With the appointment of a new Commissioner of Competition expected in the first half of 2019, Davies lawyers George Addy and Anita Banicevic spoke to Law Times about the direction and priorities of Canada’s Competition Bureau.

With respect to regulation of the digital economy, George is particularly concerned that the speed and depth of technological disruption will trigger an overreaction akin to what happened with Y2K, and that the Bureau is diverting resources to speculative areas even as they’re unable to meet their own internal guidelines for processing merger reviews in a timely manner.

Anita’s concern lies in the fact that the Bureau seems intent on forging into issues that are the domain of other regulators. She cites the Bureau’s draft discussion paper on Big Data to demonstrate how the Bureau is seeking to apply the misleading advertising provisions of the Competition Act to privacy policies and the collection and use of data, an issue that falls under the purview of the federal privacy commissioner appointed under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.