Enshittification – it’s a word you’ve doubtlessly heard before, especially if you’ve been reading or listening here.

It’s a term that neatly and cheekily encapsulates how everything, from our digital devices and streaming services to real-world retail stores and even health care, have gotten worse.

It’s also the title of a new book by Cory Doctorow, the Toronto-born digital rights activist, science-fiction author and coiner of the word itself, which has won accolades including Word of the Year from the American Dialect Society in 2023 and the Macquarie Dictionary in 2024.

Doctorow is everywhere these days expounding on his book, which has hit on the zeitgeist in a way that few others do. It’s probably because everyone instinctively knows exactly what he’s talking about.

He was recently in Toronto for a joint talk at the Hot Docs theatre with his childhood friend, former Biden administration advisor and fellow Do Not Pass Go podcast guest Tim Wu, who unfortunately ended up participating via video call because of travel problems.

Prior to the event, Doctorow sat down with us for a very special recorded interview at Bakka-Phoenix, the science-fiction bookstore where he worked as a teenager.

In this conversation, we discuss the uniquely American aspect of Enshittification – and how the rift with our neighbour is presenting Canada with a golden opportunity to escape a big part of it.

Check out all things Cory Doctorow at his Craphound site and buy Enshittification here. Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore on Flickr.

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Back in October, former Conservative party leader and Prime Minister candidate Erin O’Toole argued that monopolies and oligopolies aren’t necessarily all bad at a University of Toronto debate on the subject.

They were instrumental in building Canada in the first place, and keeping the country free from domination by the United States in its formative years.

As the saying goes, everything old is new again, and Canada once again finds itself between a veritable rock and a hard place – an aggressive and increasingly unfriendly neighbour and a need to rein in corporate concentration and the affordability crisis it’s contributing to.

O’Toole knows a thing or two about consumer issues and national security. Prior to politics, he worked as a competition lawyer for Procter & Gamble and served in the military for 12 years, where he earned the Canadian Forces Decoration distinction.

After the Conservatives lost the 2021 election, he returned to the private sector, where he is currently the president and managing director of risk advisory firm ADIT North America.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss Canada’s difficult geopolitical situation and its equally difficult effort to bring oligopolies to heel, plus he sings a few bars of Gordon Lightfoot.

Check out his Blue Skies Substack here.

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In an effort to tackle out-of-control unaffordability, Prime Minister Mark Carney is upping the GST rebate and renaming it the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit. A family of four will get nearly $1,900 in credits this year and $1,400 in each of the next four years.

But is that enough to counter the problem of skyrocketing grocery prices?

In Canada, five giants control more than 80 per cent of the market – Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart. And while they blame other factors such as supply chain problems for rising prices, their continually rising profits – and profit margins – suggest oligopoly is also at cause.

It’s why the idea of public grocery stores – those owned or operated by government – are gaining cachet. New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani recently rode the promise of establishing public grocery stores to an election victory while here in Canada, federal NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis is making them part of his pitch to voters.

The concept has been criticized, notably by the Globe and Mail, as unworkable, but a group of food experts beg to differ. In a recent paper, they’ve worked out the math and suggest that public grocery stores aren’t just possible in Canada, they’re necessary to provide competition and price discrimination to the oligopoly.

Aaron Vansintjan, policy manager at advocacy group Food Secure Canada, joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how public grocery stores would lead to lower prices for consumers.

Read the paper by Vansintjan and his colleagues here.

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There’s a battle going on over Canada’s crown jewels: Banff and Jasper.

With more than 6 million annual visitors between them, the two national parks are the nation’s biggest tourist attraction – not to mention the symbolic image of natural beauty that many people around the world picture when they think of Canada.

But a single company has rolled up nearly all of the market for paid attractions, including gondolas and boat rides, plus a third of the hotels in Banff. And worse yet, critics say, it’s an American company: Denver-based Pursuit Attractions and Hospitality.

The Competition Bureau investigated the company’s roll-up last year but chose not to take action because of jurisdiction issues with Parks Canada, the federal agency responsible for national parks.

