The Competition Cage Match (Vass Bednar and Denise Hearn weigh in)

You are listening to Policy Prompt from the Center for International Governance Innovation. I'm Vass Bednar.

And I'm Paul Samson.

Our in-depth interviews find nuances in the conversation with leading thinkers that work at the intersection of technology, society, and public policy.

Listen now wherever you find your podcasts. Hi, everyone. Paul Samson here, co-host of Policy Prompt. We are doing something a little different today. First, the effervescent Vass Bednar is not not co-hosting tonight.

No.

Instead, she's here, but-

[inaudible 00:00:44].

... in the hot seat.

Hot seat. Ooh.

More on that to follow. Second, we are taping at the lovely Perfect Books, shout out, in Ottawa, Canada with a group of about 20 people in the audience. Other than that, this is a regular podcast. In this episode we'll be talking about the new book, The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians. The book is mostly about competition policy, which is not automatically a bestseller topic, I will say, but these two authors make it accessible in many interesting and serious ways. We'll be covering topics from high grocery prices and consumer protection to monopolies, artificial intelligence, professional wrestling, the fake kind, to implications of the US elections, and a number of policy ideas that the book proposes. We have both co-authors here, which is great.

Ooo.

And let me introduce them. And these will be in the show notes as well, the full bios. Denise Hearn is an author, applied researcher and advisor to many financial institutions, policymakers, companies and organizations on antitrust economic policy and new economic thinking. She's a resident senior fellow at Columbia University's Centre on Sustainable Investment, and she co-authored The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and The Death of Competition, which was named one of the Financial Times Best Books of 2018. Welcome, Denise.

Thank you.

Vass Bednar's work focuses, you know her a bit if you're listening to this podcast, but her work focuses on the intersections between policy and innovation, and she's the executive director of McMaster's University's Master of Public Policy in Digital Society Program and a senior fellow at CIGI. Kudos. She was recently recognized as a key changemaker by The Globe and Mail, that's really cool, and hosts their podcast lately. So welcome to you both.

What does she not do? What can't she do?

Well, you can read in the show notes, the bios are much more extensive. Both of our authors have newsletters as well, and so you'll look for those in the show notes. So here we are at the perfect place, Perfect Books again, shout out, no pressure on you. Perfect place.

Perfect co-authors.

We'll see.

Perfect podcast.

Perfect host.

Here we come.

So I thought for the first question that we should peel it back a tiny bit, in that this competition policy label, I think somewhere in the book it says it's now the topic of dinner conversations. I wasn't totally convinced on that point that it's quite that mainstream?

Are you fact checking us?

But it's getting there, and then when you unpack it, there's a lot in there. And one of the things that I thought of is of the three Ms of it's about market manipulation, monopolies and mergers. So it's about tons of stuff. There's other things in there, but a lot of people that are listening to this podcast don't necessarily know what competition policy is. So the audience probably does for the most part, but can you say in a few words what's at the heart of competition policy for you?

Yeah. We do have some competition experts in the audience, so we'll see how we do. They can rate us on this answer. The way that we describe it is that competition policy is a way of analyzing power in the economy, how it aggregates, how it accumulates, and whether that power is used beneficially to create good outcomes for workers and consumers, and independent businesses, or whether that power is abused in ways that make the economy less livable for all of us. And then it's also about the kind of structures that we have, the policies, the mechanisms we have to understand how markets are made and remade, and what options we have to try to make them again more flourishing, working better for more people.

Right. So there's a ton in there and it's super critical, right? It's foundational, it's power, it's structures. Vass, anything you wanted to add?

I would add that I think through the book we're trying to remind people that competition policy is more than just the Competition Act, which in Canada is the core piece of legislation that governs how we enforce and police the economy, but we make and remake, and reshape markets all the time through other legislative levers that are really important to think about. So I would tuck that in under Denise's incredible answer.

Thank you. Thank you. And just welcome again to anyone who's come in and feel free to find a seat, anything you like and it's all good. So when we think about competition in Canada, there are always lots of complaints. There are memes there, Reddit, Threads, there's all that kind of stuff, and so there's a lot of chatter about it. Do you contribute to those Reddit threads by the way? Or are you out there on this?

No. I wish I was good at Reddit. I wish.

It's true, [inaudible 00:05:50]-

I do read around sometimes, but I don't actually have a handle on that forum and I think it's a missed opportunity.

It's more mainstream now than it was a year or two ago even, right? Reddit.

What about you?

Well-

I thought you had to have coins to post on Reddit. So I just recently got corrected on that. I was like, "Does anyone have coins? Can you post this for me?" And they were like, "You don't understand the internet."

Vass is amazing because she's a meme queen. She knows what happens on the internet, whereas I'm basically a boomer. I don't know what's going on at any given time. And she's really good at picking up on public sentiment and where the public is identifying a problem where they're getting angry, there's a blah blah subreddit. There's merch that's talking about concentration in Canada. And I think those are such great opportunities to harness the public conversation and then say, "Yes, you've identified a problem, and you're absolutely right to have identified this problem, and now let us point you to the actual places where there are solutions and join those." So you transmute that anger into an actual policy agenda that can actually affect change.

And so what do you think is working from your perspective right now in competition policy? Is there something, let's start off with something that is on the positive side. We've got a list of things we're going to go through, but is there something at the top of your list about what's working pretty well right now or even well?

Maybe outside of what the government is doing, I'm glad you mentioned memes and I would include merch in that territory. I think it's important to recognize and respect even if people are doing something that can be antagonistic or has an element of levity that policymakers, decision makers, researchers, we need to learn how to pay better attention to those movements and those expressions because it's part of our work is, I think, identifying and translating what it means to be upset about that element you made a about how to connect and motivate someone that change is possible, or we can make the telecommunication market in Canada better, but also there are all these other spaces, right? So I guess I just want us to be careful about discounting those things. As for some of the other memes I've sent Denise over the years, they're not all necessarily competition related, but it is good to have somebody who can translate those. I have to be careful about not speaking in a meme or making too many references, but I'll come back to what we're doing well, what's going well in Canada. Go ahead.

I mean, we are always touting the fact that the recent legislative changes, so we passed three rounds of changes to our competition law. And for context, Canada used to have one of the weakest laws in the world in this area. We had a major loophole called the efficiencies defense, which allowed firms to merge basically at will. And it was very difficult to bring a case to say that they shouldn't. And Canada, within a matter of a year and a half, went from one of the weakest legislative regimes to one of the strongest, and that passed unanimously through Parliament, which we find just astounding and such a success story.

