National Magazine recently featured Anita Banicevic’s insights on the Competition Commissioner’s aggressive vision for Canada’s Competition Bureau.

In the article, Anita remarks that one of her biggest takeaways from the Commissioner’s speech at the CBA Competition Law Spring Conference is the Bureau’s intention to look more closely at smaller transactions that don’t exceed the monetary thresholds for mandatory pre-merger notification but that raise potential competition concerns.

Lawyers working on a transaction should know that “it’s important to keep Competition counsel abreast, even if you are below the threshold,” she stresses, adding that it has become more critical to bring in Competition counsel at an early stage of any transaction planning.

Anita is not surprised to hear talk of more active enforcement, but wants to see the Bureau take a balanced, evidence-based approach that looks carefully at the facts to determine whether there is genuinely an issue because, she says, “I think that over-enforcement can also be quite damaging to innovation.”