The Standoff Nobody Saw Coming
On May 7, 2026, Canada's Competition Bureau filed a motion with the Competition Tribunal asking it to compel testimony from former Google employees based in the United States — none of whom had agreed to cooperate voluntarily. The motion landed in the middle of Canada's largest-ever tech competition case: a November 2024 abuse-of-dominance complaint (CT-2024-010) alleging that Google illegally entrenched control over Canada's online advertising technology stack since 2008, a period of conduct that Google's own lawyers calculated could expose the company to an administrative penalty of C$91 billion.
The witness standoff is not a minor procedural detour. Former employees often hold the most credible accounts of how anticompetitive decisions were actually made — context that internal documents can obscure or that legal teams can spend years contesting the interpretation of. Their refusal to cooperate, and the Bureau's scramble to compel them across an international border, exposes a structural ceiling in how Canada enforces competition law against companies whose key decision-makers sit 3,000 miles away in California.
The Case in Context
The Bureau filed its adtech complaint on November 28, 2024, accusing Google of abusing its dominant position across Canada's digital advertising supply chain. According to the Bureau's filing, Google holds roughly 90 percent of the publisher ad server market in Canada, approximately 70 percent of advertiser networks, around 60 percent of demand-side platforms, and close to 50 percent of ad exchanges — a grip the Bureau says allows Google to rig auction dynamics in its own favour by tying these tools together and imposing access terms that disadvantage rivals.
The remedies sought are sweeping: forced divestiture of DFP (Google's publisher ad server) and AdX (its ad exchange), plus a financial penalty calibrated at either three times the benefit derived from the misconduct or three percent of Google's worldwide gross revenues since 2008. Google itself calculated the latter at C$91 billion and used it to mount a constitutional challenge, arguing that a penalty of that magnitude constitutes criminal punishment and triggers Charter protections designed for criminal defendants.
On March 3, 2026, the Competition Tribunal dismissed that challenge. Justice Andrew D. Little found the C$91 billion figure "hypothetical at best," dependent on findings not yet made, and held that administrative monetary penalties serve regulatory rather than punitive purposes. The case then advanced into the discovery and witness phase — where the cross-border problem became impossible to ignore.
What the Competition Act Can and Cannot Do
Canada's Competition Act, under Section 11, gives the Commissioner broad evidence-gathering authority. Section 11(5) explicitly extends that reach to persons "outside Canada who carry on business in Canada or sell products into Canada." The 2022 amendments strengthened this further, empowering courts to order Canadian corporations to produce records held by foreign affiliates. These are real powers, and they matter.
But there is a gap: former employees who have left the company, reside in the United States, and have no ongoing Canadian business nexus are not persons who "carry on business in Canada." They are private individuals in a foreign jurisdiction. Canada's courts cannot directly subpoena them. Letters rogatory — formal requests to foreign courts to assist in obtaining evidence — provide an indirect mechanism, but they are slow, uncertain, and ultimately depend on US courts' willingness to enforce a foreign administrative proceeding rather than a criminal one. US courts have historically been reluctant on that front.
The US-Canada bilateral antitrust cooperation agreement, in force since 1995, facilitates coordination between the Bureau and agencies like the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice. But it covers governmental agency-to-agency cooperation — not the compulsion of US-resident private individuals in Canadian regulatory proceedings. Canada has no statutory analogue to the International Antitrust Enforcement Assistance Act that would enable meaningful cross-border compelled disclosure.
The Strongest Case for Pursuing These Witnesses
Before dismissing the Bureau's motion as overreach, it is worth steelmanning the concern. Large US-headquartered platforms can, in practice, insulate their most consequential decision-makers from accountability in foreign jurisdictions simply by keeping them in California. If that structural asymmetry goes unchallenged, competition enforcement outside the United States risks becoming a proceeding against documents and subsidiaries — not the humans who made the decisions. The Bureau is right to press the point.
Moreover, the US DOJ's own adtech case produced substantial testimony from Google insiders, testimony so significant that the Competition Tribunal separately ordered Google in April 2026 to confirm its accuracy for use in the Canadian proceedings. The Bureau's argument, in substance, is that witnesses whose accounts were central to the American case should not be able to simply opt out of the parallel Canadian one.
A Structural Problem, Not a Tactical One
The Bureau's May 2026 motion is a reasonable litigation move given its constraints. But the deeper issue is that no amount of creative lawyering fully closes the gap. Even if the Tribunal issues a compulsion order, enforcing it against a US-resident private individual who ignores it depends entirely on US judicial cooperation the Bureau cannot guarantee.
That ceiling matters because the Canadian market is not large enough to wield unilateral jurisdictional leverage over a company of Google's scale. The EU can impose per-day fines that threaten global revenue streams. The US can hold witnesses in contempt with immediate domestic effect. Canada can do neither when its witnesses are across the border. When core product and policy decision-making for a global platform sits in one jurisdiction, smaller regulators — even well-resourced ones with strong cases — hit structural limits regardless of legal quality.
What Proportionate Reform Looks Like
The Bureau's factual case — 90 percent market share in publisher ad servers, alleged auction manipulation since 2008 — merits full adjudication, and the constitutional challenge has rightly been cleared. But the witness standoff is a prompt for legislative and diplomatic follow-through.
Parliament should consider whether the Competition Act needs an explicit mechanism, beyond letters rogatory, for obtaining testimony from foreign-resident former employees in major civil competition proceedings. And Canada should press for an updated bilateral antitrust cooperation framework with the United States — one that extends to evidentiary assistance in administrative cases, not merely agency coordination.
The Bureau is doing its job. The problem is that the job has outgrown the tools available to do it.