And we don't think that one law changes the game necessarily, but it is a huge foundation upon which we can now build a stronger enforcement regime. We can bring better cases. So that's definitely something that we've gotten right, and I think really speaks to, there's a lot of cynicism about, "Can government do anything these days? Is there any bipartisanship, cross-partisanship in any policy area?" And we're here to say, "Yes, there is, and this is a really exciting area." And that's just one of, we think a number of things that Canada has gotten right in this area actually.

Great. And so that's the Competition Act you were talking about, right?

Yeah.

And before that it was stale for a few decades, right, before the big changes that you're referring to?

Mm-hmm.

Vass?

Yeah, basically I would say that Canada's anti monopoly movement has been really strengthened. We have the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project-

Hup, hup.

... in the audience who's also a CIGI fellow. We have another CIGI fellow who's an academic here in the crowd, Jennifer Quaid. I think we're seeing more research, more attention back to that how do you translate from a meme or an expression and help concretize not just what the problems are, but where the solution set or the opportunity set is, and make things more exciting and less defeatist. I think we're still, it feels like it's part of our DNA in Canada to call out concentration but also almost take it as a part of our heritage, like a heritage minute because we've been told that our geography is our destiny or we don't have the population to warrant the kind of robust markets that we imagine, but we're also putting forward to people that it doesn't have to be that way.

And one last thing on memes is, of course, those Reddit threads that are often sub, sub, sub threads are all being scraped into the large language models, so that is now become part of the kit that's out there. So it comes back to us through those chat functions now, the Reddit inputs. So it's all very circular in a way. So we talked about some of the positives. There is a lot of angst in Canada and the same thing in Europe. A lot of European countries, there's other kinds of angst, perhaps, in the US, but most countries are comparing themselves to the US right now and saying, "Why isn't our productivity nearly half as good as the US trajectory?" And so there's a little bit of a, "We don't have it right. Canada's on the wrong track," OECD studies left and right, especially on productivity. But is there something there that we're on a trajectory that you're worried about or are you optimistic now because we've got wind in our sails with the new Act in Canada?

Yeah, I mean productivity, those trends have been systematic over time and larger macro trends, and now there's much more attention paid to them, but they are structural, and they're also structural in the US by the way. I think the productivity maybe has gotten a boost from The Magnificent Seven, but when you look at the rest of the public markets, like all of the rest of the 493 companies are essentially flatlining and you only have these seven firms that are extremely productive, and so I think it depends on how we're talking about productivity, what types. But Canada, I think you look at the macro data, and for years we've had under-investment by our major corporations, we have declining startup rates. So declining firm exit and entry. Vass always, I feel bad because she's heard me talk about this now so many times, but the thing that blew my mind when I was researching for this, I was writing, I was like, "I'm going to go find some interesting stuff for my financialization chapter for the book.

And I found that in Canada last year we had 135 IPOs, public offerings, companies going public on the TSX. And 84% of those were ETFs, exchange traded funds, which are bundles of existing companies that are just a form of financial engineering. So they're not adding net new jobs, they're not operational companies. And so these are things that are really a big problem for Canada going forward in terms of our growth, in terms of productivity, creating new jobs, creating more innovation. So we think competition is definitely a part of this answer. It's not the only thing. There's lots of things that go into making the productivity pie, if you will, but this is a really important ingredient.

And especially if it's per capita. So the question of population growth, aging, immigration, all that is key, and we're seeing some changes there in Canada. There may be some changes coming in the US. There's a lot of turbulence there as well.

For sure.

So a lot going on. We should acknowledge that something pretty big happened south of the border over the last couple of weeks.

What was that?

There was an election, so today we're taping November 13th, right? Today, it was confirmed just a few hours ago that the Congress will be Republican led, including the house by at least a seat or two, right? So it is a Republican Congress and Trump 2.0. How's that going to matter? Maybe there's a couple angles we could explore. One would be the existing antitrust work, breaking up some monopolies by the Biden administration, looking at that. Is that likely to continue to fade away? We're guessing, and is there something about the imposition of tariffs that would matter if we get an across the board 10% tariff in Canada, that is huge in every element of our economy and society really, but is there a link between tariffs and competition policy in some ways for how it might shake things up in Canada? So maybe either of those questions about antitrust or tariffs, et cetera.

I mean, I don't want to be so presumptuous as to answer anything about the climate in the US, but maybe one thing I'll pick up on, I really appreciate that you're connecting productivity to competition, connecting trade to competition. Because I also think for a long time, a lot of the time people ask us, "How did we get here? Tell us how bad we suck, and why do we suck so bad?" Kind of thing, but in our policy approaches, the idea that you have to be polite or stay in your policy lane or stay in your target, that's not ours. That happens somewhere else.

We don't think about competition when we talk about, I mean, with trade elements, we do end up... Something I've been reading about or doom scrolling about related to the prospect and the dynamics of these tariffs is how once again, we see that the public is being primed for price increases that are likely to come, but also end up being opaque in a particular way. So already some companies due to their market power may be getting a little bit excited about their ability to put their prices up again too.

[inaudible 00:16:27] inputs into progress.

And inputs in addition to the penalty essentially that we would be paying to access those products, so that's something that ends up being-

A lot of moving pieces right now potentially on the horizon, right? Denise, what do you think?

Well, I just became, I'm Canadian, but I became a US citizen last year, so this was my first election experience. So just going full force straight in. And I mean, on the antitrust side, I think it's a very open question as to what will happen under a Trump administration because JD Vance has been very supportive of the current Biden regime approach to antitrust going so far as to say that Biden's appointment of Lina Khan who chairs the Federal Trade Commission in the US, which is the big, is one of two agencies responsible for antitrust enforcement in the US, that she was Biden's best appointment. And so we know that there's certainly sympathy. Also, the Trump administration brought some of the first big tech antitrust cases in his first term. So I think we'll see at least some continuation of particularly on the big tech side, and also in the US there's a lot of bipartisanship at the state level of bringing multi state coalition cases against big tech in particular.

So I think those will all continue, but of course, it remains to be seen what happens from there. And then on tariffs, I am by no means a trade expert. My understanding is every trade agreement is effectively negotiated bilaterally, often between hundreds of different countries and very specific. And so we don't know to what extent the tariffs would be applied to specific industries or to specific countries as a penalty. I mean, I think we have an inkling of what Trump cares about in that sense, but we don't know exactly how that would affect Canada. But clearly I think the main point is that you can no longer divorce a conversation about competition policy from industrial policy and protectionism, and basically that the locus of competition has really changed from just between firms to also between nation states and them protecting their own supply chains, them protecting their own critical assets of various kinds. And so I think you'll see much deeper thinking about the relationship between competition and trade competition, and industrial policy going forward.

