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:
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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
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