An Analysis of the Proposal to Decriminalize the Anti-competitive Pricing Practices Under The Competition Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 23 April 2002, the Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology released a report containing twenty-nine recommendations for enhancing Canada's competition law regime, including, among other things, two significant proposals related to the criminal pricing practices under the Competition Act. One involves repealing the criminal offences of price discrimination, regional predatory pricing, predatory pricing and disproportionate advertising allowances and their replacement with amendments to the civil abuse of dominance provisions of the Competition Act. The Committee's second key proposal in this context is to repeal the price maintenance provision. Horizontal price maintenance would form part of an amended conspiracy provision, while vertical price maintenance would be added to an expanded abuse of dominance provision. The article sets out a brief overview of the rationale for the Committee's recommendations regarding the Competition Act's pricing provisions, as well as the Federal Government's response to the Committee's proposal. The authors review the history leading to the current pricing provisions as well as the scope of the current provisions themselves. In an effort to provide context for the Canadian competition law regime related to pricing practices, a brief consideration of the treatment of such practices by competition law authorities in Europe and the United States is provided. Following a consideration of the policy implications of decriminalizing the anti-competitive pricing practices under the Competition Act, the authors conclude that despite the compelling arguments in favour of decriminalizing provisions, these provisions cannot be amended in isolation. The article concludes that the effects of decriminalization are far-reaching and that many issues must be addressed prior to implementing the Committee's various recommendations. The authors suggest that undertaking an analysis of the broad policy implications arising from decriminalization is the approach most likely to produce a consistent and balanced policy for the future enforcement of the Competition Act's anti-competitive pricing provisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".