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In
order to protect the principle of competition, valued by all liberal, capitalistic
societies, laws or anti-combines laws have been created to prevent and punish the
undermining of free markets by corporate combination.
When corporates get together and eliminating competition there
is protection against this in the anti-combines law in Canada and also in the U.S.A. The
combines department of the government can investigate and recommend prosecution, with or
without complaint.
Canadian Parliament had passed an Anti-Combines Law in 1889, but its actual effect was to
legalize price fixing, for the law held restraints on trade actionable only if they
“unduly” or “unreasonably” lessened competition.
The flawed Anti-Combines Law seemed a deliberate shot into its own net by a government of
vested interests.
The Supreme Court of Canada in Jabour4 expressly linked the RCD to the then criminal
nature of the anti-combines legislation:
[S]o long as the CIA [Combines Investigation Act], or at least Part V, is styled as a
criminal prohibition, proceedings in its implementation and enforcement will require a
demonstration of some conduct contrary to the public interest. It is this element of the
federal legislation that these cases all concluded can be negated by the authority
extended by a valid provincial regulatory scheme.
These comments were based on earlier case law which explicitly tied the availability of
the RCD to the criminal nature of the federal anti-combines law. 5 In particular, the
courts have focussed on the “undueness” standard in the conspiracy provision, a
term which has been explicitly equated with the “public interest”6, and have
concluded that provincially regulated conduct could not be undue or contrary to the public
interest.
Recent Canadian Anti-Combines Policy: Mergers and Monopoly Robert Lyon
The University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1963), pp. 155-184
doi:10.2307/824911
Some Empirical Issues in Canadian Combines Policy J. N. Wolfe
The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d'Economique et
de Science politique, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1957), pp. 113-121 doi:10.2307/138735
McDonald, Bruce C. "Constitutional Aspects of Canadian Anti-Combines Law
Enforcement" (1969). |
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