By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – When the members of the Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) began talking about studying the proposed acquisition of Shaw by Rogers, one member suggested that they should not bother inviting the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development since he would not be able to say anything but instead then invite the chairman of the CRTC, the commissioner of competition and top representatives from the Department of Industry.
They all were the witnesses on Wednesday, April 7 and… they could not share anything useful because they are prohibited from prejudging the issue.
The Minister, François-Philippe Champagne, on the other hand, gave an interview on March 30 to Bloomberg.
Welcome to Ottawa. We did learn from Ian Scott, CRTC chairman the Commission will definitely hold a public hearing into the deal. Some observers have said since the issues the Commission has to look at are perhaps less critical than those to be reviewed by the Bureau or the Industry Department, they could have elected to just do a paper process.
But at least theirs will be a public proceeding while the other two will be conducted behind closed doors.
So, since the officials could not talk about anything substantive (but did give the politicians a crash course in how the regs all work), the Bureau’s Matthew Boswell instead talked about how the Competition Act needs to be revised and that he needs more resources in order to better police competition in our “digital and data-driven world.”
“The amount of data brought into those reviews grew by three billion additional pages.” – Matthew Boswell
“Around the world among our key trading partners, there are extensive public policy debates about their competition laws and ways they could be changed, to better reflect the digital data-driven economy we all live in now… to consider the standards for merger review, whether there should be presumptions in Canadian law with respect to mergers… and my point quite simply is that it would be a benefit to the Canadian people to take a comprehensive look at this,” Boswell said when asked if he has what he needs to investigate..
“The policy function is not with the Bureau has, the legislative function is with our friends at ISED, and obviously with the Minister. But the Minister, in a letter to me in May 2019, invited to consider these issues to make sure the Act and the framework and the investigative and prosecutorial processes were fit to purpose. We have been engaged in that work with the department since that time,” he went on.
“Just to illustrate the point, 2017-2018 and the next fiscal year, we obtained an additional 4,450 gigabytes of data in our investigations. One gigabyte of data equals enough to fill a small truck or 678,000 pages,” he went on. “The amount of data brought into those reviews grew by three billion additional pages. That is in the context of our budget having been flat, for ten years and if you take into account the inflation, declined by 10% over that time,” he added.
Perhaps the Competition Act and not the Broadcasting Act should be updated.
Boswell assured the committee that he would reallocate the necessary resources to ensure a thorough (probably long) review of this transaction.
