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Law360 (March 15, 2021, 11:53 PM EDT) -- Canada's competition enforcer says it supports plans to take a hard look at the country's competition laws after two grocery companies admitted they consulted with each other before cancelling plans to offer frontline workers bonuses.
After Canada's House of Commons revealed that it would be launching an inquiry into the nation's antitrust laws, the Competition Bureau said that it supports the endeavor and is willing to lend its expertise, the Financial Post reported.
The heightened scrutiny comes after Canada's three largest grocery companies — Empire, Metro and Loblaws — told Canadian legislators this summer that they had spoken to each other before making the decision to cut their so-called hero pay programs on the same day.
The head of Metro Inc. testified that while he knew that Loblaws was also planning to end its frontline worker bonus program, they came to their identical decisions independently.
"Hero pay" was instituted by a slew of grocery companies last spring as a way to show appreciation for frontline grocery workers as the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold.
Walmart, Kroger, Safeway and many other chains promised temporary raises, bonuses or other benefits for employees who continued to work during the pandemic, but many were talking about ways to roll those programs back by the summer.
As Canada's lawmakers turn an eye toward modernizing their competition laws, they aren't alone.
The U.S. is also considering ramping up enforcement and tweaking antitrust law to account for the rapidly changing tech industry, which has seen giants like Google and Facebook swallow virtually all of the market shares in their respective arenas.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee put four of the biggest giants in tech — Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook — in the hot seat earlier this summer as part of a Democratic-led probe into their virtually unmatched market power.
As head of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been pushing the committee to consider sweeping antitrust reform, including a bill she introduced that would lower the threshold for mergers to be considered a threat.
Right now, a union must "substantially lessen competition" in order to be blocked by regulators, but the Clayton Act would be amended to forbid mergers that only "create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition" under Klobuchar's proposal.
--Additional reporting by Matthew Perlman. Editing by Regan Estes.
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