That prompted the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project watchdog to call on the government to intervene by breaking up Pursuit and requiring Parks Canada to consider competition issues in national parks going forward.

Perhaps the biggest supporter of that stance is Adam Waterous, an oil tycoon from Toronto who also owns the Mount Norquay ski resort in Banff and the local train station.

Waterous joins Do Not Pass Go this week to discuss how Pursuit’s monopoly is raising attraction prices and contributing to congestion in the parks. Stuart Back, Pursuit’s chief operating officer for Banff and Jasper, also joins us to refute the charges.

The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project brief on Pursuit’s holdings in Banff and Jasper can be found here.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user rvdbrugge, CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Telecom service complaints continue to skyrocket, with the ombudsman that deals with them reporting a 17-per-cent increase to a new record of 23,647 for the year ended July 31. It’s the third year in a row that complaints have set a record, according to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services.

Wireless services led the way, with television and higher set-top-box fees close behind. Contract disputes, unexpected price increases and promises that weren’t honoured – basically all the things that consumers routinely deal with when it comes to telecom.

It’s a broken record. Canada’s big telecom companies – Bell, Rogers and Telus – are basically the poster children for oligopolies, and therefore oligopolistic behaviour. Absent concrete action by the government to address the industry’s structural failures, it’s a story that’s bound to continue repeating.

There is a small change in this tale, however, and that is that the CCTS now has a new boss. After 17-plus years at its helm, founding commissioner Howard Maker has stepped aside and handed the reins to Josée Bidal Thibault, who becomes the organization’s second head.

Many Canadians still don’t know about what the CCTS does. Thibault joins Do Not Pass Go this week to discuss her predecessor’s legacy, what she hopes to do differently, and what’s behind the explosion in complaints (spoiler: it’s the affordability crisis).

Read the latest CCTS annual report here.

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

There’s an amazing (and hilarious) video that’s been doing the rounds for the past few years of a 1993 interview with Nirvana about concert ticket prices. As the above photo of frontman Kurt Cobain illustrates, the band was horrified to learn that some artists were charging upwards of $50 to attend one of their shows. Nirvana, meanwhile, was charging around $25.

Were he still alive, Cobain might be even more horrified of what ticket prices are like today. Natural inflation aside, the crosshairs for why that’s so are squarely falling on one entity – a company that has taken over and become dominant in nearly every aspect of the concert-going experience: Live Nation Entertainment.

Legal and regulatory actions against the company are multiplying rapidly. U.S. antitrust enforcers with the Department of Justice are trying to break the company up while the Federal Trade Commission is suing the company for artificially inflating prices. A host of class-action suits over Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary are proliferating in both the U.S. and Canada. Even the Swifties, still mad over Ticketmaster’s mishandling of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, are continuing their lawsuit.

Add a major new Canadian case to this list. Mirroring the DOJ, the Consumers Council of Canada is asking the Competition Tribunal to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

Filed over the holidays, it’s among the first cases to take advantage of new competition laws in Canada that allow private parties to bring abuse-of-dominance charges in the name of the public interest. We’ve covered the other two – an indie game developer taking on Google’s search deal with Apple, and the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic case against Apple’s App Store – here on Do Not Pass Go. It’s clear that this is a growing wave.

Neil Hartung, a lawyer and director with the Consumers Council, joins the podcast this week to explain why the advocacy group is taking a stand and why it thinks it can actually break up a giant American company. (Read the filing here)

It’s worth noting that literally no one else is covering this movement, which is why it’s amazing that you’re here. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this important work.

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

Happy 2026 to all! It’s going to be better than 2025, right? Right?!?

Hopefully so. But before we dive back into how bad things are, let’s start the new year off with a potentially good news story – which is that there’s about to be a new social media player in town, and it’s Canadian.

Gander Social is targeting a first-quarter launch and is aiming to be a kinder, gentler social media platform, which is another way of saying of course it’s Canadian.