My sense is the tariffs are real, that they're coming, that there will be a 10% across the board tariff. Now, it gets very tricky. Is that applied to energy and things like that, which have not had tariffs applied to them anyway for a long time. But when the US, last time Trump 1.0 came to steal an aluminum, Canada was not exempted initially. And so it feels like we're heading to the same space where it's like something will be imposed and then you tell me why we don't do it, so there's a real risk of that. It's going to be messy as well with even the appointments, the Republicans issued a report, I think about FTC, Commissioner Khan as well about inappropriate behavior. So they're going to be really divided on these things. There was some kind of report that came out. So JD Vance has been positive, but others haven't been, so it's going to be really messy.

Aren't there also Khanservatives, K-H-A-N?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly. So some will want, but the appointments right now are coming fast and furious.

For sure.

And the senate appointments process will be expedited, so things will happen quickly.

I mean, that role is very political. It ends up being political naturally, and I don't think the competition commissioner's role in Canada is as politicized or maybe as public, but we have spent a lot of time in Canada looking for villains and trying to punish villains, but we don't quite have the hero character. And for us, I do think that's probably Commissioner Boswell. Canada doesn't have a Klobuchar or-

Elizabeth Warren.

... Elizabeth Warren. I was like, "The woman with the glasses and the short hair who's amazing," or a Senator Warren. So where do we have those more formal champions who-

We do have a Senator Colin Deacon though?

We do have Senator Colin Deacon, absolutely Energizer Bunny. But maybe he's just a step away from some of the decision making or proposal making power that others would have. But shout out to Colin Deacon for sure.

I just also want to say on the trade and tariffs thing, obviously I think Trump hopes to accelerate the reshoring, nearshoring dynamics that are structural that will continue, but you cannot rebuild global supply chains in a day. It takes decades actually.

It's like we're sitting CHIPS, right?

Yes.

It takes a while.

It takes a long time, and there's more political narrative, I think, juice in it than there probably is the ability to actually retrain an entire workforce, build huge CapEx required factories and so on and so forth. And also, once you lose the institutional knowledge of how to manufacture things in a country which the US has lost for the last 40 years, you can't just snap your fingers and bring it all back. So I think there will actually be... It'll be very interesting to see how some of his policies play out, including the rollback of the IRA, the Climate Bill.

Inflation Reduction Act.

Inflation Reduction Act, because actually a lot of that money is going to red states and bringing back manufacturing capacity in interesting ways.

There's going to be huge debate about it, I think, right?

Yeah.

Because there's some claims that it's soft money that's not really going to the right things. Partly to your point of you just dump money in something, you're not going to have a new CHIP manufacturing facility in 18 months radar.

Mm-hmm.

So a lot going on there. You mentioned the Competition Bureau, we'll come back to that in a bit because you were there earlier today, and so let's unpack that. But you said one thing that caught my attention about the independence of the superheroes that are out there. I think you used those words. In Canada, one thing in the book, is you talk about how arm's length organizations like the Competition Bureau, is that arm's length enough from the, I said the industry, Innovation Science and Economic Development minister, it is fairly arm's length. The way that things work is these bureaus, they're part of the reporting structure into ministers, but they're quite arm's length in Canada. But I think you're suggesting that it might even go further to be a little bit removed from the daily thing. But I do want to say that they're actually pretty independently operating right now, really. So did you have thoughts on that where again, we'll get into various policy issues, but on that specific point that you noted, what do you think about independence?

I mean, back to where people are and how they talk about competition or competition issues, the bureau has made these huge incredible strides in intentionally drafting major reports in plain more common accessible language. There's also differences in terms of responsiveness or accessibility of the leaders of these fora. If you do compare to Lina Khan and her social media presence, she's not sharing memes. She may want to or she may in a burner account, but she can be very responsive to the public on behalf of the FTC very quickly. And sometimes we don't quite have that, and that could partially be a function of approvals and being nested within somewhere versus a more independent voice. Paul, you as a former public servant, that probably terrifies you like the prospect. I don't know, I'm seeing some discomfort.

No, actually. Look, I know I would say, I mean I worked in the United States for the energy labs, and I thought that that was super interesting that they are truly arm's-length. It's kind of, "Work on this stuff, tell us what you think, give us some advice, but we're not going to be asking you for briefing notes during the week," right? Totally different system. And the arm's-length in Canada is still not that arm's-length, so I'm with you on that.

Well, and I think maybe the broader point is just about alignment of goals and purposes, and that sometimes there is a risk where you have a bureau that is a law enforcement agency nested within a ministry whose ultimate purpose is also to promote Canadian industry in various ways that there may be times where those two agendas are at cross purposes.

Just picking up on something, I want to question one of our assumptions. You were specifying, right? You're like, "Well, the Competition Bureau doesn't have a policy function, it has an enforcement function."

Yeah.

Well, why aren't we also asking, "Could we have a bureau that also has a stronger policy function?" When you look at Canada's wonderful, very comprehensive, very important consultation on the future of competition policy in Canada, the bureau came out, guns are blazing, and something that I find that we find that we talked about very provocative and ballsy to come out and basically be like, "Here are 50 incredible ideas from our perspective that Canada should be thinking about."

In a very wonky world of what I was saying before, "Who gets to do what, and that's not my brief or not my portfolio?" That was wonderful that we had that in the conversation, and I think somewhat political too. There's risk associated with that. There are incredible ideas that I'm sure came up and got deleted last minute or got tucked in before someone clicked publish or things like that, and I think that's important to keep in mind. And part of rethinking how we do this thing called competition policy in Canada, just because we've minimized the policy function of the Bureau historically doesn't mean that it can't have more of a policy function going forward or that it shouldn't.

Well, lots of international competition regulators also have a rulemaking capacity where they can actually issue rulemakings that affect the entire economy, regulations essentially. And so we do think that's important. The other thing that we keep waiting for someone to fact check us on, but we did some research, and according to our calculations, the Bureau only gets about 3% of the entire OECD budget. And when you think about how the economy has grown massively, how mergers and acquisitions keep rising, and you have one agency that is responsible for essentially policing the entire economy that is getting more and more complex, more and more convoluted, more globally interconnected in many ways, you need to be allocating more resources to this entity. And also when you think about it in those terms that it's only less than 3% of this ministry's budget, I think that gives you a sense of how sometimes the priorities aren't always in alignment.

Mm-hmm. Are you looking for somebody to fact check to you on that on that stat?

Yeah. We like fact checking.

We can arrange that. We can arrange that.

We're used to men replying to us online if we have an idea.

Yeah, [inaudible 00:28:06].

So we were like, let's put this to good use. And I think they're still crunching numbers.

Yeah.

I think it's a good number actually, but I think it depends a little bit what you're counting because there are a lot of things in that portfolio across-

For sure.

