OTTAWA — Ottawa will aggressively push competition between companies in a bid to ease the cost of living, Industry Minister Melanie Joly said on Wednesday as she opened the Competition Bureau’s annual summit in Ottawa. In her speech, Joly delivered an emphatic endorsement of more market competition in Canada.
“Let me be clear. This government will be hawkish on competition,” she said.
Joly argued expanding competition in Canadian industries such as telecom would give consumers more choices and offer a path to lower prices.
Speakers at the Competition Summit also pitched improving competitive forces and trimming red tape in Canada as a solution to flagging productivity.
Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell said in his speech that boosting competition within Canada will make domestic firms more competitive on a global scale as U.S. tariffs and shifting trade flows threaten long-standing supply chains.
“Shielding domestic firms from competition doesn’t make them strong, it makes them complacent,” Boswell said. “If we want them to compete globally, they must face competition at home.” The Competition Bureau acts as a watchdog for competitive dynamics in Canada and has examined concentration in the grocery and airline sectors in recent years. Boswell said the latter study revealed adding a new carrier to an existing route can reduce airfares between two cities by an average of nine per cent.
“Competition is one of the most effective tools we can leverage to lower prices and improve products and services,” he said.
But adding new competitors to concentrated Canadian industries has long proven difficult for Canadian industry.
Boswell said the top issue keeping him and members of his office up at night is a stagnant rate of new businesses entering the Canadian market.
He pointed to red tape and prohibitive startup costs holding back entrepreneurs from starting the kinds of new businesses that bring innovation to the market and put pressure on incumbents.
Statistics Canada said in a February report that the level of federal regulation increased 37 per cent between 2006 and 2021…
Source: ctvnews.ca/business
