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!

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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.

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Back in June, Toronto-based independent game developer Alexander Martin – known as Droqen online – filed a lawsuit against Google, charging that the company was abusing its dominance in search by paying Apple billions of dollars to make its search engine the default on iPhones and iPads.

The case is the first of its kind as Martin is taking advantage of newly introduced amendments to Canada’s competition laws that allow private individuals to make such charges on behalf of the public interest.

Those amendments were put in place by the federal government as a way of enabling ordinary, every-day Canadians to fight back against market abuses by larger, dominant companies.

University of Ottawa law professor Jennifer Quaid, an expert in competition and digital policy, says this case is highly significant because it will determine whether the Competition Tribunal intends to entertain the government’s intentions, or whether it slams the door shut on individual actions like Martin’s.

She joins Do Not Pass Go this week to explain why all eyes are on this David vs. Goliath case.

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Just before spring sprang in 2021, Rogers made a bombshell announcement that shocked corporate Canada and everybody everywhere with a cellphone.

The biggest cable company in the country was buying the second biggest cable company in the country – Shaw Communications – for a whopping $26 billion.

Nobody who wasn’t in on a cut of the action was for this deal. Consumer advocates decried it, customers freaked out and Shaw employees hated it, leading the Competition Bureau to try to block it in court.

At the same time, behind the scenes, company scion Edward Rogers was trying to oust his mother and sisters to take full control of his departed father’s telecom empire. Much of the ensuing drama played out in public, like Canada’s very own version of HBO’s Succession.

The Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, who was on the front lines reporting on both unfolding stories, detailed it all in her 2024 book, Rogers v. Rogers. Her award-winning book is now a one-man play opening this week at the Crow Theatre in Toronto, and in February in Winnipeg, followed likely by stints across the country.

Playwright Michael Healey says the most interesting part of the book, for him, was in how it illustrates the massive political power that uber-rich families like the Rogers’ wield in Canada.

He joins Do Not Pass Go to explain why he chose to orient his play around that aspect of the story – and why Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell, is cast as the hero.

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When everything costs an arm and a leg, maybe the only rationale thing to do is to buy nothing?

The idea isn’t new, stretching back until at least the 19th century. In 1992, a Canadian artist named Ted Dave adapted criticisms of conspicuous consumption into Buy Nothing Day – a symbolic single day of the year that encouraged people to think about the effects they were having on both inequality and the planetary ecosystem through the things they were purchasing.

Adbusters, a Vancouver-based leftist magazine and non-profit, picked up that message and in 1997 tied it to Black Friday, the day after U.S. Thanksgiving that kicks off the holiday shopping season.

Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn joins Do Not Pass Go this week as we head into our annual consumerist smorgasbord to talk about how Buy Nothing Day is merely the tip of the iceberg, leading to what he calls the “third force” – a new kind of politics that seeks to rein in and limit corporate power and that accounts for ecological well-being rather than just pure economic growth.

Along with limiting corporate market share, requiring stock buyers to hold their purchases for at least 24 hours and imposing the idea of “True Cost” – adding the ecological damage of products and services to their price – Lasn shares his vision for a “worldwide revolution” that can allow humanity to survive the 21st century.

Tune in for the literally radical conversation, man, and if it’s your kind of jam, head to adbusters.org for more.

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Outsider disruptors are making their mark in the United States.

Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, recently beat out the billionaire establishment’s pick to become the new mayor of New York, riding a promise of making daily life more affordable.

Fellow New Yorker and congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders drew giant crowds at rallies this year, where their main message was that billionaires and their oligopolies were destroying democracy.

Here in Canada, the self-styled outsiders aren’t as prolific but they do exist, with Beaches-East York Liberal backbencher Nate Erskine-Smith among them. His message is similar: strong action is needed to break the hold that oligopolies have on Canadians.

Erskine-Smith’s 10 years in government have been colourful. As part of the Industry committee, he’s dressed down telecom CEOs, dropped F-bombs in Parliament and critiqued his own party.

