Review: The Big Fix offers a compelling look at Canada’s problem with monopolies | Canada Voices

• Title: The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians
• Authors: Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar
• Genre: Non-Fiction
• Publisher: Sutherland House Books
• Pages: 120

Complaints about Canada’s productivity and economic growth cannot be divorced from the structure of our economy, including the legal regime that permits the concentration of corporate power. The country is dominated by large, entrenched business monopolies that make life worse for consumers, workers and businesses alike. It’s been that way for decades with little indication of any major changes that will level the playing field – or change the game all together. But the inertia isn’t for lack of ideas about how we might do better.

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In The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians, Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar offer a short but deeply researched and compelling assessment of Canada’s monopoly problem and the outlines of an approach to solving it. Opening with the 2022 Rogers service outage, the book reminds us that while more than 12 million users were affected by the disruption, which took out wireless internet access, business payment systems and even 911 access, the company’s income was up at year-end by nearly 4 per cent. Rogers, they write, “has become too big to care.”

“Too big to care” would make for an appropriate alternative title for The Big Fix, with one important caveat, namely Canada’s entrenched corporations do care about protecting their monopolistic market share and the regulatory regime – or rather lack of regime – that allows them to flourish at the expense of everyone else, leading to higher prices, lower wages, stagnant research and development and industry concentration.

As Hearn and Bednar write, “We have three major telecommunications companies, five grocers, a few big banks, two major airlines and one train company.” In a country of nearly 42 million people, our economy is run by a group of executives that could fit comfortably in one of the yachts their top earners could comfortably afford.

The status quo serves big companies well. Monopolies in Canada, and indeed around the world, are growing. These companies are working hard to buy up rival firms and eliminate competition rather than invest, innovate and become more productive. But they’re also sinking their massive capital into vertically integrating, controlling as much of their own industry as possible, from supply to retail, while also entering new sections of the marketplace in a bid to become an “everything company.”

Loblaw, for instance, owns grocery stores, but it also has run a chain of pharmacies since its 2014 purchase of Shoppers Drug Mart, a bank, a big data operation by way of its Optimum rewards program, a clothing brand and a real estate investment trust.

The Big Fix is an impressive and essential read for understanding the Canadian economy and the state of competition within it. It’s at once concise and comprehensive, with 316 citations for just more than 100 pages of text. The prose is crisp, the argument is compelling and the support evidence is rage-inducing for anyone who’s ever been taken to the cleaners by a monopoly – which is to say, almost all of us.

The extent to which monopolies dominate Canada may be even greater than you expect. Hearn and Bednar cite plenty of instances of this dominance: airlines, telecoms, eye glasses, streaming, movie theatres, app stores, concert tickets, grocers, banks, hotels, transportation, minerals, grains, pork, turkey and more.

There is no escape from the monopolists, there is nowhere to hide and power is one their side. They have the capital. They have the market dominance. But they also have the rules on their side. As the book lays out, Canada’s current competition regime, “updated” in the 1980s and shaped by an era of neoliberal free market orthodoxy and fanaticism, is more concerned with “economic efficiencies” than with preventing or breaking apart monopolies. Indeed, the country has never successfully blocked a merger. Not once.

Hearn and Bednar see a “big fix” to the problem, which entails all of us engaging in reshaping competition in Canada – though the state must lead the efforts through a whole of government approach. Rather than a fully fleshed-out program, the book offers a framework for thinking of change and a few initial ideas, including structural remedies to ensure companies don’t have control over multiple stages of production, blocking mergers and moving beyond a focus on price as the core determinant of monopoly and toward a focus on power – the control big companies have over capital, data, surveillance and bargaining leverage with labour and other businesses.

As much as we might wish otherwise, The Big Fix won’t fix the problem of monopolies dominating the Canadian economy. But it will advance the cause of understanding and addressing the problem. It makes for a top-shelf primer for those new to the issue and a handy resource for those familiar with it.

The book might have gone deeper, to examine capitalism itself as a driver of monopoly, a phenomenon that Marx warned of in the 19th century. To their credit, however, Hearn and Bednar name power as a cause of our ills, not simply money, and that gets us well on our way to further conversations about the future of competition and corporate ownership in Canada, which is a service you can’t put a price on.