... the board of just different programs and things, but I think the point still totally holds, but we will keep coming to this throughout the conversation about, because your book has a lot of policy ideas and prescriptions in it. And one of them that occurs to me that's in there as we're talking about this now is the broader policy function that you're referring to, but it goes beyond just the competition bureau or its additional pieces. Isn't there a broader question about economic strategy and policy for Canada in general? We don't have an economic advisory council or anything like that that is truly there as an advisory. Now, a government could say we like that advice or we don't like the advice, but we don't actually have that on the table in Canada. There is no high level group that says, "Hey, why aren't you doing more of this or less of that?" Even above competition policy.

But could it be that that pressure comes from other places now versus something that's static or more predictable, which I see utility too as well. Because I hear when people call for councils like this or a productivity council sometimes I think has come up. My question, I guess, in the group text with my friends is like, it's interesting to think about that's a way of saying, me talking to myself-

Or to me.

... or to Denise, meme, major question late at night falling asleep. Is why do we think we need that, right? What is the discomfort or the absence of that? The absence of having, is it structural or is it the feeling that without something like that government will not take in or input ideas or have a common ear because at times that can be the outsource or piecemeal, or expert papers can be commissioned.

I guess, I'm interested in it from a design element, all of which to say we have not re-articulated what Canada's position is in terms of that role of the state in mediating markets, making markets more free and fair. Historically, we privileged the holy grail of efficiency, and efficiency is still a very cool thing in many facets of life for many people and can be very valuable and rewarding, but it's not our north star anymore. What's the new north star for Canada? What do we want to ensure our policies and our structures can do and are doing? What are we measuring? We're not quite there yet. We're in fits and starts.

I think it would be fair objectively to say that Canada's a bit light on policy conversation. We don't have a lot of-

Says the president of a major think tank on policy.

But we don't... So to that point, we don't have a lot of think tanks.

We're on Policy Prompt, right?

We don't have a lot of think tanks in Ottawa. There's not across the road here, all these think tanks. There aren't these national energy labs. There's no science, national science foundation of the big thinkers. So what happens when you have a really tight bubble? Civil service is great in Ottawa, but how much marge de manoeuvre, how much space do they have to really come in with this? Think about this. It's hard to do from inside, and so that seems to be missing in Canada holistically.

Oh, you mean the cover for good ideas too? Other people putting out are like-

There's some cover elements to it, and just the freedom to just, you have more time and space. So I think it is a weakness. You get at some of that in your book with some of the ideas, and we'll get to some of those I thought are great things, but there is a broader question about just in general. And the evidence would be why do we need it? Well, because the OECD is telling us we'll be in last place over the next 15 years if we don't change course. So it's not a political issue to be solved in the next budget. It's actually a much more fundamental thing. So I think that's one of the takeaways that I had from your book that it reinforces that point, I think.

Yeah. And maybe just to circle back to something we had talked about the beginning, which is we think that good ideas can come from anywhere really. And they don't necessarily have to come from think tanks. They often come from the people who are experiencing their own market power dynamics every single day. You speak to entrepreneurs, you speak to workers, they know way better what they're experiencing than I do or the vast us.

The consumer protection groups-

Consumer protection-

... like real data.

Yeah, exactly. And so certainly I think more groups that are able to aggregate those types of voices and then feed those stories and those narratives upwards is really important. And maybe there is a bit of that middle infrastructure that's missing. I also, I guess be careful what you wish for in a way too because there's lots of opportunities for think tanks or other groups to be set up that have their own funding sources and their own agendas at play. And I think it becomes even more imperative to ensure that we do have these sort of consumer or worker protection groups that can have their voices heard in the policymaking process. And we do talk a lot about how can you democratize the policymaking process so that it's not just policy wonks who are feeding into these consultations.

Totally, totally agree.

Paul, I'm interested. I know I'm in the hot seat and I'm not allowed to be the co-host.

You've been pretty good. You can-

However, no, I'm interested that you would put that forward because again, back to testing and challenging some of the norms here, it's fascinating to me to think about how important external thought leadership is and can be, right?

Mm-hmm.

In the scheme of things, I get it. Building support for an idea sometimes just like, "Hey, I hadn't thought of that. That's great." Ideas in the ecosystem, you can pluck, you can tuck it in an economic statement, you can test it around. That's wonderful. But it's also maybe it shouldn't have to be that way in a sense, back to incredible civil servants and expertise that's in-house. The idea to me that we would overprivilege outside thought from inside thought as well across government and even through political layers, I just find interesting and putting out there-

Critical.

... and just putting my laser pointer on like, why is it like that?

Well, you talk in one of your recommendations in the book that comes towards the end that I really looked at carefully was the Citizens' Assembly kind of model. It speaks a little bit to what you were saying, Denise, about you need these voices that are, what about what are people thinking in different regions? What are they experiencing? You don't want to top-down, we know best kind of model, but you need some of that to provoke sometimes the right discussions. But maybe could you talk a little bit about what a Citizens' Assembly might look like, right? Personally, I think we need them on a whole bunch of issues right now. Competition policy may not call it that to attract lots of people, but what would that look like? How do you make it real? Can you just say a little bit more about that?

So Citizens' Assembly is like jury duty for public policy ideas. And actually something that's quite similar in the policy world to it is if you've ever wondered about seatbelt laws or bicycle helmet laws actually in Canada in provinces, those are the result of coroner's inquiries which have a similar function. So that's like an example of a policy change that came from something that's democratic and ends up being calling on citizens. If you were to avengers assemble, mail out to many Canadians and say, "Hey, who wants to put their hand up and commit a few weekends in a row to come and think and talk about something?" You'd have to make the question fairly specific. But we could do something like a Citizens' Assembly on price transparency. And in these situations there's a little bit of a bootcamp element too. So it's not just, what's the movie like, 12 Jurymen, The Jury? Now, I can't do real references anymore.

12 Angry Men.

Thanks. I can only do memes.

12 Angry Men, or which is that what you mean? The old one?

A hundred percent.

Okay.

We need to update that for a DEI world, but anyway. It's not like that. It's not about locking up people together and being, "Figure this out. Google your hardest, go as fast as you can. Give us some great ideas." They listen, they listened to stakeholders, they get presentations from experts and excerpts probably somewhere. And when Canada was developing its online Harms Bill, a Citizens' Assembly was part of that strategy and part of an input, and part of the listening. So it's not hard for us to imagine putting that forward as part of democratizing where policy ideas come from and where they go.

And I think directionally we're seeing policymakers, especially politically pay a lot of attention to what people are saying and why they're saying that. You mentioning the US election, I mean nobody seems to be able to, no incumbent seems to be able to really push past inflation, just the experience of inflation and the emotions associated with inflation. And to the extent that some of inflation is fundamentally a corporate power story as well makes you wonder how do you ask everyday people to help connect those dots and come up with setting, resetting new expectations. We think a Citizens' Assembly could do it.

