Letters: Canada's Digital Sovereignty Imperative
June 29, 2025Welcome 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 instalment we have:
If you enjoy Letters, please considering sharing and supporting CAMP Now let’s dive in.
McCord: Digital Sovereignty Key to Preserving National SecurityCanada’s increasingly tenuous relationship with the United States has forced a rethink across long-settled areas of policy, and national security is no exception. Prime Minister Carney has made it clear that one of his primary goals is to diversify Canada’s defence base away from the current overreliance on American firms. Today, nearly three quarters of Canada’s defence capital spending heads down south. Taken for granted for decades, this arrangement looks naïve amid ongoing U.S. belligerence towards Canada. But in the Globe this week, CAMP policy analyst Curtis McCord argues that for these diversification efforts to truly protect Canada, Carney’s focus must extend to our dependence on the U.S. for our critical digital infrastructure. Our digital world is dominated by US firms, with players like Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft controlling a dominant share of key markets such as online advertising, computing infrastructure and services, and increasingly artificial intelligence. Our economy, social lives, and even government services depend on access to digital infrastructure. If access to these resources were disrupted or otherwise leveraged against Canadians, their monopolization means we would have limited alternatives to fall back on. Accordingly, a national security strategy focused on maintaining Canadian sovereignty must include consideration for digital sovereignty - the need for nation states to have a degree of control over their digital capacity. For a government focused on nation-building and forging a new path for Canada in an uncertain world, securing our digital infrastructure must be part of the conversation. 📰CAMP in the News📰
Cohere Co-founder: Canadian AI Leader “Not for Sale”The digital sovereignty conversation in Canada has been an important reminder that who owns what matters, whether at the international or local level. But when it comes to companies, especially in the start-up space, the desire to maintain ownership is in tension with the financial rewards that come with being bought out by a larger firm. That’s why CAMP was glad to hear Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez confirm this week that the Canadian AI leader is “not for sale.” There are many reasons to care about the acquisition of start-ups by dominant incumbents. But one cause for concern is the innovation that may be lost when these aspiring companies are acquired by established players. In a new study, researchers at the OECD found that after start-ups are acquired by incumbents, their innovative activity declines with no corresponding increase in innovation by the acquirer. Companies hungry to steal share from competitors or create new markets are more likely to invest in R&D and create new products, services, and business models. Once they’re a part of a Big Tech mothership, that desire to innovate comes into conflict with the incentives and bureaucracy of the larger organization. The need to foster independent companies at home must be balanced with vigilance that ensures we aren’t just propping up new versions of home-grown monopolists. Canada needs entrepreneurs that want to build at home, but making Canada’s economy diverse, competitive, and fair means supporting a variety of ownership structures for business. These include cooperatives and employee ownership models supported by our colleagues at Social Capital Partners. Cohere’s success to date shows what many of us already know: it is possible to create great companies in Canada. That those companies have a desire to stay and grow in Canada is key to both reinforcing our sovereignty as well as building a fair and competitive economy. 📚What We’re Reading📚
Trump’s FTC Continues to Roll Over for Big BusinessDespite enforcement efforts against Big Tech, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continues to disappoint. In a piece this week for Washington Monthly, anti-monopoly expert Ron Knox lays out how the decision to abandon an important price discrimination suit against PepsiCo shows that the enforcer is giving up on fair markets. Price discrimination, businesses charging different prices for the same product, is something we’re all familiar with. What may be less familiar is the power of price discrimination to distort competition and punish small businesses to the benefit of dominant players. That’s exactly what RF Buche, owner of a small chain of rural grocery stores in South Dakota, told the FTC was happening. While Buche was paying $8.52 USD for 12 cans of Pepsi, big chains like Dollar General were able to sell the same product for $5 USD, a price they literally could not compete with. By negotiating deals that no other retailer can access, price discrimination lets monopolists like PepsiCo, Walmart and Loblaws flex and consolidate their power over the supply chain. As Knox notes, Walmart (much like Amazon) rose to prominence using these tactics, leveraging buying power to drive supplier consolidation, gutting small businesses and markets across America. The U.S. has had laws against this practice for nearly 100 years. But they had gone unenforced since the Reagan era, until Lina Khan took the helm at the FTC and brought the case against PepsiCo. The FTC giving up on this case is another sign that the monopolists are back at the helm of important American antitrust agencies. While the U.S. has robust state-level and private enforcement of its antitrust laws to make up the slack, the FTC’s abandonment of this important case is a blow to efforts to restore fair markets at home and abroad. If you have any monopoly tips or stories you'd like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca
Follow CAMP on Twitter LinkedIn Instagram or Facebook |
A Tech Anti-Monopoly and Accountability Agenda for Canada
In a piece for Tech Policy Press, CAMP executive director Keldon Bester lays out what a tech accountability agenda should look like for the new Canadian government.
Read the article here.
