Do Not Pass Go by Peter Nowak

This week we’re celebrating a pair of milestones here at Do Not Pass Go: We’ve officially hit both the six-month and the 1,000-subscriber marks!
Our quick growth tells us there’s a big appetite for what we’re doing here, which is reporting on and elevating the profile of competition, affordability and consumer issues in Canada.
That’s great news, because we’re just getting started – there’s so much more to come.
Join us on this very special episode of the podcast for a look back at some of the highlights and stats from the past six months, plus a look forward at what’s next.
Plus, in between, we’re joined by Vass Bednar, director of the Canadian SHIELD Institute sovereignty think tank, and Arshy Mann, host of The Hatchet podcast and Substack, for a report card on how the “hawkish” Carney government is doing so far on competition issues.
Along with Denise Hearn, Vass is the co-author of the 2024 book The Big Fix, while Arshy in 2022/2023 produced Canadaland’s monopoly podcast series, both of which were the inspiration for Do Not Pass Go.
What better way to celebrate our milestones than a conversation with grandma and grandpa!
Check out the Canadian SHIELD Institute here and The Hatchet here.
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Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, a small business or a large enterprise, having an online presence is a necessity. And while businesses have always had to deal with unfavourable changes to online platforms, these issues are multiplying now that concentration has set in and competition between them has levelled off.
Stories of businesses losing access to their social media accounts are increasingly popping up. Entire industries have pivoted because of changes to algorithms, only for platform owners to switch them up again on a whim. Some have ceased to exist entirely while others have changed hands and ushered in completely new sets of rules.
On top of it all, most of the platforms in question are U.S.-based – a big problem when Canada is pushing toward more sovereignty.
In other words, it’s never been a worse time to hitch your online wagon to someone else’s train.
Spencer Callaghan is the brand and communications director for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the non-profit organization that sells the dot-ca domain name. He’s self-admittedly biased because of who he works for, but he’s not wrong in advocating for businesses of all sizes to control their own online fate.
He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to warn of the dangers of businesses putting too much effort into opaquely run platforms, and to share his advice on how they can own rather than rent their respective online presences.
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Of all the places you’d think that Canada would have drawn inspiration from when deciding how to adjudicate its competition problems, Sweden maybe isn’t top of mind.
But that’s exactly what lawmakers did back in the 1980s, when they borrowed from the Scandinavian country’s Market Court to create the Competition Tribunal – Canada’s court of first resort when it comes to assessing mergers and abuse of dominance cases.
As the name implies, it’s not precisely a court. The Tribunal is indeed made of up judges, but they are often joined by lay members that jointly hear cases as a panel. As per the Swedish approach, the idea has always been to couple real-world economic and market knowledge with legal expertise.
Prior to retiring this past October, Paul Crampton served on the federal court for 16 years, with 14 of those as its Chief Justice. His duties included heading the Competition Tribunal, where he presided over some of the biggest and most contentious cases in Canadian history – including perhaps the biggest and most contentious, the Rogers-Shaw merger in 2023.
He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to discuss how recent, badly needed updates to Canada’s competition laws are likely to affect future Tribunal cases – and, of course, we talk about that Rogers-Shaw case.
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When it comes to increasing corporate concentration and declining competition, Canada is dealing with a double-barrelled problem.
On the one hand, big companies are continuing to snap up competitors. On the other, less visible serial acquirers – often private equity firms – are rolling up entire categories of businesses, from dental clinics and veterinarians to laundromats and car washes.
Fortunately, a new counter-force has begun to emerge: employee-owned trusts (EOTs). Enabled by legislation that came into force in 2024, these new structures allow rank-and-file employees to buy the companies they work for, providing a different option for owners who want to retire or otherwise exit their businesses.
It’s an exceptionally timely development – not just because EOTs are providing an alternative to further concentration, but also because of the nation’s looming succession crisis and a growing desire to keep local companies in Canadian hands.
Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners and Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project board member, is perhaps the biggest proponent of EOTs in the country. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to explain their upsides and downsides, and to warn that employee-owned trusts are at risk if the government doesn’t take immediate action on the tax incentives that make them appealing.
Learn more about employee-owned trusts here.
Read the letter signed by notable business leaders to the federal government here.
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If there’s one highly concentrated industry that the federal government refuses to fix (perhaps more so than others), it’s airlines. It’s why Canadians pay some of the highest prices to fly and suffer under some of the weakest passenger protections in the world.
The government has ignored a major report issued by the Competition Bureau last year that has recommendations on how to improve the problems. The passenger complaint backlog sits at close to 100,000, with each individual issue taking years to resolve. Worse still, according to a CBC Go Public investigation published in January, the feds are actively delaying making airlines pay for the complaints system.
With such inaction and even complicity by officials, other resistance emerges. Enter Gabor Lukacs.
For nearly 20 years, this one name has been striking fear into airlines by becoming synonymous with air passenger rights – in fact, Air Passenger Rights is his group, which has more than 274,000 members on Facebook.
Lukacs has fought – and won – dozens of court battles with the airlines, getting passengers justice and the money they’re owed in the process. He’s a fixture in virtually every news report on airline misdeeds, which is to say he’s on TV a lot. He’s the nation’s veritable avatar of passenger anger.
But who is Gabor Lukacs? Why has he taken up this crusade? What drives him?
A child math prodigy, Lukacs escaped an abusive mother in Hungary when he was just eight years old and ended up doing a PhD in Canada at just 16. He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to share his amazing story and how it – and his love of math – fuels his crusade for the justice that the government refuses to deliver.
For more, check out airpassengerrights.ca.

Do Not Pass Go is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.



Get full access to Do Not Pass Go at www.donotpassgo.ca/subscribe