Right. And there's an engagement. This engages people too. It's not just an information gathering kind of assessment thing. People need to be engaged in issues in a way that they're not very much [inaudible 00:38:38].

And it's different than saying, it's different from that element of broad and open public consultation, which we know and see and naturally tends to be crowded by private interests. I used to joke one of my jokes, that's not very good like, you could spend, imagine just spending a year participating in public consultations. You could do it every day. You could go in person places, you could write exhaustively, I don't know. I think you would learn a lot. It would be fascinating. That's like my zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, but to what end? And when we call those activities public consultations, are they really conversations that we're having with the public or are they conversations we're having with key stakeholders that we were already talking to and going to speak with anyway?

Or worse yet, checking off a box to say, "We did a consultation on X in region Y." So you have to do them right, absolutely. I wondered if we could circle back, and let's keep coming back to this, what happened south of the border and what's going to happen is a really big deal. We're guessing on certain things, but let's take a scenario where Lina Khan, JD Vance says, "Let's go with it," and these Khanservatives you referred to, Vass, carry the day, and so she continues with a similar direction that she's been doing on antitrust, looking at some of the big monopolies, Google, et cetera. What does that look like? Where might that go under that scenario? And it's just one scenario for sure. Maybe not even the most likely one, but it's possible, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the misnomers maybe about the US antitrust regime under Biden is that it has been overly focused on tech, but actually it hasn't at all. It's been extremely active in all kinds of other areas. Agriculture, they did the first case against a private equity firm, rolling up veterinary clinics. They've done a huge amount in healthcare, grocery, consumer staples, luxury. I mean, they've done basically everything. And so I think you would expect that same level of horizon scanning to say, "Okay, where are their opportunity areas for us to bring forward cases that will be successful where we can have a real impact on the lives of consumers and workers? Where can we set novel precedent?" Like they've done in certain cases, but there's other things that they've done. For an example like the non-compete ban, which was a rulemaking, very controversial. It probably will go to the Supreme Court.

It's being heavily contested, and basically there's a huge effort to undermine not only the FTC but all other federal agencies and contest the territory that they have under congressional authority. So do they have the right, do they have the ability to do the things that they're doing essentially? And those are experiencing all kinds of legal challenges under something called the major questions doctrine. So I think that you would see that continue where there's a lot of vested interest in basically shrinking the universe in which the agencies can operate and the types of rules that they can issue. So I think it would be a bit of a mixed bag. It's not necessarily a coherent, it's not always coherent, I would say.

Unlike us, we're always coherent.

Totally, totally.

One of the things I was doomscrolling and reading was about how in key contested states, the antitrust activity was a place of harmony amongst voters that voters of both stripes liked that. So I think that's something that keeps us a little bit optimistic, but maybe there's also an opportunity for some spillover and for Canada to pick up the torch that it already has lit, but hold it even higher, try to run a little bit faster. And we do see back to just what we lament, "Oh, things take so long, it's hard to speak back and forth." Canada has been moving quickly on a bunch of competition policy relevant things, and we have to remember that and remind ourselves of it sometimes because those modest changes are still quite meaningful in the scheme of things. And I think it helps build that optimism that we can change and do things differently by reminding people that we actually do.

Yeah. And I don't want to be a downer here, but if the other scenarios play out where antitrust grinds to a halt in the US and it's maybe even the opposite, which are some of the voices down there that will probably be in the new secretary positions or senior positions, what's the impact of that on Canada and other countries if the top 10 largest companies in the world, as you say, it's not just tech, but a lot of them, the biggest, biggest of the big guard tech, what's the implication of that for countries like Canada if it stops? Is it going to be tougher? It's going to make things tougher for us?

I mean, I wonder if we've been here or been there before being in that scenario, not under Trump 1.0, but there was a period of time in the US where the approach to innovation policy or industrial policy was explicitly permissionless innovation, was stand back, hands back, pencils down, let's do cool things, all the cliches move fast, break things. And now what we see policymakers having to do and grapple with is that harm minimization model or grasping at the toolkit that we already have to minimize poor outcomes that don't necessarily get at the core either business model or market structure of the firm.

So what would it mean for Canada? I mean, we don't have our own big tech cases quite yet. It doesn't mean that we haven't been looking at or looked at Amazon. We have new powers, market study powers, so maybe we will see more of an echo of some of what could be paused or feels like will go away. Those are global conversations and global regulatory conversations too. So it will still be fascinating to see what happens, but it feels like anything goes or anyone knows type thing.

Yeah, I feel like the trade policy really comes to the fore, and maybe some of those fights move into that jurisdiction a bit more.

There are, of course, rumors that Lighthizer would return in some trade role, and he was there during Trump 1.0, and he was pretty active on the trade, the tariff man junior, right? I mean, I guess it goes back to the point of there are going to be a lot of conversations in Canada about what do we do?

Bangers are popping their champagne as we speak, right? So I think people expect deal making to go up again, to be less friction, more frictionless. And I always thought that a more interventionist, antitrust regime in the US benefited Canada because then you're holding these, particularly the tech firms, but others, the agricultural giants and so on to account and curtailing their ability to ever expand their dominance, and they do want to get into Canada. Of course, they like our markets, they want to expand their profit margins by coming here too. So who knows. But I do see our book on the shelf back there, which is fun.

I've been shopping with my eyes for some of this episode.

I know.

[inaudible 00:46:38] when you see me wandering, I hope I look pensive because I'm like, "I'm going to buy that. I'm going to buy that, demo that."

We're taking photos of books that we're going to dive into soon. Let's change gears now for a bunch of other things we want to talk about. We'll come to artificial intelligence in a minute, but I did promise that we would talk about professional wrestling in some manner. So Kayfabe is out there. If you look at the book, you don't really see what that is until you get into the book a bit. So you've got to work for it and it's worth it because it's a really good analogy about how wrestling looks like. What I always loved is the fact that the hammer, the fist comes down at the same moment as the foot on the ground that makes a lot of noise and it looks super dramatic-

Suspicious.

... but nothing has happened. There's no problem. So what's Kayfabe about and how does that relate to the topic here?

I mean, I think it's obvious we're big professional wrestling fans.

Huge.

Yeah, I thought that.

I did try to convince Denise to pronounce it Kingfabe so we could make it sound fancier, but I have to be careful. We don't accept that. Denise came across it and was reminded of it, and in our scrappier days of mood boarding and bullets, and outlines, and then we didn't let go of it. It was kicking around in our minds the concept of Kayfabe, that everything is fictitious, prescribed, and we're pantomiming and going through things, and we felt like a lot of what we wanted to describe in terms of how markets had changed or how they functioned felt like an episode on pro wrestling. I did beef up on pro wrestling a little bit in grade seven because I had a crush on Kevin Patterson, and he seemed really interested in wrestling.