He hosts his own podcast, Uncommons, was briefly in cabinet as Housing minister, and nearly became leader of the Ontario Liberal party – a job he’s considering running for again. He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss runaway prices on just about everything, plus the giant mess that is Blue Jays playoff tickets.

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Fees to maintain accounts, fees to use ATMs, fees to transfer investments. Lousy services, difficult-to-get loans, non-competitive mortgages. And, oh yes, quarter after quarter of record profits. Welcome to banking in Canada.

The Big Five – RBC, Scotiabank, TD, BMO and CIBC – are among the biggest and richest companies in the country thanks to decades of protection from competition by government and regulators, who have prized stability among all else.

The side effects of that preoccupation are becoming increasingly clear. A study last year by consultancy North Economics, for example, found Canadians were paying about $10 billion per year in excess fees, compared to the U.K. and Australia, working out to about $350 per person. On top of that, a growing number of economists are pointing at the banks for Canada’s woeful productivity and innovation showings.

Amid the dual affordability and sovereignty crises, it’s about time for change – and it finally appears to be happening.

As the head of the Bank of England for much of the past decade, Mark Carney had a front-row seat to how competition and innovation in banking spurs a nation’s economy. It’s why the Prime Minister and his government have introduced a raft of imminent reforms including open banking and updated payment systems.

Industry vet and economist Andrew Spence, who lays out the many ways in which the big banks rake in those outsized profits in his book Fleeced, joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to talk about how behind Canada is – and how we may be about to catch up to the rest of the world.

Check out his book here. And check out the story on RBC’s backfiring TV spot:

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Canadians are generally aware of the giant oligopolies running various industries – banks, airlines, telcos – but many likely aren’t familiar with the silent force killing competition: private equity.

For some time, these asset-managing firms have been rolling up small businesses across the economy – from veterinary and dental practices to retirement homes and even cemeteries – in the interest of pulling value from them.

This extraction generally comes in unfriendly terms: worse products and services for consumers, higher prices, plus lower wages and layoffs for employees. And because the individual business acquisitions are typically small, competition authorities don’t notice until it’s too late.

Rachel Wasserman, a Toronto-based lawyer who used to work in the field, is among those raising the alarm on the need for new rules that govern industry roll-ups. Without them, small businesses are going to find it increasingly hard to start up and to sell out to anyone but private equity firms.

As she explains on this episode of the Do Not Pass Go podcast, every-day consumers have a role to play too in terms of where they spend their money.

Further reading for articles and papers mentioned in this episode:

Wasserman’s white paper on private equity for the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project.

Toronto Star op-ed on the “new giant story of capitalism.”

The New York Times op-ed on how private equity is “gutting America.”

CBC story on veterinarian consolidation and resultant price increases.

University of Waterloo study on deaths in private equity-owned retirement homes.

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 a cone of silence over the music business like no other industry, mainly because everyone in it is afraid to upset the one dominant company at the centre of it all: Live Nation.

Graham Wright, guitarist and keyboardist for the recently disbanded, multiple Juno-nominated indie rock band Tokyo Police Club, is one of the few who isn’t afraid so speak out.

He joins the Do Not Pass Go podcast this week to talk about how Live Nation is making indentured servants of working musicians through buying up venues, demanding cuts of merchandise sales and driving ticket prices to the point where regular people can’t afford to see their favourite bands.

The artists, meanwhile, have no choice but to go along with it, since there’s no other game in town.

“Sooner or later the bottom’s gonna fall out,” he says.

Plus, we also talk about the growing movement among artists against streaming services, why people are increasingly going to see cover bands, and even the merits of Kid Rock.

Graham has his own podcast, Major Label Debut, where he talks to other musicians and industry insiders on breaking into the business. Check that out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

(Also, my apologies for actually uttering the words “Star Wars: The Next Generation”)

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