October 26, 2025

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 instalment we have:

• Canadian food inflation stubbornly persists as policymakers refuse to act against food chain monopolies
• Ticketmaster’s dominance means five figure prices for Blue Jays World Series tickets
• Massive AWS outage reflects the dangers of concentration in our economic infrastructure

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Now let’s dive in.

Canadians Shouldn’t Be Surprised by Sticky Food Inflation

This week’s inflation print from Statistics Canada brought unwelcome news. Average inflation has increased, with the rising price of food leading the pack. But this shouldn’t be a surprise to Canadians, given our lack of effort in fixing the food system that has consistently forced these price increases on Canadians. While the previous federal government took action to improve Canada’s competition law, the application of those laws to the food system has been limited. The Competition Bureau’s pursuit of property controls that limit grocery competition have borne some fruit and a code of conduct now exists between major retailers and suppliers, but the same system effectively remains in place.

Canada’s grocery market is heavily concentrated, which allowed the three major players to protect and even expand their margins as prices continue to rise. The situation is worse further up the supply chain, where just two or three companies control important markets like meatpacking, seeds, and fertilizer. Stuck in the middle of these massive companies are the individual producers who are forced to bear the risk that agricultural giants insulate themselves from. But the situation is not hopeless.

When the problem is structural, it requires a structural remedy. While the grocery code of conduct might increase transparency and reliability in the supply chain, it doesn’t change the distribution of power across the food system. Similarly, while political parties have floated windfalls taxes for the excess profits of grocery giants, this approach leaves the current structure intact and provides no relief to Canadians at checkout. Even redistributive responses have their limitations, with money flowing right back into a monopolized food system.

At every level, the markets that put food on our tables are monopolized, with entrenched incumbents cornering the market for necessities. If we want to create a competitive food system that is resilient to the kind of shocks we’ve seen since 2020, we need to break open these concentrated markets.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• Should Canada hit ctrl+alt+delete on its AI vision? (CBC)
• What Does a ‘Sovereign Cloud’ Really Mean? (Tech Policy Press)
• Private equity firms are buying up dental clinics, vet practices, and other small businesses. (TVO)

Ticketmaster’s Tactics Stick Jays Fans with Sky High Prices

Everyone outside of Los Angeles County is excited about the Toronto Blue Jays advancing to the World Series, giving the team another crack at a title they haven’t held since 1993. Those looking to attend any of the games, however, may find that enthusiasm shaken. To attend just one game, tickets will cost you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for even the cheap seats. Expensive World Series tickets are not a new phenomenon, but what has emerged in recent years is the industrialized scalping that companies like Ticketmaster have allowed to foster.

Why does Ticketmaster allow scalpers employing bots to instantly scoop up all available tickets and sell them right back to fans at sky high prices? Because it’s profitable. By turning a blind eye to the scalpers operating on their platform, Ticketmaster is able to “triple dip” on the fees they charge to ticket buyers and sellers. This is exactly the kind of conduct that the U.S. FTC is currently suing Ticketmaster over down south. Canada’s Competition Bureau has sued Ticketmaster over its deceptive practices in the past, but this time around they’re passing the buck to provinces.

Just over a month has passed since we put Ticketmaster on blast for closing Toronto venues, dominating the live entertainment market through its ownership of Live Nation, and jacking up admissions to the Toronto International Film (TIFF). In response to the public firestorm, Ticketmaster vowed to crack down on scalpers, but a company’s commitment to not act in its own interest isn’t worth the price of admission. If we want change, we need to break up Ticketmaster’s entertainment monopoly and regulate the practices that have stuck Jays fans with five-figure World Series tickets. In the meantime, Go Birds.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Butler, The return of ‘Tescopoly’? How Britain’s biggest retailer dominated everyday life (The Guardian)
• Hanley, The Enduring Force of the Federal Antitrust Laws (Open Markets Institute)
• Levine and Nguyen, The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices (Vanderbilt University)

Amazon Stock Shrugs Off Major Internet Outage

This week, a Domain Name System (DNS) error brought down a key node in Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure, AWS, causing massive outages for businesses relying on AWS cloud servers. Over 60 countriesmay have been affected, with services like Amazon’s own Alexa assistant, Snapchat, and the ultra-popular videogame Roblox going down. Highlighting the bizarre reach of connected technology, smartbed ownersfound themselves locked out of their mattresses. While the issue had been remedied the next day, the scope could mean damages in the hundreds of billions, highlighting a recurring theme of this newsletter: the dangers of highly concentrated digital infrastructure.

Highlighting Amazon’s dominance in the space, anti-monopoly expert Matt Stoller points out that the company’s stock remained completely unaffected by the outage. Because of Amazon’s dominant position in the market, and in the adjacent markets they monopolize, investors know they will be able to shrug off this kind of global disruption. Businesses reliant on AWS might lose revenues and valuable customers, but the level of lock-in and few alternatives mean they are unlikely to go through the pain of switching providers. With the stock prices steady, for Amazon the outage is somebody else’s problem.

We can be sure that this won’t be the last catastrophic outage we hear about for Amazon or one of the other major cloud providers like Microsoft or Google. If key digital infrastructure remains consolidated under the control of a few providers with limited competitive pressure, the risk of these far-reaching service outages, from videogames to bed frames, will remain. The political ruptures of the past year have reminded us of the dangers of relying too heavily on a single country, and outages like these remind us of the dangers of doing the same with a handful of companies.

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

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