Not the Undertaker?

It didn't work. I don't know.

But to be clear, real pro professional wrestlers are incredibly tough. The real wrestling or the Olympics, this is one of the most intense sports and real deal. Those are pro wrestlers too, in a way. Don't they-

Right. So they're just as-

It's just that certain segment of the show wrestling-

It's just like [inaudible 00:48:46], which is like the entertainment, everything's fabricated. There's this fake rivalries. And we thought that was the perfect illustration or metaphor for markets today where it's like everybody pretends to compete, but actually behind the scenes they're pretty cozy. And also that it's very rare to break character as a professional wrestler. And when you break that fourth wall, we tell the story in the book about someone who was a world champion four years in a row and then came out, and actually announced on stage like, "Hey, my real name is Joe-"

Roman Reigns.

Roman Reigns, "And I actually have to leave pro wrestling because I have leukemia," and that was so rare because it's called breaking kayfabe. It's where you break the illusion, you break character, and so anyway, we thought that was a great metaphor for-

I think it is a great one.

We're in kayfabe capitalism now.

And The Rock was a wrestler and became an actor and-

Maybe we can get him to do a spot on the Big Fix.

"Do you smell what The Rock is cooking?" That was around my time in junior high, a lot of boys were saying that in the hallway.

Yeah.

A transition to a successful acting career. Great for him.

Yeah. And he'll probably live forever with-

And he kept the name, which is interesting.

Yeah. Well, it's worked I guess, hasn't it? So I thought that was pretty cool. It made me think of Kabuki theater and things like that too. There are a lot of art forms of showing distress and big things, but not really it having a massive physical consequence.

I mean, you could say that being the minister of innovation and marching CEOs down to Ottawa to slap their wrists is an element of kayfabe too potentially in terms of-

[inaudible 00:50:30] Kabuki theater.

... of just, what are we really accomplishing here? Who are we performing for? Who's the audience and what are we accomplishing?

But again, isn't it getting more real and real for Canada as the months go by? I think of the CUSMA, NAFTA 2.0, USMCA. It's got many official titles because of the different languages and countries. That will have to be renewed by July 2026 where each one of the countries says, "Yes, we want to keep this going." It's a thing. It's a call for the administration and not the Congress. It's an executive level decision as I understand it.

Won't the US, like Canada would say, "Let's go for it, keep it going, let's continue it. No changes. We're good." Mexico will say the same thing, but the United States will say, "Yeah, let's keep it, but with a whole bunch of conditions. We don't like your cozy banking system, and we don't like your cozy airlines, and your telecoms, and oh yeah, dairy." Aren't all those things coming towards us now in a way that's going to shake up just a lot of stuff? I mean, I know you don't have crystal balls, but I'm just trying to make the point that there's a lot of things coming potentially under a fairly likely scenario in some ways, turbulence.

Yeah. Well, and the interesting thing about trade negotiations is that, to your point, they do supersede parliament. They supersede national regulatory regimes. So that is an avenue by which oftentimes the largest firms will try to insert terms that are favorable to them, and sometimes under a national champions approach where it's like, "Okay, we want to support the Canadian dominant firms or whatever, we're going to insert terms that they are feeding to us in terms of our trade negotiations." But I do think that that is a really critical area to better understand and to better understand what we want to accomplish through our trade policy as a country, and what elements are worth being protectionist over and which ones are not. Because Vass and I, we often hear like, "Oh, just bring a foreign competitor, bring a foreign competitor." And we don't necessarily think that that always solves the problems that we're trying to address. In grocery, as an example, Vass and I have talked about if we brought Trader Joe's, we like Trader Joe's.

We love snacks.

Yeah. They have really great vegetarian breakfast patties if anyone's tried them. But actually, what is it like, 80% or something? A very high percentage is private label is all Trader Joe's private label products. And so bringing that into Canada, that doesn't necessarily help Canadian suppliers that want to get on the shelf. It's a closed ecosystem. So what kind of level of competition are we talking about? What are we hoping it will accomplish? Is the primary goal lowering prices for consumers? If that's the goal, okay, then maybe we talk about that. Is it to create a more diverse food ecosystem? That's a different outcome. Is it to support SME? Is a different outcome, right? So I think these things are complicated, but the trade elements are certainly a huge component.

Totally. So let's turn to artificial intelligence because you have a chapter on it. I thought it was a good chapter of just setting up what the heck is this anyway, of which there's a whole debate around that, so you have to describe what your take on it is. And so let's dive into a few elements here. But we're really talking about generative AI as the latest twist and accelerated change agent here. But what would you say about AI and how it's playing into this? You made a couple of comments that I'll let you say in the book. What do you want to say on AI?

Maybe I'll kick off on one element in particular with generative AI because it follows what Denise was just saying around more isn't necessarily always better. And something that captured us as we were seeing the slop and pollution of generative material. You can call it synthetic materials-

From Reddit?

Everywhere.

I want to make [inaudible 00:54:53].

You're still on Reddit, I think you are the big Redditor with all the coins that I was imagining.

What's handle? What do you even call it, your name?

I think it's probably called Anonymous Porcupine or something if I'm on that.

Mine is Vice-like Basilica.

I'm not on, there actually.

Is that's what-

Guest.

... the word processing tool that I was using back in grade seven used to autocorrect my name too. It was like Vice-like Bednar. Did you mean Vice-like Basilica? And one day I was just like, "Yes, I did." So seeing the pollution often referred to as slop. And one, we never even had a conversation of, this belongs in our marketplaces. We're still intrigued. It's interesting, "Look what a computer did." I, even despite teaching and running a program on Policy and Digital Society, I try to not even use the word algorithm too much because it seems, I think it makes this material seem fancier than it deserves to be. So we're making-

This material, meaning the stuff that comes out of chatbots-

Yeah, I'm going to-

... interfaces?

... say stuff that generates fake news, fake audio, fake video, fake images. But we don't use the word fake. We say generative. So we wanted to say, "Look, take this context of music," if you and when you're on Reddit, Paul, you're probably listening to a playlist on Spotify like Jazz for reading. And increasingly it seems that computer programs are making songs. Someone's still remunerated on the back end that are inserted into our feeds without us knowing. So there's a deceptive element that's annoying, but there's also a displacement where very modest remuneration could have, should have been going to human artists who are, I'll say, I don't know, authentic, real, and what's better for certain companies instead of dealing with labor and wages than mimicking what those people can produce and just putting it out there. So that's our higher entry point abstraction.

One thing on that though, you mentioned in the book, I think it was in the book, some legislation for musicians, right? That's in the US right now-

Oh, yeah.