And aside from trying to be better than the other bot-infested rage farms out there, Gander is also differentiating itself by laying down sovereign roots: Canadian hosting that’s free from the dictates of any foreign mad king.

The company blew through its crowd-funding goals late last year by raising $1.5 million and has more than 35,000 users waiting to get onto its app, which is borrowing some of the best aspects of BlueSky, TikTok, LinkedIn and others while trying to avoid their worst pitfalls. (Full disclosure: I chipped in some bucks through that crowd-funding effort.)

Chief executive and co-founder Ben Waldman joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how Gander is going to be different from other platforms and whether the world needs another social media app in the first place.

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

You’d think that going up against a competitor that holds three-quarters of the market (cough, Cineplex, cough) would be suicide, and you’d generally be right.

But the Revue Cinema in Toronto – Canada’s oldest operating movie theatre – isn’t just holding its own, it’s doing exceptionally well.

The theatre is run by the non-profit Revue Film Society, which this year became a charity, so it’s numbers are public. And the numbers show that revenue and profit are climbing exponentially.

That’s impressive given the non-stop challenges the theatre has faced over its history – not just Cineplex, but also moral panics, pearl-clutching regulators, a pandemic and a hostile landlord.

On this episode of Do Not Pass Go, we dig into how the Revue has persevered and entered what seems to be a new golden age, and we learn how its strategies and executions can be emulated – not just by other independent cinemas, but by all small businesses who are competing against their own respective behemoths.

A special note: I’d like to wish everyone a very happy holiday season! Thanks to all for reading, listening and subscribing through these first few months of our launch. I’m taking a break for the holidays and will be back in early January. We’re just getting started!

And if you’re looking for last-minute gift ideas, why not a paid subscription to Do Not Pass Go? Give the gift of joining the movement against oligopolies!

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

Deregulation – it’s synonymous with big business, right? It’s what leads to chemicals in water supplies, dangerous additives in food products and all manner of profit-maximizing tricks that have negative effects on consumers and the environment.

But wait a sec – it’s not quite so simple, says Matthew Chiasson, a senior policy analyst at the Competition Bureau. While deregulation may indeed be a dirty word that is often tied to big companies getting their way, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, with complicated, voluminous red tape strangling small and medium businesses, it may be time to apply it in the name of the public good. It’s time for deregulation’s makeover.

In a recent presentation at the annual Competition Summit in Ottawa, Chiasson took attendees on a cross-Canada tour of how excessive regulation is smothering competition and killing off entrepreneurialism. You can watch that presentation here.

On this episode of Do Not Pass Go, he takes us through a few of those examples and explains how big companies are using regulation as a weapon to take out smaller competitors. With entrepreneurialism levels dropping dangerously, it’s time for Canada to cut the red tape.

And be sure to check out the CBC short doc on how regulators waged war on Jamaican beef patties in Toronto in 1985.

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Donald Trump’s election as U.S. President just over a year ago threw a real wrench into the growing worldwide movement against corporate power and concentration.

If the headlines around a series of recent legal defeats are to be believed, that momentum – at least in the United States – has stalled, if not reversed. Certainly, Netflix’s just-announced $72 billion (U.S.) takeover of Warner Bros. isn’t helping with the narrative. After all, such deals simply aren’t brought forward in an environment that is frosty to mega-mergers.

In Canada, the movement has been subsumed by the bigger issue of the trade war and Trump’s repeated threats of annexation, serious or not. These dangers fester near the top of the public and government consciousness, but the concentration problem and the unaffordability crisis it’s driving continues to bubble just underneath.

Matt Stoller, research director at the non-profit American Economic Liberties Project advocacy group, has a different view.

He doesn’t believe the antitrust and anti-corporate power movement in the United States is in as bad shape as it’s being made out to be. And he believes that Canada and other countries are using the U.S. situation as an excuse to avoid dealing with their own problems.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss Netflix’s big move and what Trump’s impossible-to-predict policy on monopolies mean to the rest of the world.

Check out his Substack newsletter BIG here, and his Organized Money podcast here.

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