The Constitutional Gambit That Failed
On March 4, 2026, Canada's Competition Tribunal rejected Google's attempt to derail an abuse of dominance case on Charter of Rights grounds, removing the single largest procedural obstacle in Canada's most consequential antitrust action against a technology company.
The case — filed by the Competition Bureau in November 2024 as CT-2024-010 — targets Google's alleged abuse of its dominant position across Canada's online advertising supply chain. Administrative monetary penalties sought could theoretically reach C$91 billion if the Tribunal ultimately rules against Google. That number is what prompted the constitutional challenge.
Google's argument had surface logic: if a penalty is large enough to constitute punishment rather than deterrence, it triggers Charter of Rights and Freedoms protections that apply to criminal proceedings, not regulatory ones. Justice Andrew D. Little disagreed. The Tribunal held that administrative monetary penalties under the Competition Act are regulatory instruments designed to deter anti-competitive conduct and restore competition — not to punish wrongdoing in the criminal sense. A regulatory penalty, however large, does not carry the constitutional weight of a criminal sanction.
What Canada Is Actually Alleging
The Bureau's substantive case rests on four specific allegations. First, that Google tied its ad tech tools — publisher ad server, ad exchange, and demand-side platform — into a bundled ecosystem designed to prevent buyers and sellers from mixing and matching competing tools. Second, that Google granted its own exchange preferential access to ad inventory on terms that rivals could not replicate. Third, that Google used below-cost pricing in select segments to undercut and exclude competitors. Fourth, that it imposed restrictive contract terms on publishers who transacted with rival ad tech providers.
Acting Commissioner Jeanne Pratt framed the core harm after the ruling: "Through its anti-competitive conduct, Google has been able to entrench its dominance, prevent rivals from competing, inhibit innovation, inflate advertising costs and reduce publishers' revenues."
It is worth pausing on the strongest version of this case before criticising it. Online advertising is infrastructure for Canadian media. Publishers — local newspapers, broadcasters, digital outlets — depend on ad revenues. If a single company controls the sell-side server, the auction exchange, and the buy-side tools advertisers use, it can extract fees from both sides while denying either meaningful alternatives. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority reached broadly similar conclusions about Google's ad tech stack. The US Department of Justice is litigating a parallel case. The market-structure concern is real, not manufactured.
The Proportionality Question Survives the Ruling
The constitutional challenge failed, but the underlying proportionality concern is legitimate in policy terms even if not in legal ones. C$91 billion is a figure derived from applying the statutory AMP formula to Google's global revenues — not from any measurement of harm caused in Canada's advertising market specifically.
Under Bill C-59, which received Royal Assent on June 20, 2024, abuse of dominance penalties can reach the greater of C$25 million (C$35 million for repeat offences) or three times the benefit derived from the anti-competitive practice, or 3% of a firm's annual worldwide gross revenues when the benefit cannot be reasonably determined. The formula is meant to ensure penalties are non-trivial relative to a global company's scale. That is a sound principle. But penalties calibrated to worldwide revenues rather than domestic harm risk becoming a blunt instrument that maximises deterrence at the expense of proportionality.
The better path is a rigorous liability hearing that develops a clear evidentiary record on harm, followed by penalty arguments grounded in that specific record. Canada will earn more durable enforcement credibility from a well-reasoned decision than from a headline figure.
A Parallel Front: Amazon Under the Microscope
The Google case is the flagship, but not the only proceeding. In July 2025, the Competition Bureau obtained a Federal Court order compelling Amazon to produce records in an investigation into its Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy on Amazon.ca — a policy that penalises third-party sellers who offer lower prices on competing platforms.
The Bureau's concern is structural: if sellers cannot price more cheaply elsewhere, competing marketplaces cannot attract them with lower fees, which insulates Amazon from the cross-platform price competition it might otherwise face. No conclusion of wrongdoing has been reached and the investigation remains ongoing, but the theory of harm is coherent. The same conduct drew Federal Trade Commission scrutiny in the United States, suggesting this is not an idiosyncratic Canadian read on Amazon's practices.
The Structural Complement: Making Switching Easier
Enforcement proceedings are reactive by nature — they address harm after the fact, through proceedings that stretch across years. In January 2026, the Bureau released Your Data, Your Control, a market study examining how data portability could address the root cause of platform lock-in rather than its downstream effects.
Using insurance as a case study, the Bureau estimated that a data portability framework could save Canadians between C$1.1 billion and C$3.8 billion annually, primarily by reducing the friction that prevents consumers from switching providers even when better options exist. The UK's open banking regime and Australia's Consumer Data Right offer tested models. Data portability is the pro-competitive structural complement to antitrust enforcement: if consumers can move their data freely, switching costs fall, incumbents must compete on quality rather than inertia, and dominant positions become harder to entrench without genuine merit.
What Comes Next
The Google liability hearing is expected to extend into 2027 or beyond. The outcome will define how Canada's reformed Competition Act applies to multi-sided platforms — what conduct counts as abuse of dominance, how harm is measured, and whether penalties are calibrated to Canadian-market effects or global revenue proxies. Bill C-59 gave the Bureau new tools; CT-2024-010 is the first real test of whether those tools can deliver proportionate, enforceable outcomes against companies operating at global scale.
The procedural path is clear. The substantive work is just beginning.