... about fair compensation. I'm not sure the name of it exactly, but can you say a little about that seeing that you mentioned that?

I don't think it went anywhere.

It's out there, right? It exists.

Yeah. It's a proposal.

It's not caught on, but it's out there?

It's the Living Wage Free Musicians Act. So that would be an example of Redistributive Policy that in the US says maybe we should a price floor for streaming. And it's actually really heartbreaking as well, not just that we should seriously be thinking about legislation like this, but it's a penny a stream.

Oh, way, way less than that.

Less than that.

Way, way less than that.

It's like 0.001 or something like that.

Yeah, it's really low.

At the same time, I think it really illuminates how concentrated and challenging cultural marketplaces have become through digital. Anyway, I'm doing a long and rambling kind of, here's an example where-

No, it's a great example.

... more is not necessarily better, more is different, and again, back to markets being made and remade all the time. This material, I'm using the word pollution. This material is changing how those markets function. It's also changing what information we receive and how. And then the second element, I mean, I'll turn it to, I am sorry. I feel like I'm speaking a lot-

We're going to keep going on AI bit here, so just keep-

No, no, I will turn it. It's like that we're replicating... Again, we've been here before that. We're replicating structural concentration in terms of the rails or the companies who are privileged and poised to win the moment, but we're dressing it up with AI and maybe pretending that there's more competition there than there actually ever can be.

Well, I think when we talk about AI, it's talked about as this massive... It's going to be massively disruptive to innovation and it's going to unleash all this productivity, and so on and so forth, and that's the Canadian government stance, we're plowing a lot of money.

And you mean positive disruption when use the word disruption?

Positive disruption.

Yeah.

And I think obviously that is true. I mean, we don't have any inclination about the types of things that are going to happen in the next 10 years as a result of this technology. But what we do know is that there are only a handful of firms that have the supercomputers, the data centers, the data troves and the software encoding talent, and so on and so forth to aggregate and actually create the kind of, as Vass was saying, the rails or the infrastructure of producing AI upon which everyone else will build their stuff. And so it is like the old railroads where if you control the infrastructure, you control the game, and that's basically where we are. There's only a handful of nation states and a handful of major US tech firms that will have the capacity because it requires billions, and billions, and billions of dollars to plow into the actual hardware. I mean, so much so now this is so energy intensive that now all of the big tech firms are creating their own mini nuclear reactors.

Small modular reactors.

Right. To be able to power their data centers and creating exclusive energy agreements and so on and so forth. So to be able to actually control that much of the supply chain, also, can they use their procurement power to get access to the multiple millions of semiconductors that they need. So there's only a few firms that can basically do all of this, and that's where we think that's the underappreciated element that AI has a massive monopoly problem from the get-go. And how is that going to impact what solutions get built, how markets are already cornered from the beginning and so on.

You mentioned how big a deal it is in the US and it's really just California and Texas, but then there's China and then there's really no one else. There's a couple of small companies that are trying in France and elsewhere, but in Canada too, and they're not small, but they're not the biggest players. So that has, as you said, the railroads is a good analogy because it was very hard to build a railroad and only a few could do it. It's like the large language models.

But one thing I wanted to come back to is that I hear your criticisms of it's not really AI, it's not really new, but isn't there a risk that whether the disruption is positive or not, it is massively disruptive, and there's this potential for it to almost take on agency, whether you like it or not, it has enough power to become some kind of agent that ultimately could even be recognized legally as an agent. And so it really is fundamentally different here, whether it's good or bad, just leave that aside. Is it not so disruptive in a neutral sense, positive or negative, that it actually could be changing more than we acknowledge? Is that true? Are you worried about that?

Yeah, well, I mean all the smartest people in the world debate this very, it's hugely contested-

[inaudible 01:02:24] so we wanted to do it.

Well, I mean in the sense that you've got a certain camp that says, this is the end of humanity and we should all just pack up now essentially. And then you have another, which it calls this essentially a bubble, an over hyped bubble. And then I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in between, which is... And then it's also these debates about what is consciousness, what is information, what constitutes these things? And if you could debate about that for a long time. But what is clear is that the commercial uses of this are not totally evident yet. I think some firms are learning how to incorporate AI in ways that do make them more productive and more efficient, but we're still early days in that, and so I think there's not, people are like, is this a technology in search of a market? How are we going to monetize it? But it is clear that especially with generative content, and it is going to be massively disruptive for the labor force and also for white collar work, which finally gets-

And for artists.

Certain classes.

A lot of artists.

So it gets a certain class of people finally existentially worried.

And there's a bit of kayfabe going on there too in some ways, right?

I think we just wanted to try to focus on what is happening now that we can point to and grab onto. I sometimes wonder with generative material, remember how everyone felt about the sharing economy in, I'll say 2011 to maybe 2013? It was hot. It was going to transform everything. We were going to have to own less, share more. And that happened, but it also didn't revolutionize the economy in ways that we were promised.

So the risks cut both ways-

So I wonder if we're in that moment.

... is what you're saying. In a way, when you think of, I do think that economists get this part right when they look at upside and downside risks, risk is upside and downside, and that's what it is. And in my view, that's certainly what we're seeing with generative AI. So lots more we could talk about there. But I think if we get into the policy prescriptions again, which you had, I didn't count them, but you have half a dozen plus policy prescriptions. We talked about one or two of them already. Could you tie that a little bit to the conversation you had earlier today with the Competition Bureau in Canada about just, "Here's what we found, here's what we analyzed, and here's some ideas we have." Is that how the conversation went today or were you talking about other things? Can you give us a bit there?

We weren't there in a teaching capacity, but we did have the honor of offering a presentation of some of our thoughts. We framed it as here's what we're hearing, here's what we're thinking about, kind of what's on your mind. And it was just an exchange in that way. One element that was raised that is definitely sticking in my mind, I haven't had a chance to talk about what Denise, we packed our afternoon with meeting and coffees.

If you disagree, it's okay.

No, and we do disagree sometimes. It's healthy. That's what makes our thinking as strong as possible. We had discussed an idea that had been put forward by the Bureau before and is seen as an OECD standard called Competition Assessments. And we went back and forth, "Where's the real utility? Does this become more bureaucratic? Does it slow things down? Is it just a box ticking exercise?" But it was raised in conversation that potentially doing competition assessments in the way that Canada has changed policymaking through gender-based analysis, some of the power there is for cultural shifts and awareness. That it's not, again, that the outcome's very important to understand when we put forward a new policy, be that a tariff, be it the online Streaming Act, be it the Online News Act that you mentioned. What does this policy decision do to that marketplace to...

