought to myself there should be about two decades of very clear, well-tracked information. And there wasn't.
There was also contemporary evidence from news reports that suggested that, even within the first few years, some of that ambition to keep better track and to understand these deaths better just never happened. I also found it very moving on a personal level because the stories were really tragic, and they were so clearly associated with that expansion of gambling. I think it's safe to say that for most people who have died from a gambling-related suicide, they would not have necessarily found their way to gambling if it wasn't so conveniently offered to them.
What do Canadians misunderstand about how gambling works in this country?
Probably the biggest misunderstanding is that people don't necessarily consider that when the government takes an ownership role and a leadership role as a gambling operator, they are also the ones who are responsible for potentially impacted areas like public healthcare, addiction services and emergency room funding.
They're also the ones who may potentially have to deal with other spillovers related to everything from crime to family breakdown to bankruptcies.
It's challenging because we don't have a clear way of ascribing some of these costs and consequences of the gambling industry in a clear and direct financial way.
People also forget about the role of multiplier effects. When I spoke with a tourism industry executive in Nova Scotia, she talked about how, in the tourism industry, a dollar can turn into multiple dollars because there's a multiplier effect when you're spending at local businesses that develops the local economy. But money that is bet through legalized gambling is not going back to the economy in the same way. There is a lack of productivity and economic spinoff that you might see if that spending was deployed differently.
The new push for iGaming industries is often based on converting people gambling in grey markets and black markets. A grey market site is unregulated, while a black market site is unregulated but also criminally associated. The whole idea is if people are doing that, moving players over to the provincially regulated market allows governments to enforce a level of player protections, but more critically for them, they also keep part of the revenues.
The challenge with that is that you're never going to get 100 per cent of those players to move. Some of those people are going to be money laundering, or are going to be youth who are under the age of majority.
There's a lot of discussion based around the "channelization" of players from unregulated to regulated sites. The numbers are really big, but I've noticed that the figures which project how many people are gambling in non-regulated markets vary depending on whether it's a provincial agency, an academic researcher or a gambling consulting company calculating them. I've seen very, very different numbers, which says to me that nobody clearly understands the size of the problem.
We also don't factor for multiple accounts. Traditionally, if you have a government-owned online casino, you're allowed one account. But when you go and open accounts in an iGaming market like Ontario, you could open 20 or 30 different accounts.
In turn, the channelization rate is arguably a lot lower than people expect when these issues are considered.
Ontario’s iGaming market has many competing operators. What does competition actually look like between those companies, and is that competition beneficial or harmful?
Some industry analysts are of the opinion that there's a few companies that really dominate the market, for example FanDuel and DraftKings, with market shares so large that they create a misperception. It looks like there's a wide market, but so few companies are dominant that others aren't necessarily going to have a viable business. You have seen iGaming companies in Ontario already shut down and pull out of the market.
To me, the big question is: what is the market share? New York State, for example, offers weekly and monthly financial reports for each regulated sports betting company which help us understand statistics on market share. That was featured in a Globe and Mail commentary once, which noted that Ontarians had less understanding of this area than their American neighbours.
I think that's a question that should really be asked, because there's a contingent of the population who is going to say personal choice is important and having as many options as possible is important. But there's also a point at which there's diminishing returns.
Maybe having a dozen iGaming operators in Ontario instead of nearly 50 would provide a sufficient amount of choice and opportunities for people to play in that market. It also might reduce that glut of advertising that we see.
One researcher told me that he's of the opinion that sometimes companies enter iGaming markets with the expectation of making money and getting out. If they have to break some rules to do that, or pay some fines along the way, that's okay.
I think that's something worth considering. When you have that huge market and you have all these operators, surely there's going to be some who, in that quest to attract customers, are willing to, if not play a bit loosely with the rules, perhaps just take the financial penalty to avoid them if at all possible.
What changes when the distance someone has to travel to gamble effectively falls to zero?
I think it's really important to think about the portion of Canada that lives in rural settings. I once spoke with a gambler in recovery who said she used to physically have to take a ferry to a casino because she lived on an island. This created friction each time she wanted to gamble. Now, a gambler can take out their cell phone any time of day and play.
What we maybe forget is that the ability to play was always tempered with certain frictions. VLTs don’t operate 24 hours a day. There are betting limits on them in Atlantic Canada, whereas you can go on Atlantic Lotto’s regulated online gambling site and play 24 hours a day. You could bet, in some cases, hundreds of times as much on these online slots.
We're in an age where it's convenient to have everything in the palm of your hand, but there was a certain protection in having gambling in physical spaces with certain regulations around them. We're losing that in this new wave of legalized gambling.
It's also worth noting that, especially in iGaming provinces like Ontario and Alberta, partner sites are run by independent operators. They have a different focus than a government does. They have different relationships with profit and shareholders, and those factors into their decisions.
I once heard an employee who worked for one of the bigger casino companies in the U.S. say that no company is ever going to do more than the bare minimum of player protection set out by a government because there's no financial incentive. If they add frictions that their competitors don't have, that puts them on the losing side of a business equation.
Realistically, when a government decides to expand gambling and to invite in private enterprise, they need to consider this fact when building policies. So far in Ontario and Alberta, those have not been central to the discussion.
What can Canada learn from countries that have gone further in studying or regulating gambling harms?
