Do Not Pass Go with Peter Nowak

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 o...

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, i...

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 be...

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 b...

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, wh...

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 number...

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 di...

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...

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 comp...

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...

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...

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,...

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 a...

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...

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 t...

Does it feel like every business – whether it’s telecom providers, airlines, grocery chains and more – are simply trying to get more and more of your money these days without providing better products and services in return? It’s not your imagination, according to Columbia University professor and Biden administration competition advisor Tim Wu. In his new book, The Age of Extraction , Wu argues t...

With nearly 300 million units sold since its official release in 1935, Monopoly is hands-down the best-selling board game of all time (not including checkers and chess). But its success is fraught with misunderstanding and controversy, beginning with its very origins. Elizabeth Magie was a writer and feminist in the early 20th century. She was an ardent supporter of Georgism, an economic ideology...

In a country with highly concentrated industries, consumer protection should be a top priority for government, right? Not in Canada, according to the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and Open Media, two of the nation’s most prolific consumer groups. Through lack of funding, red tape and a general lack of seriousness from the government, both say they’re on life support. It’s a dire situation becaus...

A year ago, there was no doubt that affordability of basic goods and services – or lack thereof – was top-of-mind for Canadians. Along with that was the growing realization by policy makers and the public that corporate concentration in numerous industries is a prime driver of the problem. But for big stretches of this year, a different story has dominated the national psyche: The U.S. trade war a...

Matthew Boswell is something of a rock star among the pro-competition set. While he started out as a criminal prosecutor before turning his attention to white-collar crime, for the past seven years he’s made waves as the head of Canada’s Competition Bureau. He’s had successes: helping to convince the federal government to update competition laws and to boost the Bureau’s funding, plus cases, inves...

The United States and other countries have a number of journalists and media organizations covering corporate concentration, competition and monopoly issues. Canada? Not so much. Do Not Pass Go is filling that void with original reporting, breaking news, scoops and investigations into how Canada’s biggest companies are taking advantage of consumers, competitors and employees, as well as the people...