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.

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Cineplex isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders right now.

Theatre closures, poor financial results, a fractious relationship with local film makers, plus the possibility of fewer movies coming its way are all making for a murky future for Canada’s pre-dominant theatre chain.

But, to borrow from The Lion King, it’s the circle of life. At least it is according to Eric Veillette, arts journalist, theatre historian and former head programmer of the independent Revue Cinema in Toronto.

Movie fans don’t need to worry much, he says, because theatres aren’t necessarily going anywhere. The days of BIG theatres, however, may be numbered – the next few years are likely to bring a market correction, and with it, consolidation and shrinking of the large chains in Canada and elsewhere.

But just as cavemen (and cave ladies!) gathered in front of the fire to watch shadow-puppet stories, peoples’ need to experience stories communally is as strong as ever, especially at a time when so many of them are being fed to screens by faceless algorithms.

Veillette joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to reveal the often shady and competitively-fraught history of movie-going in Canada, and to discuss why its future is going to be smaller and more indie.

Check out his Substack, The Downtown Theatre, and keep an eye out for his book, “In the Dark: A Select History of Movie-Going in Toronto,” coming from ECW Press in 2027.

And check out our feature episode the Revue Cinema here.

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Surveillance pricing is getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so – the individualized prices seen online for years, based on what companies such as Amazon and airlines know about their customers, are rapidly making their way into the real world.

Also known as dynamic pricing, it’s a problem because it means retailers are increasingly going to be able to charge people differently based on what they know about the person and their ability to pay, rather than on traditional supply-and-demand economics and competitive factors.

The driver of it all is poor privacy protection. Canada, with its lax laws, is especially vulnerable, according to Jim Balsillie, who needs little introduction.

Balsillie was the co-chief executive of Research In Motion, otherwise known as BlackBerry – the tiny startup from Waterloo, Ont. that ignited the smartphone revolution in the early-2000s and became the most valuable company in Canada for a time.

Apple and Google ultimately ate up the smartphone market, but Balsillie has continued to be a prominent voice in Canadian business and policy. He has started several think tanks and advocacy groups, including the Canadian Council of Innovators and the Canadian SHIELD Institute. And he continues to argue for stronger laws and policies that protection Canadian businesses and consumers.

In a new Globe and Mail opinion piece, he takes aim at surveillance pricing and privacy and how it is contributing to Canada’s cost-of-living crisis.

He joins Do Not Pass Go this week to lay down the gauntlet on Canada’s political parties – he wants them to declare whether they’re really on the public’s side when it comes to privacy and affordability or whether they’re all about their own self-interests.

Check out his Globe and Mail opinion piece here.

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Thank you Courtney 🇨🇦, Shirley Figueroa, Laurel Fairchild, Kathy, Matthew Mendelsohn, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Baseball spring training is here! Hurray!

Whether or not you’re a fan, it’s a symbolic reminder that the end of winter is just around the corner. It’s a time of celebration akin to the best pagan renewal rituals.

But we’re not here to talk about the pending arrival of spring and sunnier days ahead. We’re here to discuss the problem in Toronto sports in general, and Canadian sports overall. And that is the monopoly that one company – Rogers Communications – has over all of it.

After buying out its “rival” Bell’s share of Maple Leaf Sports Entertainment last year, Rogers now owns 75 per cent of the company and therefore full control of its properties, which include the Maple Leafs, Raptors, Toronto FC, the Argos and several other teams.

Along with the Blue Jays, which Rogers bought in 2000, the company also owns the Rogers Centre (it’s still Skydome in these parts), the Scotiabank Arena, television broadcast rights and much of the media that covers the teams.

Strangely, no one is doing anything about it. The Competition Bureau gave the MLSE transaction a pass in late 2024 and didn’t even say why.

David Shoalts is an award-winning veteran of Canadian sports journalism. He spent decades covering sports for The Globe and Mail and, in 2018, published the latest of his three books: Hockey Fight in Canada, about how the CBC lost its NHL broadcast rights to Rogers.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to discuss how Rogers’ sports monopoly is bad news for fans – not just when it comes to the prices they pay for tickets, snacks and beer, but also in how the teams are covered in the media and how that can affect their chances of winning.

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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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