Competing Ideas

Countries around the world are re-evaluating ideas at the heart of their competition laws and updating them to better protect their economies and citizens from the harms of monopolization.

In Canada, the government’s recent review of and updates to its Competition Act have sparked a closer examination of how competition is protected and promoted. Competition affects all Canadians, especially in the face of rising costs of living and a shrinking number of competitors in key markets. Yet the laws that govern competition are not easily understood by average consumers, leaving them out of the public policy conversation. In their new paper, Vass Bednar and Keldon Bester look at why better competition law is needed and examine previous reform efforts.

In this companion video to their paper, the authors discuss why the conversation about Canada’s competition reform, including who’s at the table and what voices are being heard, is so important to the future of this law.

The democratization of access to online media tools is driving a transformation of human discourse that is disrupting freedom of thought. This shift in the flow of thought is being encoded into a global infrastructure dominated by commercial platform companies whose operations co-opt individual, collective and governmental agency.

In this latest policy brief from CIGI’s Legitimate Influence or Unlawful Manipulation? series, Richard Reisman argues that to restore individual and community agency, attempts to govern these tools must get past “yesterday’s logic” and instead put the listener’s freedom of impression, rather than the speaker’s freedom of expression, at the fore.

“A tsunami of change in work is building now and will likely hit the job market with massive disruptions becoming apparent by 2030. This shift will be a profound challenge for society to manage.”

Eli Fathi and Peter MacKinnon take a look at some of the likely impacts — both the windfalls and the fallout — of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, generative AI, on workplaces in coming years, and pose the question: “Is society ready to take defensive and corrective action before the runaway AI train roars into the station?”

Last week, E. Glen Weyl and CIGI President Paul Samson joined an online audience for a fascinating, fast-flowing conversation about some of the ways in which Taiwan has achieved inclusive, technology-fuelled growth, and entrusted the people through forms of collaborative democracy to tackle shared challenges such as environmental protection, while capitalizing on a culture of innovation to “hack the government.”

A video recording of the event is now available.

In this op-ed first published in The Globe and Mail, Wesley Wark overviews Canada’s new defence policy released on April 8. The policy makes two big promises: to enhance the protection of Canada’s sovereignty and interests in the Arctic, and to remake Canada’s military as a technologically advanced fighting force.

Wark discusses some of the capability gaps still to be filled, and the need, among others, “for Canada to have ‘much better eyes and ears in space.’” Importantly, to fulfill the ambitions of the plan, all political parties will need “to identify their defence policies in their election platforms in 2025 (or earlier, depending on the political gods) so that voters can then have their say on this vision.”

In another look at Canada’s new defence plan, Michael Den Tandt writes that it gets full marks for its tenor. In this op-ed first published by The Line, Den Tandt says the document outlines the “dizzying scope of new threats,” and the dollar figures it commits suggest that Canada is finally arming itself against “the new era of geopolitical disorder.” Nonetheless, the execution of the plan “needs to happen much, much faster.”

“The great risk in building up Canada’s defences at a leisurely, peacetime rate, is that the days of leisurely, peacetime stability are over. The update can be counted as progress. But it needs a major infusion of ambition.”