What are the implications? How should those be mitigated or thought of? And I don't think we had been able in our readings or imagining competition assessments to appreciate the power of the cultural element. So that was illuminating to me and deepened my appreciation for the potential utility of that tool. That said, what's really stopping people? What's stopping a think tank or a ballsy non-profit from doing competition assessments briefly back of the envelope when major policy decisions are made? Is that another way for us to keep competition front of mind throughout the policy process and in our discussions?

Right.

I don't want to do them. I don't really know how, because I could point the finger at myself too and be like, "Well, what's stopping you?"

There's nothing stopping you. Denise-

Lots of things.

... what do you think? What were your reflections on your conversation today there?

I just felt like, again, I told them that it's so nice to be on the road and to be able to genuinely say there's a whole set of civil servants and law enforcers in Canada that really care about how a Canadian is experiencing the economy. And I think that that story just needs to be told, and told, and told, and told. And so it was just a privilege to be able to exchange ideas and dialogue about how to do that process even better.

That's great. That's great that you had the opportunity that they wanted to do it, and that you did it. I definitely wanted to make sure we asked you. You've been in several cities now across Canada, and that was great. What were your big takeaways that somebody prompted you to think about something that gelled or that you thought was missed from the conversation? Is there anything that you want say in that respect right now that it's been bubbling in your mind over the last few weeks?

I mean, I think something we have talked about a little bit is just how the competition conversation in Canada still continues to be anchored in grocery, telecoms, banking, and how there's maybe an underappreciation of how much other industries have consolidated and what kind of effects those have. And so we think there's a real opportunity now that the public is primed because competition is so much more part of the national dialogue now to expand and build upon that foundation and say, "Have you seen or have you heard about this weird monopoly?" So that's something that we try to point to in the book. And then I also think, just a general sense of trying to encourage people again, to be optimistic that change is possible, and that we have the power to envision a different future together, and that this is a really important component of helping enact that structurally.

Because I think a lot of people are like, "I'm just a consumer, what can I do?" And it's like, "Okay, there's a lot that you can do. I mean, you can support Perfect Books, you can support independent stores, which is huge with your dollar," but actually it's also telling that we see ourselves primarily as consumers and not citizens. And actually our strongest identity that we can exercise for these issues is through our policymaking process and our political process. So helping people understand how they can engage, where they can follow the conversations, I think is also really important.

That's great. Policy people are not going to be bored or idle in the coming months. I mean, on almost any topic, certainly these ones.

I think I've been struck by just how much journalism of all kinds matters in these conversations. People will cite the Canada Land Podcast Series on Monopoly in Canada. We've seen some really fast policy follows from stories that were also in the news, the Halifax Examiner and their story about property controls, and Sobeys and Dollarama that's being investigated now at the Competition Bureau. Chris Haney at The Globe and Mail his work on pharmacy benefit managers has been cited in work. So again, it doesn't have to take years and years, but having those elements as part of the conversation in terms of where good ideas come from and where they go, then maybe the second thing that I've picked up on a little bit, there was a recent case on drip pricing with Cineplex. Ironic, because I think their slogan is, something for everyone at the movies, but there is something for everyone in that case, and it was really just about $1,50, that if you booked your movie ticket online, they were advertising it was a particular price and it was impossible to achieve that price when you booked online in the scheme of things.

And of all the battles and bones that the Competition Bureau could pick, they did move forward on that. And some people have brought it up as, "Oh, it's only $1.50," like that doesn't really matter. But for most people it does matter. It's not the dollar amount, it's the principle. This was happening for a really long time to a lot of people, and it shouldn't have. And I think that sent a really strong signal from the bureau to other companies who engage in deceptive design, but also a signal to Canadians around, I think, rebuilding a lot of that trust that's being broken, trust between citizen, but also consumer and corporation, but also citizen and state. This is the entity that's supposed to prevent those behaviors from happening in the first place and protect us from them.

And we've got Taylor Swift coming to Toronto very soon, and you talk about Ticketmaster a lot.

You're wearing her merch right now. I wasn't going to bring that up.

Can you see it through the shirt? So that has played out in what's going on right now in Toronto. Right About those that got tickets, those that are the now and the next wave and stuff. So you've described a very regular occurrence for, especially the big names, and the prices are off the charts.

Search pricing, how prices are determined, for sure.

It's unbelievable. So maybe to wrap up, any final observations of what we talked about here tonight? The one last thing I wanted to throw on the table was I like the play on words with the Big Fix. I think there's about five or six meanings. I've only got through a few of them.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

We thought there were only three, but maybe there's more.

I think there could be more. There could be more. There's a lot of space there, right? So kudos for a good title. And what are your takeaways from this evening? Anything you wanted to say? Vass, usually you and I have a few comments at the end of a podcast. Have you said it all? Is there anything more?

I mean, I think our through lines end up being, change is possible. Change is happening. Here's how to be a constructive element of that.

Change is inevitable actually. So how do you harness change in the right directions? And I like this line by my mentor when she says, everything is broken, what a great time to be alive so that you can be part of creating a new future. And so we hope in our very, very small way with this project and in these conversations, and with all the work that everyone in this room is doing that we can add a little bit to that collective future that we're envisioning.

That's great. And yeah.

I want to mix metaphors and say policy change is a team sport, but it can also be a bit of a knife fight. So I think that's important to understand because sometimes I think we individualize this thing we call thought leadership or policy. Where did that good idea come from? Who said it first? Where is it? And it's about all sorts of scholars and all sorts of researchers, and all sorts of journalists, and all sorts of people. If you are making a meme or angry in a subreddit or kicking up dirt, that can still be productive. It can be part of setting or resetting policy priorities in a way that I think is important, potentially inevitable, but something to keep our eyes on.

So change is required and inevitable, and I think inherently it has that dual edged risk that I was referring to earlier, that there's always a positive and a negative about any potential change or risk in the way that I see it. For that reason, people should not just shy away or turn off and say it's all negative. There is always an opportunity along with it as well. And we're probably going to see a lot of that in the coming months. So thank you for your contribution to this topic, the competition policy coming to your dinner table near you soon. Maybe not in exactly those words, but what's in essence of the book.

I think we said we'd get you relegated to the wonks table.

Thank you. Yeah, you know.

I think you have more wonky tables than my dinner table.

That's what we have experience in.

[inaudible 01:15:49] Christmas gift, Christmas 2024, I don't know.

Yeah.

Just kidding. Okay. Thank you, and thank you. Thank you everyone for being here.

Yeah. Policy Prompt is produced by me, Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Tim Lewis and Mel Wiersma are our technical producers. Background research is contributed by Reanne Cayenne. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan, and creative direction from Som Tsoi. The original theme music is by Josh Snethlage, the sound mixing by Francois Goudreau. And special thanks to Creative Consultant, Ken Ogasawara. Please subscribe and write Policy Prompt wherever you listen to podcasts, and stay tuned for future episodes.