First, I'll talk about the UK and gambling-related suicides. Those have really been brought to the forefront by families who have lost loved ones to suicides where gambling was a risk factor. There have been several inquests in the last few years in the UK into gambling-related suicides. The inquest process is when you investigate a death to learn more about the factors surrounding it and try to figure out if there are ways to protect the wider public and prevent future deaths. In some cases, those have led to asking companies: what can you do to improve player protections in light of what we're seeing?
The UK government now has a formal estimate of how many residents die by a gambling-related suicide. That's a conversation we could have in Canada, but what that requires is coroners and medical examiners asking more questions to make sure it's recognized if a death is gambling-related. It also requires families to advocate for that. I don't think families should have to be the ones pushing for it, but when we take a less stigmatizing approach to gambling and make it a more open conversation, that allows people who've been impacted, whether individually or as an affected other, to speak out about their experience.
If you look at Australia, one of the most notable things is they have considerable research. My reporting often comes back to Australian researchers and Australian studies. We have some great academic researchers here who are looking into gambling-related harms, but the area is not as well funded or as capitalized upon. As we move forward in this gambling era, we need to fund research to make sure we understand how it is affecting Canadians.
Finally, there are countries where they have data vaults, almost like a cloud program, where a provincial gaming corporation can view anonymous player data and analyze it. Regulators use data vaults to look at everything from suspicious transactions that might indicate money laundering to play patterns which might indicate that a bettor is wagering in a harmful way and might need a level of intervention.
Given the harms you document, why not go further in calling for the industry to be scaled back or dismantled?
I think it comes back to being a realist. If you look at the history of gambling expansion in this country, we have been asking the same sorts of questions, and replying with the same answers: it will create jobs, it will create tourists, it will do X, Y and Z.
When I say that I'm a realist, what I mean is I think it would be very easy to say, "Let's scrap iGaming. Let's cut that down to five companies." But where's the incentive for the government, which is bringing in revenue, to do that? Where is the incentive for the corporations who are making money? Where is the incentive for the swath of people who are going to say, "Well, that affects personal choice?"
Putting the genie back in the bottle is not going to happen. The real question, in my opinion, is what are we going to do moving forward?
Take Alberta. Maybe instead of bringing on as many iGaming partners as Ontario, they can have a moment of clarity and say, "This maybe doesn't make sense with the size of population we have, with the potential for harm."
You have provinces like Quebec and British Columbia where there has been some lobbying for these new iGaming industries. But let's say that's the way things go eventually. I think the question is: how do we right-size it? How do we make sure that it's an industry where there's data vaults, and we have certain frictions or betting limits, et cetera?
To me, that's where the changes have to happen. There's this challenge where some people think that to solve gambling harms, you need to get rid of the baby with the bathwater and extinguish the industry from existence.
As someone who's spoken with people who have lost loved ones to gambling-related suicides, even they have not necessarily called for a wholesale dismantling of the gambling industry. What they have expressed interest in are reforms to make sure that people who are adversely harmed by the industry can avoid the worst consequences of addiction, like suicide.
My reporting led the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Examiner’s office to finally start tracking gambling as a suicide risk factor, and their office had been created in 1996. I'm going to get that first batch of data 30 years after that major reform for their office and 23 years after there was supposedly a national reckoning that led to better tracking.
Change is slow. It requires taking incremental steps. That's really where we need to focus. Small changes over time are going to make the real difference.
To learn more about Rob’s work, pick up a copy of A Losing Hand: The Human Costs of Canada’s Gambling Epidemic.
CAMP welcomes planned Canada-EU competition agreement, calls for broader regulatory cooperation
October 1, 2026 [Ottawa, ON] – The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP) welcomes plans for a second-generation Canada-EU Competition Agreement, which could strengthen cooperation between the two jurisdictions’ competition authorities and help address anti-competitive conduct across borders.
A draft joint statement prepared for the October 29–30 Canada-EU Summit says negotiations on the agreement have concluded. It describes the agreement as a way to strengthen cooperation between competition authorities and support a more open, innovative and competitive marketplace for businesses and consumers.
“Competition problems do not stop at national borders, especially in markets shaped by large multinational companies,” said Keldon Bester, Executive Director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. “Closer cooperation between Canadian and European authorities could help them respond more effectively to anti-competitive conduct that affects both jurisdictions. The agreement’s value will depend on how that cooperation works in practice.”
CAMP has called for Canadian regulators to deepen information-sharing and coordination with their European counterparts on competition, privacy, communications and democratic resilience. A stronger competition agreement would advance that work while creating an opportunity to build cooperation across other areas of shared concern.
The draft statement also proposes regular Canada-EU engagement and early consultation on major policy and regulatory initiatives. That cooperation could help both sides respond to the influence of powerful companies across digital markets and other sectors.
“An agreement is a useful foundation,” Bester said. “Canada and the EU should use it to coordinate enforcement and build a wider working relationship that helps governments address concentrated market power and its effects on people and businesses.”
Competition Bureau investigates minimum advertised pricing policies in grocery sector
Canadian Press
The Competition Bureau is investigating minimum advertised pricing policies in Canada’s grocery sector, examining whether the practice makes discounts harder to find and weakens price competition. CAMP Executive Director Keldon Bester told The Canadian Press the policies can soften competitive price signals and lead to more uniform pricing.