Canadian COMPETITION LAW

In a small stroke of serendipity, I bumped into Paul Crampton here in Vancouver last week, who is on the Tribunal hearing the Commissioner’s challenge of the CCS Corporation / Complete Environmental waste merger (a merger to monopoly case and the first fully contested merger case before the Tribunal in six years).

In chatting with Paul, now a Federal Court judge and known in the competition bar for a variety of clever turns of phrase, such as raising a finger in the air and rhetorically requesting that a thorny legal or economic issue be “decoded” (usually for the benefit of others in the room less learned than Paul in such matters), I threatened to quote him on my blog.

It just so happened that the previous day, in working through a product market definition question, I had come across one of his quotes from his 1990 book on mergers.

So, as threatened, here is the quote, which I thought rather a fine one by Paul on the geeky topic of market definition in competition/antitrust law cases (and rather apropos following my bumping into him after he had heard argument in the BC waste merger case):

“The importance of preparing a well articulated argument in support of one’s view of the ‘relevant market’ in the context of a competition law case cannot be overstated.  Put succinctly, the party who manages to convince the court of his view of this matter generally wins the case, because as the purported market is enlarged, the relative significance of the merging parties within the market usually decreases.  Conversely, as a market is defined progressively more narrowly, the competitive significance of challenged conduct typically increases.” (Paul Crampton, Mergers and the Competition Act (Toronto: Carswell, 1990)).

We wish Paul and the Tribunal all the best of luck in “decoding” the waste merger.

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