July 13, 2025

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 instalment we have:

• Canada’s Competition Bureau dives into Amazon’s influence over the prices you pay online
• Lawyers pat themselves on the back for another merger at the expense of Canadian farmers
• Google takes its global PR push up north amid claims of “hot and heavy” competition

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Now let’s dive in.

Competition Bureau Advances Investigation into Amazon’s Alleged Abuse of Dominance

This week, the Competition Bureau announced it was moving forward with its investigation of Amazon’s conduct in online marketplaces, securing a court order to compel the e-commerce giant to produce documents related to the treatment of third-party sellers on its platform.

The Bureau’s investigation seeks to determine whether Amazon’s practices have led to higher fees for third-party sellers along with higher prices on both Amazon and other online shopping sites. The investigation parallels existing cases against the e-commerce giant in other jurisdictions, particularly those brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and California’s Attorney General.

The FTC’s case claims Amazon punishes sellers for offering lower prices on sites other than Amazon by “[burying] discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.” It also alleges that Amazon conditions access to “Prime” eligibility on the use of its own fulfillment service, raising the proportion of seller revenue captured by Amazon. The Bureau is investigating whether the same conduct has been killing e-commerce competition in Canada.

As more shopping moves online, policy makers must pay attention to the companies that increasingly function more like infrastructure than individual companies. Given its scale, many businesses cannot afford to forgo access to Amazon’s platform, making them vulnerable to the kind of exploitation detailed in the FTC’s case. This is borne out by data on the growing share of seller revenue captured by Amazon, rising from 19% to 45% over the past decade.

As the rising cost of living continues to be a topline concern for Canadians, practices that strangle competition and eat into the margins on small businesses need to be addressed.

A Round of Applause for the Lawyers Making Life Harder for Farmers

A good rule of thumb is you should be worried anytime corporate lawyers are celebrating. After a multi-year wait, in early 2025 Canada’s Minister of Transport approved the purchase of grain handling company Viterra by global agri-business giant Bunge. This came despite a Competition Bureau investigation finding that the transaction would cost grain farmers nearly $20 million annually and a parallel study by University of Saskatchewan researchers that estimated annual harms in the hundreds of millions.

But last week brought a reminder that all clouds have silver linings as the Canadian law firm McMillan celebrated their Merger Control Matter of the Year win for shepherding the multi-billion dollar transaction through the required global regulatory processes. Behind every good merger is a team of lawyers charging up to four figures an hour to make sure the deal closes. Regardless of their consequences – shuttered stores, higher prices, waves of layoffs – a closed merger is a win for the corporate law community.

For decades, Canada had a competition law that catered to Bay Street’s appetite for consolidation. Mergers that monopolized Canadian markets at the expense of consumers and businesses were allowed in pursuit of the vaunted goal of efficiencies with no consideration of who, if anyone, might benefit from those efficiencies. While the game has changed after 2024’s “breathtaking” reform of Canada’s merger laws, the deck is still stacked against the average consumer, entrepreneur, or farmer.

While Bunge-Viterra slipped in under the door, the next major food system merger will be a test of whether Canada’s competition law is up to the task. Until farmers rather than corporate lawyers are celebrating, we’ve got work to do.

📚What We’re Reading📚

• Mendelsohn, Mark Carney’s economic agenda misses something vital (Toronto Star)
• Sygutek, Canadians have the power to fight back against Big Tech (Financial Post)
• McKenna, A major defence contract is set to favour U.S. supplier, despite Carney’s promise to diversify (CBC)

Google’s Top Lawyer Calls Competition “Hot and Heavy” in Canadian PR Push

Monopoly? What monopoly? This week, Google’s top lawyer Kent Walker told the host of the Public Policy Forum’s WONK podcast that he was optimistic about the outcome of Google’s many global antitrust challenges. Sidestepping the fact that Google has been declared a monopolist by U.S. judges not once but twice, Walker asserted that competition for the search giant was “hot and heavy,” going so far as to describe the current state of competition as “frothy and yeasty”.

Upsetting baking metaphors aside, the podcast should be seen as the first salvo in a building PR push for Canada to abandon its efforts to rein in the search giant. Beyond run-of-the-mill lobbying, Big Tech companies are extremely adept at shaping the policy discussion at home and abroad to their benefit. While it was all smiles on the podcast, we can look at Trump’s push to kill the Digital Services Tax (DST) as a preview of the kind of pressure Canada will face if we want a say over the behaviour of American tech giants.

While the dollar figures are lower than their American lobbying efforts, recent years have shown Big Tech more than willing to get creative with their shadowy efforts to influence Canadian policymaking. In 2023, the University of Toronto returned a previously undisclosed donation of $600,000 from Amazon amid faculty uproar that the shady donation gave the e-commerce giant influence over research and events related to Canadian competition policy. We need to take a page from the U of T faculty and stay vigilant to both hard and soft power efforts to bend Canadian laws in favour of Big Tech.

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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