Consumer Protection Through Competition Law: Civil and Practical Analysis of Canadian and European Positions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Competition law contributes to protecting consumers. European competition law proves to be the link between competition law and consumer law. The single market needs protection for European consumers. Nonetheless, not all occidental countries know this link between consumer law and competition law. Canadian competition law illustrates this issue. Indeed, constitutional barriers explain this difficulty. The Canadian parliament has the legislative power to regulate trade and commerce, but also criminal law. So Canadian competition law has been taking power in the regulation of trade and in criminal law. In Canada, consumer protection is provided by the provinces that can make laws to protect consumer contracts. This power is based on the power of the Canadian provinces in civil law. The Quebec civil code and the Consumer Protection Act of this province shows this competence. There is, in Canada, a direct protection of consumers by the provinces, like in Quebec, and an indirect protection by federal competition law. For example, misleading advertising is punished under the criminal rules of competition law. Another aspect of this subject is the private enforcement of competition law. Section 36 of the competition law permits the consumer to sue a person who engages in conduct that is contrary to any provision of the criminal part of the law. The constitutional validity of this section was disputed in the Canadian Supreme Court. For the court, Section 36 was constitutional. Consequently, this section protects the consumer directly against a violation of competition law. This paper tries to identify how civil law, particularly in Quebec, can be used to improve the protection of consumers in the area of competition. Competition damages are one of the solutions that can be explored. In this context, a comparison is made with European law. Directive 2014/104 shows that consumer protection can take place in competition law. In a civil law system, such as France, the introduction of collective redress demonstrates that there may be a link between consumer law and competition law. This article finally shows that consumer protection occurs at two levels. The supranational law ensures healthy competition in the market and consumer safety. National law protects consumers in contractual relations. We find this situation in Canada and in the European Union. However, these two legal systems reconcile consumer law and competition law by the private enforcement of competition law. This article explores this new reality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".