September 27, 2026

Welcome to Letters from CAMP, a newsletter on anti-monopoly activity in Canada and abroad, brought to you by the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. In this installment we have:

• Bureau announces agreement to hold Empire to account on its commitment to abandon property controls
• Ontario teachers bear the brunt of a government-sanctioned school supply monopoly
• How Carney’s middle power powerplay is an anti-monopoly strategy

If you enjoy Letters, please consider sharing and supporting CAMP.

Now let’s dive in.

Bureau Gives Empire Property Control Promises Some Teeth

This week, the Competition Bureau announced the of its investigation into the use of property controls by Empire, the owner of Sobeys, Farm Boy, Safeway, IGA, Foodland, and FreshCo. The Bureau found Empire’s use and enforcement of property controls is likely to have created significant barriers of entry to their competitors, stopping them from accessing available real estate or selling certain products. The agreement, which is legally binding, means that Empire must limit its use of exclusivity clauses, can no longer enter into new restrictive covenants, or enforce existing ones.

Property controls, like exclusivity clauses and restrictive covenants, are agreements in commercial leases or bills of sale that restrict how land can be used, limiting what a buyer can do, even preventing landlords from seeking certain tenants. In the grocery sector, these meant that landlords couldn’t put two grocery stores in the same complex, or when grocery stores sold land, the buyer wasn’t allowed to open a grocery store in the future. Sometimes it really is right there in the title. When you hear the words “restrictive” and “control,” you’ve got a strong signal something anti-competitive is afoot.

This is a win, but it can’t be the end of the campaign against property controls. The Bureau’s investigations into other major grocers is still ongoing. Loblaws agreed to end property controls in 2025, but the commitment isn’t legally binding, and the bid by Weston controlled Choice Properties to become Canada’s largest grocery landlord suggests they’re pursuing a more acquisitive strategy. It’s not just the Bureau’s show either. Provinces need to follow the lead of Manitoba and ban property controls in the grocery sector and other sectors starved of competition. We’re not there yet, but Canadians are on the path to a more competitive, diverse, and dynamic grocery market.

🎤Events 🎤

• ​Rewriting the Rules: Innovation, Competition Law, and Our Shared Future – Tuesday September 29^th in Toronto

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• ​Q&A: Keldon Bester wants Ottawa to protect smaller players when implementing C-34 (The Wire Report)
• ​The Walrus Talks – The Billionaire Problem (The Walrus)
• ​AI Co-Pilots Set to Disrupt the Great Medical Record Oligopoly (C.D. Howe Institute)

Staples Monopoly Contract Gives Ontario Teachers the Screws

In March, the Ontario government announced the Classroom Supplies Fund, a reallocation of funding that would give individual teachers the budget, and responsibility, for buying their own classrooms’ supplies. Each teacher would have $750 dollars to spend on supplies, but the catch is they must spend it on the exclusive supplier of the program: Staples. The school year is off to a bad start for this program, with teachers reporting higher prices on the portal than those available in regular Staples stores.

The situation is a lesson from Monopoly 101: Staples has a captive market, with a set budget, for necessary purchases. This presents a great opportunity for Staples to make as much money as possible within those confines. The outcome is a reminder that we need to be clear eyed about the consequences of granting a private company a public monopoly. Boosters of economies of scale tell us that Staples should be able to offer the lowest prices on commodity goods, and that’s what they might have done if they faced actual competitive pressure.
​
Instead, Staples is taking advantage of a closed system that allows them to jack up the margin on common products and squeeze the budgets of teachers trying to do right for their students. The behaviour raises questions about other arrangements the Ontario government has struck with Staples, like the 2024 no-bid deal to move 9 Service Ontario locations into Staples stores. Government’s bulk buying power gives them tremendous leverage, the over 2 million students in Ontario’s public school system need a lot of erasers, but that power is wasted when a government ties itself to a single supplier. The province should be using that power to save money, not bankroll a classroom conglomerate.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Chowdhury and Komaitis, America is in the wrong AI race with China (Restofworld)
• Adair, When private equity buys the home team (Canadian Dimension)
• Matheson, Canada Is Not Banning Teenagers from Social Media — It’s Trying Something New (Tech Policy Press)

A Middle Power Anti-Monopoly Strategy

As we covered last week, Canada’s attempt to diversify away from the U.S. is taking our representatives around the world, culminating with Prime Minister Carney’s speech to the European Parliament last week. The core idea: getting in bed with hegemons comes at the cost of dependency. Those of us in the middle can either hitch ourselves to one and hope for the best or seek to build something better. In the Star this week, CAMP board member Jon Shell offers one of the most compelling arguments that Canada’s emerging economic strategy isn’t anti-American per se, but anti-monopoly in general.

The principal harm of monopoly is a loss of control and autonomy. Monopoly offers a deal that can seem sweet but cannot be refused. Canadians know this all too well. We’re a country waking up to the cost of monopolies to our economy and democracy. But if we thought taking on the telcos was hard, tangling with our country’s biggest customer is a different ballgame. Canadian consumers, businesses and governments depend on U.S. technology and markets, giving them leverage over the future of our country. The same lessons applied in our markets needs to be applied on the global stage: markets work best when the players are in balance.

Shell argues that for middle powers to break this dependency, alternatives must be created, sometimes literally from the ground up. Here’s one place where the market will fail us. If the goal is sovereignty and autonomy, we cannot expect markets to deviate on their own from the path of least resistance and highest profitability. In the short term, the deal offered by monopoly, whether a country or company, can look like a good one: stability, simplicity, and efficiency. But middle powers around the world are learning that this deal is a limited time offer.

If you have any monopoly tips or stories you'd like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca

Follow CAMP on LinkedIn or Twitter​