Diversify from the U.S. for defence? This must include diversifying from Big Tech
In a piece for the Globe and Mail, CAMP policy analyst Curtis McCord outlines how Canada's dependence on Big Tech could lead to disruptions of Canada's digital infrastructure.
Read the article here.
Letters: Not So Friendly Skies
June 22, 2025Welcome 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 instalment we have:
If you enjoy Letters, please considering sharing and supporting CAMP Now let’s dive in.
Air Duopoly: Competition Bureau Releases Landmark Airline Market StudyCanada is a big place, and that means we need to take transportation seriously. Given the vast distances between even major cities, air travel is often the most convenient way to get people and goods from Point A to Point B. This is especially the case for Canada’s northern communities where flying can be the only option for travel. But today there is a severe mismatch between the importance of the air travel market and the results it delivers for Canadians. This week, the Competition Bureau released its year-long market study on Canada’s airline market, the first under its new powers to compel information from companies, and the results will not shock Canadians. Canadians are highly dissatisfied with the current state of the airline market, finding limited choice, high fees, and falling quality. Although Canada has seen new entrants like Flair and Porter enter the market, the lion’s share of domestic passenger traffic is concentrated in the hands of WestJet and Air Canada. Rather than compete, increasingly the major players are carving the country into eastern and western markets that they dominate respectively. To remedy the situation and bring competition to the market, the Bureau puts forward a raft of recommendations, several of which echo the recommendations of CAMP in our submission to the market study, Connecting Canadians. These include gearing the fee structure that funds the air travel service to favour smaller planes and providers, allowing greater foreign ownership of airlines while preserving Canadian control, and making more data about the performance of the system publicly available. While we believe the Bureau does not go far enough in advocating for change to Canada’s air travel market, the outcome of the study is an important piece of evidence of the need for change to create a system that delivers safe, affordable, and reliable air travel to Canadians across the country. 📰CAMP in the News📰
Monopoly’s Twin Threat to CanadaIf you’re reading Letters, you know Canada has a monopoly problem. But how we think about the range of harms from monopolies shapes the solutions we bring to the problem. That’s why understanding the full scope of the issue is so important. While monopolies put pressure on the pocketbooks of Canadians, they also pose a risk to Canada’s future as an independent nation. In a piece for Corporate Knights this week, CAMP executive director Keldon Bester lays out the parallel threats to affordability and sovereignty that monopolies pose to Canada. Whether we’re talking about companies or countries, the issue of monopoly is the same: when we rely too much on a single player, we are not in control. In recent years we’ve seen this at home in our interactions with our banks, telecom companies, airlines and even grocery giants. But in 2025, Canada learned that this interaction extends to its relationship with other countries, namely the United States. Geography, history, and the path of least resistance made us dependent on a single player, and now that player wants to change the rules of the game. With the U.S. administration exploiting our economic integration in key sectors like manufacturing and raw materials against us, Canada urgently needs to consider how to insulate itself from this kind of pressure in the future. Faced with monopolies at home and abroad, Canada needs to embrace an anti-monopoly vision if we want to begin charting a stronger and more resilient path forward. 📚What We’re Reading📚
Transatlantic Civil Society Calls on Regulators to Block Meta’s Takeover of Scale AITraining AI models is an incredibly expensive process, and one of the main costs is, ironically, human labour.[KB1] To train AI models, thousands of workers must carefully tag and categorize millions of pieces of media, providing the feedback and examples that AI models use to determine patterns and produce accurate results. One estimate puts the average spend of major AI companies on human-driven training as high as a billion dollars annually. A leader in packaging and selling the low-paid labour in countries like Kenya and the Philippines that feeds this process is the U.S.-based Scale AI. This week, in a bid to prove to investors that it is not losing the AI race, social media and advertising giant Meta announced its intention to take a 49% stake in Scale AI for over $14 billion. Meta’s move will give them control over the whole lifecycle of artificial intelligence models, from development and training to deployment and collection of user input. To prevent this from happening and preserve competition in the AI supply chain, CAMP is joining our colleagues at Amsterdam-based SOMO (the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations) in urging competition authorities in Germany and the UK to block the purchase. While the rise of AI presents a unique set of policy challenges, those challenges are exacerbated by allowing monopoly to flourish. The AI stack has already seen dramatic consolidation, and Meta’s purchase of Scale AI would tighten the corporation’s grip on the inputs to this rapidly evolving market. If you have any monopoly tips or stories you'd like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca
Follow CAMP on Twitter LinkedIn Instagram or Facebook |
With Few Discount Airlines, Canadian Travelers Face Steeper Fares
The New York Times
It’s unlikely that foreign carriers would be interested in serving the domestic routes that are most in need of competition — those that serve places other than the country’s major cities — because those are not as profitable, said Keldon Bester, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project.
Cut fees that hamstring small carriers: Bester
BNN Bloomberg
Keldon Bester, executive director at Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss opening up Canadian air travel to competition.